Maintaining Momentum Throughout the Year w/ Anthony Bratti | builders podcast

0:00So if there's three or four areas in a plan, and you keep the team confined to reiterating and pivoting within those three or four areas of the right way to success. That'll enable you enough room to be able to find the areas of focus.

0:21Today, I speak with Anthony Brody of Centerfield about continuing business and operating momentum throughout the year and capturing that excitement and bump you get after New Year's into February, March, April, and so on. Anthony has joined us before about scaling sales organizations, and he always has a fresh take on growth. As always, we have a weekly chat with Marty Beckerman, which is our first segment. Marty and I discuss the stories he's covering for Business.com, including new sensory friendly hours at Walmart and how a judge issued a unique sentence for an abusive Chipotle consumer. Thanks for listening.

1:05I'm with Marty Beckerman in our weekly chat about what he and his team are covering in this week's B newsletter. Marty, good to see you. Hey, John. Good to be back. We've got some really good stories cooking this time of year. One of them is really interesting to me. I remember when COVID started, stores started putting together hours for seniors to go. I think it was like the first hour of the day. Seniors and seniors only could shop. There'd be a little less folks in the store. And that was good for a variety of reasons. Walmart is doing something new. Could you tell the listeners about it? Sure.

1:44Walmart began experimenting with what they call sensory friendly hours, where they turn off all the loudspeakers, the TV monitors throughout the store. And they turned the lights down low a bit. This is to help people who are neurodivergent or possibly have PTSD to just create a calmer environment. They tried it out. They had a really resoundingly positive experience from those communities, and they decided to roll it out at every store in America, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Saturdays. And they've been getting a lot of positive feedback. So we wanted to highlight that. That's cool. I do know that the big box stores can be super bright sometimes.

2:27And I think it's a really good idea. So I am a believer in some cases that the punishment should fit the crime. Before we get into the next story, which relates to this, I guess I was at the local co-op in Seattle last week and I'm walking to the hot bar. I'm going to get like some breakfast. And there's a person maybe 10 feet away from me, and she's absolutely screaming at the folks behind the deli saying that the food at the hot bar sucks and there should be better food. And the folks really, really took it well, the employees at the at the co-op. But it was a crazy scene. You talk about a maybe even crazier scene that occurred at a Chipotle.

3:15Talk about what happened and then the end result. Sure. This was in Ohio late last year. A woman at Chipotle threw her burrito bowl in the manager's face. She had asked for it to be remade. She didn't like it the first time, asked for it to be remade. didn't like it the second time, threw it in the manager's face while it was still hot. And so she was arrested for assault, pleaded out to a very unique plea deal that the judge gave her, which was to say he would reduce her sentence if she's got a job in fast food for 20 hours a week. So she would then have to be behind the counter dealing with disgruntled customers herself.

3:59And the way the judge put it was that he wanted to teach her a little bit of empathy. So the punishment fit the crime. They actually asked the Chipotle manager how she felt about it. And she said it, she told the New York Times, it wouldn't sour her view of the fast food industry. She said, I still love working in fast food and I love the customers. So one bad one. I really like that. I think it's a great idea for everyone to work in service for empathy. And I like the quote from the judge, which you can read in the article in the newsletter. Last thing to cover for today, Marty, I'll tee it up with a question.

4:40Who are better employees, Republicans or Democrats? Don't answer that. That was a trick question. um you you we obviously know that uh we should not talk about politics in the workforce or it's often it's frowned upon um you talk about it in this week's uh organizational psychologists couch a recurring um recurring bit or piece in the newsletter right this week's was written by dr ben baran and he's talking about how in an election year especially when tensions are higher than normal, and they've been high pretty constantly lately, that even knowing what party your coworkers belong to, even if you haven't had a debate with them or an argument with them, just knowing that they might belong to the other party can cause teams to stop talking to each other in the office and avoid each other.

