Effective Business Planning and Weekly Accountability with Scott Rudy

Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Most first-line managers are drowning. They're recruiting, onboarding, developing, forecasting, and trying to hit a number, all in 62 working days a quarter. But Scott Rudy, a three-time chief revenue officer, has spent his career figuring out how to make that job title manageable. He's been through it at companies growing from 80 reps to 400. And what he's learned is that the managers who actually make their number aren't the ones working harder. They're the ones with the right operating rhythm in place. In this clip, Scott walks through what rhythm looks like, how second line managers should coach first line managers on weekly accountability, how to set expectations that stick, and why most companies get this wrong. Because if your managers don't have clarity on how to execute week to week, your reps don't either. Let's dive in.

There's a part of all this around great business planning. And I think second line leaders need to help new first line leaders take a step back and build a proper business plan with an ideal customer profile, pipeline, lead source, activities, and help them work out a cadence. And I read a book and actually brought this author to a sales kickoff. His name is Brian Moran. He wrote this book, The 12 Week Year. And one of his concepts is that at the end of each week, you have a WAM, a weekly accountability meeting. And the whole idea behind it is peer accountability. And it can also work between a first and a second line leader. Here's what I said I was going to do this week. Here's what I actually did. And I'm not talking about just yelling at the scoreboard. I'm talking about really helping shape the week or the month and then participate in coaching along the way.

I like that. Brian Moran to 12 week year.

There you go.

I like that dude.

It's not nearly as good as John McMahon's book, but

thanks Scott.

Qualified sales leaders. The book.

Agreed. Thank you. No, but what you were pointing out, what that really does is helps people understand, were they doing a lot of activity or were they accomplishing anything?

Right.

Going back to the point that Johnny made where people are like traveling in and they're checking on deals. The issue with the first line manager, even the second line manager, is a lot of times they're not development focused. They're just too forecast focused. And what happens is, I have five to six sales reps. Two of them are ramping. Four of them are ramped. And I'm trying to make the number. So what I'm doing is I'm running around... and making a lot of sales calls or I'm on a lot of sales calls, even if it's a zoom meeting and the deals that I'm spending all my time on are deals where like Scott Rudy, my number one sales rep is going to meet with the economic buyer, or he's going to get the purchase order at XYZ company for a million dollars. So I go spend time with Scott, but Scott doesn't really need my help. He's done 15 of these fricking deals. He knows. In fact, he could teach economic buyer meetings to my entire team. But that's where I'm running. I'm going over there so I could say that I was part of that deal that Scott did.