https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-tip-excel-closer-right-now-zach-barney

4 Tips to Excel as a Closer RIGHT NOW

Published on September 1, 2017

Zach BarneyFollow

Building a predictable, scalable sales team of AEs and SDRs at Nearmap. We're a rocket ship! Want to go to the moon?

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I recently moved away from a Sales Development leadership role to leading a team of closers at Nearmap. One of the reasons why I accepted the offer was the challenge of implementing the same sort of efficiencies on the account executive side of things.

 While we have inbound SDRs (we call them MDRs here), closers are expected to outbound. At Nearmap, the reps that are starting to separate themselves from the rest are those that do the little things every day to make sure they have enough business to close. While we are nowhere near as good as we want to be as a team, we are definitely on our way, thanks to 4 key areas of discipline. Here they are:

Don’t be above the dirty work –

Top performers prospect. That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter if you have an SDR to AE ratio of 10:1 or 0:1. If you are a closer, YOU are the only one responsible for your performance. Be supportive and work with your setters (and every other department that supports you,) but do not think for 1 second that your boss will take “but I’m not getting any leads” as an excuse for missing your number.

Even the SDR guru himself, Aaron Ross, recommends that 10% of a closer’s day be spent prospecting key accounts. I’ve seen others recommend 20% or even 50%, but the real right number is the number it takes to hit your quota.

Prioritize your accounts –

We have lots of Inside Sales reps on our U.S. team, each with a geographical territory. Each rep has +20,000 accounts that are workable. THAT IS INSANE!

My Western US counterpart, Nate Buttars recommends reps tier their accounts based on product fit and potential deal size. I’ve taken that and asked all of my reps to be working any 10 “Tier A” accounts of their choice at any given time. Tier As are accounts that reps will be doing 100% custom outreach to. They get to pick which 10 are Tier A, and they present those accounts to me during our 1:1s. Every week I check in on progress made on the Tier A, and I expect the ISR to know more about each than the people that actually work there.

I also ask the team to identify 5-20 Tier B accounts each week that they will use a traditional, customized outreach cadence through Salesloft on. These are the people that we are reaching out to a dozen times or so over the course of several weeks. Email + phone + social. Again, I check back on progress with reps during 1:1s and ask for a commitment on the # of Tier Bs they will be targeting each week.

Lastly, I ask each ISR to target 5-20 Tier C accounts each week as well. These are accounts that they do what I call an “Outbound Drip” cadence on. No calls, no social, just emails. We still use dynamic fields and avoid fluffy marketing lingo, but the general idea is to target smaller accounts that “kind of” fit in our target audience. These are the accounts that we don’t want to waste our time calling into when there are higher probability ones to be worked, but we also do not want to take the line out of the water. ISRs also report these results to me weekly, and commit to a number for the next week every Friday.

Prioritize your time –

I see it happen all too often where a rep is really really good at being busy, but really really bad at being productive. They will spend hours reviewing slide decks or tweaking their Linkedin Bio, only to have the weakest pipeline on the team.

Ralph Barsi (aka The Man) wrote one of the best pieces on time management I have ever seen, calling out different approaches of time management for SDRs. When you are prospecting + closing, it gets even harder, and thus requires even more discipline.

We all know that a weak pipeline will result in weak performance, but I promise you that unless you actually have a few hours per day blocked out for prospecting activities (list building, cadence writing, calls, email customization, social touches etc…) you will not do nearly enough. It’s easy to get burned out on these activities, so I recommend doing 30-45 minute blocks of each, and developing that pig-headed discipline and determination to start each on time, and go all the way through the end of the block. 

Be crazy organized –

This is probably the hardest discipline to instill into a salesperson’s head, and I am sure there is some biological wiring associated with a salesperson’s mentality. We are inherently bad at being organized.

Get over it. Use your CRM the way your boss has asked you to. It DOES matter. Good clean data can help your company get predictable and thus provide you with insight into which prospects are prime for selling, which geographic areas respond best to your value prop, and which parts of your sales process need improvement.

I’m incredibly grateful for all of the tools that Nearmap has invested in. They make our lives easier, but only IF we use them.

In Summary, if you want to be a top performer, act like one. Do the dirty work, prioritize your accounts and your time, and be crazy organized.

I’d love to hear any other tips you have for closers. Add ‘em to the comments!