5:37And it's going to destroy trust and destroy the ability to work together. So he recommends some things just to keep in mind that we need to acknowledge how everyone belongs in a team, respect each other and trust that we're all working toward the same goal when we're at the office. And then maybe we save our opinions for Twitter or X or our private time. Okay. So that was the final analysis. Just say what you want on Twitter. No, I'm joking. All right. Thanks, Marty. As always, sign up for the newsletter at business.com. It's free. Thanks, John.

6:20I'm talking with Anthony Brody today. He's a recurring guest on the pod. And our subject is about getting 2024 off right, having your best year yet as a company for results and personally as part of your career. And notice that we're not launching this on January 1st, because this is not about week one of the year. We're launching it beginning of February. It's about taking the energy from the beginning of the year or the culmination of all your planning and maintaining it throughout the year and staying on track or getting back on track as you deviate from your plan throughout the year. Hi, Anthony.

6:56How are you doing? Good, John. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for coming back. Let's work backwards though a little bit into the planning process. Maybe we don't have to all talk only about work. Did you do any New Year's resolutions? I'd love to know. In our last meeting, you talked about the virtues of cold plunging. I'm sure you're still doing that. And then what's your process like in general for personal and work resolutions if you do them? Great, great question. Well, I do have to say the temperatures around here have been about 19 degrees outside. And that cold plunge, if you remember, I keep it at like 34, 35 degrees.

7:34So So it's actually been colder outside to get into that warm cold plunge. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. So it does a little bit of reverse action now in the winter. Yeah. And I just came off a week of travel. I think everybody's back into travel mode. The holidays are off. So definitely appreciate it. So from a personal standpoint, I think you need to have one big epic race or event a year. I haven't quite found that one for this year, but I do a good job of setting up what my races and planning are. So one that I signed up for, which comes first up in April, is it's called a SealFit 20X Crucible.

8:17So it's like a it's a 12 hour Navy SEAL training kind of race or event, I would say. And then another really notable one will be I'm looking forward to what's called a Whiskey 50, but it's a it's a 50 mile bike ride, off road bike ride in Phoenix. So so I don't necessarily have a set of. Of resolutions, but we keep to a I keep to a really good pace of, you know, family balance, physical activity and as well as work as work goals. So I'd map those out in the beginning of the year. I make sure that I have plans for the family to travel. And once those are on the calendar, then everything else starts to fill in the spots with good activities.

9:06I love it. Yeah, for me, I try to shut down as much as I can between Christmas and New Year's. I find it's a really good time to recharge and always try to do something new. um this year i'm doing dry january which i've done done before i i love it and one of the one of the new things is um is i'm doing boxing you know i'm not like a really like muscular guy but i've been i've been doing boxing fitness and if anybody's thinking about like what's something i can do new to get me excited about fitness um hitting something hitting a bag as hard as you can is like really, really is great. And, um, and I'm actually, I'm looking forward to it every day.

9:48Like I can't, I can't wait to go. Are you doing it for office or after office? Is it start your day? How does, how are you doing it? Well, I like it so much. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it anytime. They have classes as early as six. Um, they have a lunchtime class. And so like whatever, whatever would work within my schedule is, is what I would do. And I think you, you know, So if you're sort of dreading like training for a 50K bike ride or whatever, you may do it, but it's not the type of thing that's going to last. You know, you've got to find things that bring you joy and bring you energy.

10:26Yeah, so glad to hear what you're doing. And I think we've got similar attitudes on that. maybe as a segue from personal to work and sort of like wrapping your head around new mindsets. We were on the phone a couple of weeks ago, maybe before the holidays, I can't remember. And you're wearing this sweatshirt and I'm going to kind of quote it. And the sweatshirt said, hating me will not help you win. Tell me about that. Why'd you wear it? How'd you, how'd you get it? What does it mean to you? Great topic. I'm surprised, not surprised, But I'm glad I'm glad you remembered it. So there's a an influencer.

