T2D3 WOD

As B2B SaaS executives, most of us now feel the pressure our peers in more mature industries have felt for a long time. We need to make every $ count and improve all aspects of our functions to constantly increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Especially now that the “cheap money” train of the past 12 years is not going to visit most of us anytime soon, the times of unlimited experiments without clear outcomes and starting and stopping initiatives without seeing them through are over.

As I meet with marketing, sales, and customer success leaders, it’s clear that the real upside is for those teams to work closer together and make meaningful (sometimes small) improvements along the complete GTM funnel.

I’ve seen success with CEOs and their direct reports making an effort to turn “update” meetings like leadership team syncs and (daily) standups into ‘mini workouts’ to dig into a single, often simple, question or challenge, and see if they can make concrete improvements, or gain new insight.

Stealing a term from CrossFit, I’ve called these WODs, or “Workout Of the Day” exercises (inspired by these).

These are activities and questions that can be run daily, weekly, or honestly at any interval, to help a CEO or the GTM leaders in your team drive small improvements across the complete GTM function. Just like in cross-fit, the constant discipline to develop specific muscles in your GTM engine can add up to significant growth. These can be used as simple questions to the team or to schedule, for example, a 30-minute discussion with the team to brainstorm about possible improvements.

Here we go. I’ll keep adding to this list and might even get a daily email subscription to get new ones delivered to your inbox. Right now, it’s just a list though (and please let me know if you come up with other ideas at support@t2d3.pro.)

Workout examples

1. Mystery-shop your company. Call the phone number, fill out the form, or subscribe to a service to see what happens. How fast is the follow-up? What’s the quality of the content?
2. How fast is the activation of a new user/client after they buy? Can activation be sped up? Can your ARR “counter” start ticking earlier by activating customers asap after purchase?
3. Review the landing page that gets the most visitors from campaigns and design a new A/B test. Can you learn something new about your visitors and/or improve conversions?
4. What’s your best customer testimonial? What would you need to build one that’s better? A new testimonial that has better quotes, ROI proof points, and metrics and is even better aligned with your Ideal Customer Profile? What can you do to go create that?
5. Inspect your Discount history. Why is your team discounting? What do they get in return when giving something up? What can you learn from this about your value proposition, the fit of your prospects, and the ability of your team to sell vs. taking orders?
6. Can you pull renewal execution forward? Review the process that your customer success team follows. Count churn upon contract expiration, and minimize any “grace period.” Any day that a contract is delayed renewing is lost ARR. Drive early renewals and at least 90-day preparation before the contract expiration. Start with asking the team, “What’s the average delta between client contract expirations and when we count them as churn? Is there any delay or grace period? Can we shorten that?”
7. Ask your team the top 5 questions asked by prospects. Now film yourself answering those questions, and make it part of your onboarding for new employees.
8. Review the usage frequency of your clients. How many users log in daily? Or how many features do they use? Consider putting this into a Pareto chart with user cohorts and find potential 80/20 effects.
9. Train your support team on using the why/how ladder questioning technique to learn from your customers how to improve your value prop and positioning. Why are they using your solution? Why is that important? What are the tangible results of using it? And how is your solution doing the job better vs. alternatives?
10. Help improve the SDR script. Listen to a couple of qualification calls (as a team) and write down what works well and ideas to improve.
11. Improve the ROI calculator your sales team uses to communicate value. Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect and challenge how your team communicates value.
12. Google the question your should be answering for your audience in the various stages of the funnel (Why change?, Why you?, Why now?) and see what other answers come up. Are you part of the top 3? What can you write about that is more relevant than the content already there?
13. Take your sales team on a field trip and visit a team of car salesmen or people who sell another commodity product like financial services. Or better, do their training. See what it’s like to sell a commodity and fight for every piece of margin.
14. Inspect what you expect. Ask simple questions like “How many new leads did we get yesterday?” (marketing) or “How many opportunities did you get the past week?” (sales) and get to have people answer the questions with a number vs. a sentence. If this is hard, consider implementing a Bowler.
15. Review the onboarding journey of a new customer or user, and rate the experience.
16. Ask each team member to present one OKR they feel is the ultimate Key Result that will contribute to the company's success. Discuss why they think that's the case.
17. Spend 30 reviewing how your solution is being received in various marketplaces or review sites. How is that intel being used by your team?
18. Let every sales- and CS team member share one short story (or just a paragraph) of a customer success story and a deal that was lost, and they learned from that.
19. Let the sales team list the biggest challenges they're currently facing in closing deals and rank them as a group. This can span anything, from product to pricing to process, etc.
20. Review the top marketing assets that are being used by Sales and CS. How can those be improved? What's missing?
21. Inspect the dashboard(s) marketing and sales share and ask a couple of team members what they think the data means and how they use it.
22. Ask your best-performing sales rep to present why they think what they do works.
23. What’s the best-performing marketing channel? (Look at dollar added to pipeline per channel, close won per channel, $, and amount closed per channel).
24. Spend focused time writing and sending a meaningful note about a person or team who has done something special.
25. Analyze your partner/channel program. How do you recruit, enable and manage partners?
26. Sell a deal yourself. Get in the weeds, not as an executive sponsor but doing the hands-on sales work.
27. Write a blog. Have you taught/learned something new in the past week? Could that be interesting to others?
    
    Pick one of these every day, or at least every week, and let me know if these are useful.