Meetings, meetings, meetings.

Sometimes an email just isn't enough

I was walking around NY this past week and I was thinking about all of the meetings I attended (in addition to attending our awesome annual sales kickoff!). 

Every week is filled with meetings.  Leadership meetings (DSTAFF, ESTAFF), forecast calls, 1:1’s, product reviews, training sessions, budget reviews, and countless more.  Over the years I’ve found that there are two meetings that can have an outsized impact on the day-to-day running of the organization that need to happen every week without fail.

The first one is the weekly interlock with revops, finance, and HR.  If you don’t have an amazing relationship with your FP&A partner, change that immediately.  If you don’t have an amazing relationship with your HR business partner (or head of HR), change that immediately.  I have been fortunate to work with some absolutely amazing HR leaders in my career. These are two of the most important relationships you can have (we’ll come to marketing in a minute). 

What do we do every week?  We review where we are on our budgets and planned hiring for our folks.  Every organization I’ve been in has changes every week.  People are being hired, people are exiting the business, and people are going on performance improvement plans. It’s essential that these three groups (revops, finance, HR) are 100% coordinated all the time.  We need to keep the budgets in sync.  We need to make sure we’re managing sales capacity proactively.  We have incredibly detailed budgets in revops and know exactly what we’re spending money on, and need to make sure that what we are tracking is also tracking in the official company budget.  How much money do I have for new hires?  When can I hire them?  If I pay a little less for role A, can I pay a little more for role B (and do finance and HR agree)?  At my prior company, we implemented a weekly catch-up (and talent acquisition is part of this too) to make sure that we were all synchronized perfectly and could then communicate with everyone else.  I’m doing the same thing at my present company – doing this every week is essential in a fast-moving and dynamic business.

The second essential meeting that needs to happen every week is the meeting between revops and the demand generation teams. I think that the most important relationship to keep coordinated every week (even more than HR/finance) is the one between the head of revops and the CMO (or head of demand generation if it’s someone else).  As I said in an earlier post, pipeline is lifeline.

We know well in advance how much pipeline we need to be generating for each segment of our business and where we expect it to come from (e.g. marketing, self-gen, channel).  We’ve looked at pipeline conversion rates, time-to-close and set detailed plans for SQLs, SALs, MQLs.  Every week we need to know how we’re doing on these – and if we’re on track, ahead of track, or behind track.  In this weekly meeting we have revops (leading the call), demand gen leaders from marketing and channel, marketing ops, and our BDR leaders.  We review every part of the business and if certain areas aren’t on track, we assign a team to understand why, and to make plans to course correct and get us back on track.  Do we need to change where we’re investing marketing dollars?  Are we not doing enough events with channel partners in certain parts of the country?  Are things taking longer to convert across stages than we expect?  Are we not getting enough MQLs for the BDRs to prospect on? Inspect what you expect and make plans accordingly.  This is the foundation you need to have to make sure that you end the year with the results you want.

There are lots of other weekly meetings that are incredibly important (meeting with my leadership team, forecast calls, 1:1’s with my directs, 1:1’s with sales leaders, general budget reviews with finance) – and leaders of all types of business should have those.  The two meetings I mentioned above though are two that I’ve found critical in running a successful revops organization.

As always – here’s a shot of Ollie enjoying the warm sunshine before the Super Bowl game today.

As always – if there are topics you want to hear about – let me know.  Coming up soon I’ll cover compensation plans and spiffs.

Best,

Steve