11:05His name is Cameron Haynes and definitely into the athletic outdoor space. And for Christmas, I bought the kids a sweatshirt that actually said no one cares. Work harder. So I have four kids. I bought all the kids these these sweatshirts because they go from 23 to 13. the kids, right? So I've got one that just started working and, and the joys of getting up and leaving the house, uh, you know, at seven and coming back to the office and trying and complaining about having to go work on a Friday in the office. Uh, you know, it's interesting. Right. And then I got one that's graduating. And so, so the theme stuck with, you know, at the end of the day, I care, but, but most of the world really doesn't care.

11:50Um, just work harder. And so when they wore those sweatshirts around, they got a lot of, believe it or not, they got a lot of compliments and joy out of that. So they returned the favor and gave me back the sweatshirt. They gave me back that sweatshirt. And yeah, at the end of the day, everybody can be successful, right? And the harder that you work with folks, sometimes they don't want to take that call. Sometimes they don't want to do that review. And so I think if they don't see the positive reinforcement that you're giving to them, they actually dread having those review conversations. And so that switcher became a great talking point for a couple of weeks of, you know, hating me is not going to help you win.

12:39But if we're working together, you know, it makes everybody more successful. It's also a little bit about the the focus on the result or, or the outcome. If you have to have a difficult conversation with someone or you're on the receiving end of a difficult conversation and, and you, you can put it, put it in a box and say, they're not critiquing me, the, the, the person it's, how can I, how can I improve my work product? How can I things be more effective? Cause we have a shared goal. I think, I think it, it kind of just takes the, takes the edge off. everybody can relax and just talk about what needs to be done.

13:16It's one of the biggest risks in the shuffle right now. Yeah, you wear it proudly. So, all right. So I want to talk about maintaining the energy, having a good year the entire year, maybe in month two. But we have to talk about what often happens in January. I know that you work with sales. A big part of your career has been in sales and business development. And oftentimes the first week of January is a sales kickoff. I remember one of the ones I remember is in New York City during a polar vortex. Everybody's just absolutely freezing their butts off the first few days of the year. But I guess the question is, do they work?

14:00What are they good for? What are they not good for? Do you do them? What's your experience with them? What's typically done at the beginning of January? So if you think about it, December is all about planning. What is the year going to look like? January is all about getting the results out, you know, or the objectives out for the groups and rolling out quota. And then you have these wonderful things called sales kickoffs that the marketing team has spent fourth quarter working around and now we're in execution mode. And, you know, sales kickoffs are great for that bump, right? There's always that bump in activity right after the sales kickoff.

14:38And that ends typically at the end of February. And I think the problem that the leaders have is all this money has been spent and it doesn't get sticky. It doesn't maintain that kind of that mental resilience to be able to move through the plan and that stickiness of the fortitude of the teams to be able to pivot when bad things happen and they're not hitting the plan as aggressively as they want. or they get a little comfortable because they have a one-month bump and a trend doesn't happen with one line or two periods of growth. So I think the challenge now is everybody's, as this podcast is going on, I think the sales kickoffs are happening or have happened, right?

15:25And then they're going to come back. And now how do you maintain that momentum coming back from that sales kickoff to really go and achieve plan and not waiting until May or June to realize that you have a problem with third and fourth quarter. Because like most organizations, the magic seems to happen in Q3 and Q4. There's a lot of backend loaded plans there across the teams. And it's really up to the leaders in the organization to make sure that everybody has the right rules in place to be able to execute on it. So to answer your question, I think, yeah, sales kickoffs are great. They're fun at the moment.

16:05But making sure that they have the ability to execute post those sales kickoffs is key. Let's talk about two of the scenarios that you brought up. Let's talk about the good and keeping the good scenario. So you mentioned, let's imagine there's a group that works for you or there's a person that works for you that has had a great January and February. You know, maybe they're almost even meeting their yearly quota. And what's the process by which we keep this group to outpace and absolutely crush their goals and not sit on their laurels? You know, it's not like the hedge fund that on December 1st, they've gotten to 20 % growth and they just shut down.

16:53What do you do in that case? What's your technique? So I think there's a combination of things, right? So one, making sure that they have a prescriptive set of group of target accounts that they need to go after. So to your point, you know, quota is set, probably set lower in January. Right. Everybody feels good coming out of the year. It's set lower probably in February. There isn't a big hockey stick that happens to put everybody in a deficit as as that's there. But you have accounts that you have to go after. Right. So if you're ahead of plan and you're making plan on one or two accounts or one or two verticals or one or two products, making sure that you have to drive success across each of them enables the teams to continue to move forward through them.

17:35So a very prescriptive set of accounts or verticals to go after is key number one, especially for a sales organization and the partner in crime with it on the marketing side. I think the next key piece is, you know, as you have the right folks on the team, many of the folks in the commercial organization are financially motivated. So putting the right commission plan in place that is both revenue or EBITDA focus. but at the same time just because you hit your number in February and you hit your annual number in February doesn't mean you get that same commission plan or you don't get the upside by hitting that number also every single month of the year so I found that commission plans with quarterly bonuses or some sort of monthly and quarterly metric enables you to keep building on that success so if that team's at 25 % over achievement how can you build a plan for them to get to 100 % overachievement through the course of the year.

18:36Yeah, for me, my advice and my experience is a lot less in the sales side, more on marketing product analytics, et cetera, is when we found something that works better than expected, whether it's an SEO, something with SEO, something with marketing, something with whatever, it's time to pour gas on that thing. because those are the things that can like 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x your business where you had a good plan, but actually you under imagined how powerful it would be or was serendipitous in some way. And that's the way that you really, really crush your business. Let's talk about the other side of things.

19:19So somebody's having a tough January or February, and how do you have the mental resilience to get through it? Because it's possible that there are the wrong marketing messages. It's possible that there aren't the right products. It's also possible that the sales individual, the sales group, just isn't working for some reason or has had a little bit of bad luck. What do you do to keep those folks on track? I think that's the key to it, right? of not just having complete pivots out of things that are perceived not to be working. You can't throw the entire team out if plans not working. You can't throw the entire marketing organization or the marketing plan out if it's not working.

20:05So what trials can you do to look at things with a different lens? Unfortunately, underperforming organizations are coming in just to build plans, to make plan, right? And they don't always have that mindset of how are we far achieving or far exceeding the plan. So what I found is putting a set of trials in place that have the ability to have breakout growth and breakout offers helps overcome those issues versus, I think you used a good word, sitting on your laurels and saying, hey, we're going to struggle to make plan this year. So I'll give you a perfect example. in one of the recent organizations, we did it, did it, added a couple of, there was a decision to take a couple of resources away.

20:52And by taking those resources away, we automatically saw 60 days later, a drop in, a drop in results, not expensive resources, but it was something that needed to happen, you know, at that time in the business. So we tried adding some of those resources back to see what would happen. Within a, within a couple of weeks, we saw a 60 and a 97 % increase in those results over a 30 and 60 day period. So we started off, you know, they started off the year again short on the results. We added back some resources just this month. We're seeing a hundred percent increase in that area of focus by putting the resources back.

21:32So, so if we, if, if they're able to see that again for another month, can you five or six X the resources that you need in that area to be able to drive the results? And that's a digital business. It's a a lot easier to impact a digital business real time versus some enterprise sales organization. But all growth is good growth if it's profitable as you go down the path. So just an example of trying new things and making sure that the teams are aligned and have their partners in place to go and do that. One of the things that I do is I reread the plans. So we did a planning exercise prioritize in Q4, put a lot of work on it.

22:14I think it's a really good plan. And then my first day back, I blocked off a half an hour, an hour of my schedule with a note in the calendar said, read the plan. And I just reread everything that not just we put together, but everybody in the organization put together. And I've been trying to do it once a week because one of the things that I've noticed when folks get off the right track for whatever reason, it's because they're not actually on plan. They're pivoting organically away from the plan. And then the other thing that I've noticed is a focus on the right KPIs. I think sometimes in a planning process, they could say, we're going to track this, we're going to track that, we're going to test and learn.

23:00But there's 90 % diligence to that, not 100 % diligence on that. And string away from that laser focus on the KPIs that you thought would determine success, I think leads you away from the right course corrections if plans are behind. When plans are built, right, as we've done in the past, there's three or four paths to that plan. There's not 50 and there's not one, right? I think and both of them are a problem, right? 50, there's no area really to concentrate or focus. and then you just get operational or executional issues, right? So if there's three or four areas in a plan and you keep the team confined to reiterating and pivoting within those three or four areas of the right way to success, then that'll enable you enough room to be able to find the areas of focus.

23:59So, you know, I've come across a lot of folks that always want to move up market. They always want to, they're selling, they have a certain average order value. They want a higher average order value. And it's typically the CFO that always targets that out of, hey, we shouldn't focus on smaller accounts, right? And when they do that, they say, okay, marketing is going to be our brute strength to be able to position up there. So they take the same product and all they do is have marketing help them position to the larger customers. Nine out of 10 times, it doesn't work. It's it's it needs more of a collective effort.

24:37Right. So with marketing starting to positioning higher as well as product having a new solution, but a new version of the existing solution, but a new packaging of the solution and the sales team having better verbiage to be able to go speak to a more enterprise or higher level customer. That's more of a package, right, to be able to go sell upmarket. And I think most plans are developed, most unsuccessful plans are developed with just one of those intentions in place. So so I like the idea. I have my plan printed out. I don't know that I actually have calendar time to go read it every once a week, but I print out my plan with my major work streams.

25:22And so I refer to that. And the one thing I do have printed out every week is my revenue associated with plan on a weekly basis. And so with a hyper focus on each one of the levers that we've signed up for. And so that level of focus. So, for instance, another organization I spent some time with, we have a slide. I call it it's a monthly slide. It happens the 16th to 17th of every month. And like the one of the initiatives this this year is to prevent that slide. And so by publishing what that slide is on a daily basis, now they're able to exactly touch the slide and touch what contributes to the slide and go find backup plans to be able to to go address it.

26:09So hopefully hopefully hopefully that plan becomes successful this year. But net net, I think taking the plan, being very prescriptive about what the plan is and having work streams with various paths to the plan is critical for any successful execution this year. Yeah, it's easier. You know, it could be written on a piece of paper. You know, I've got it on paper. But I think technology, folks leveraging technology as a project management tool helps everybody communicate. So I think technology has helped everybody start to work with us better. I think the point I'm taking from this is we both have this routine that tells us what's important.

26:56And just like, you know, however our week goes, we're always, whether you're looking at your revenue number or I'm looking at our strategy just as a way of centering ourselves, almost like a mantra for business planning. you've been on the road Anthony just in in Vegas this week talking to marketers and I'm curious what you think with the organizations that you speak to the marketing organizations that you're most impressed with and sort of what their their philosophy for the year maybe their outlook for the year you know do they do they think that consumer demand is going to be higher business demand is going to be higher?

27:35Or anyway, what's impressing you the most coming into the year? Yeah, just because it's top of mind, can I take your question? I'm going to take your question the other way for a second. What amazed me is how many junior folks in the organization didn't have the right metrics that their executives had for the conversations. Amazing. Like, John, I couldn't tell you the amount of conversations that there were vanity metrics being used versus real metrics on results. So one thing I saw was maybe it's just the holidays. Maybe it's the timing. Maybe it's, I don't know. The good news is it doesn't happen in our organizations.

28:22But an executive would have a target number and an objective in place. and the working team had a significantly disconnected number. So I was really surprised by that. And it didn't happen once. It happened multiple times. There was a lack of connection between the executive strategy and clear objectives with what the working team is working on. So I found that to be interesting. Now, it's the third week in January, and maybe you can attribute it to some of the groups just being off. But I thought that was an interesting piece. I'll pile on to that before we get to some organizations that are impressing us.