What Should Be on a Sales Call Scorecard?

0:00Every sales leader wants the same thing. A team that's in front of more prospects, following up faster, and closing more deals. But most teams are losing hours every single week to admin work that has nothing to do with selling. Belay's sales assistants are U.S.-based professionals who go through rigorous vetting processes before they even join the team. Less than 3 % make the cut. They're matched specifically to sales teams to take that operational weight off your reps so that they can do what you hired them to do. Close deals. Download Belay's free guide called The 5 Reasons You Aren't Hitting Quota, The Sales Operations Gap Examined.

0:35Pick up that guide today at belaysolutions.com forward slash gravy or text gravy to 55123. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, best-selling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked. And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Griefy Podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt, Jr., your host. And today I've got Johnny Holston, the CEO and founder of Bridge Selling, the author of a new bestseller, Fix Your Broken Sales Calls. Johnny, so excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome to the show. Jeb, thanks for having me.

1:12I've been listening to some episodes lately. I feel like I came straight from a conversation with you already. It's like you've been spending all of your time with me. I really like that you listen to some podcasts. If you are listening to this and you've listened to a few podcasts and you want to look at this conversation, like you actually want to see it, go to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy. Johnny is in an incredible studio. You can leave a comment. I love those comments. You might receive a little prize. If I see your comment, I want to grow a YouTube audience. Johnny, as we kind of dive into this conversation, you are on a specific mission, which is dedicating yourself to simplifying sales.

1:42We had this conversation before the podcast to prep ourselves for this conversation. You highlighted that. So I want to know why are you trying to simplify sales? Seems like an obvious question and an obvious answer, but I think that it'll be more complex than people think. And then I want you to answer a quick kind of observation that we have made at Sales Gravy and you have made as well, which is sales leaders are adding a lot of complexity to their entire systems. So what is the impact of complexity on a sales organization? So first and foremost, what is your mission and why did you get there?

2:13Well, my mission, like you said, is to simplify selling. And we do that a bunch of different ways. and a lot of my writing and my thinking is based on how can we take this complex thing, which is selling, and make it as simple as possible. And the damage of complexity, like you said, when an organization gets too complicated, what people think is complexity equals competency. And that's not true. And when we get very complicated, it becomes hard to remember. And so the more complicated our system is, the harder it is for a rep to absorb or a manager to train or people to learn and execute. And so everything I think through is, how can we take something that's complex yet works and distill it into something that's very, very simple so people remember it and actually follow it and feel confident doing it?

2:55That's a big part of it as well. You have a great story here about a company you work with that had a lot of criteria when it came to evaluating their own sales calls. I love that you're beginning with this simplicity. We have this natural inclination as human beings. It's what you and I do. It's what every human being typically does, which is we take something simple and we actually make it complex to seem more competent. I like that you're kind of going the opposite way. It's what the great thinkers do. So tell us a little bit about the companies that you've worked with and what you've seen in terms of complexity.

3:23What does complex actually look like on the ground for these companies? A good example of this would be a company, they sell one product in the data security space, sell one thing. And yet the conversation with them is, hey, we're having a hard time getting our reps to change their behavior, to have effective conversations. and our coaching with them is not very effective. It's not very clear. Nobody knows how to focus a sales coaching session. And when we looked into it, it's because they said we have a great system for training and scoring our conversations with buyers, but their scoring criteria was 27 different things.

3:56And when you get put in a situation where you're being graded on 27 different things, you can't remember, it doesn't matter if you're the one being coached or the one doing the coaching, 27 is too much to communicate simply and clearly. And, you know, my thinking here is usually, well, those 27 things are probably valid, right? Like there's a reason for those things. But if we were to actually take those 27 things and map them almost like a connect the dots game, they're all going to fall into just a few different categories. And so oftentimes that's where the breakdown is. It's not that we're doing the wrong things.

4:31It's just that we're doing way too much. And that way, trainers have a hard time teaching it. Sellers have a hard time absorbing it and acting on it. So that's a little bit of the background on that thinking. I wonder when you walk into a space like this, it sort of sounds like it's not a bad thing. And I think that's why it gets overlooked so much. It's not an evil in business. It's not a sin by any means. You're not ruining stuff by having 27 categories to grade things on. In fact, I imagine that the conversations that got them to the 27 were actually from a broader list of, you know, 50, 100, you know, many other pieces that they whittled down to 27.

5:06So can you maybe walk us through where these criteria and what this complexity sort of looks like from a decision making process? Like who is bringing this complexity into the sales organization typically? Before I do this, Jeb, I would like to say there's a few disclaimers I always put out before we do a discussion like this. And that is, we'll talk about a bunch of principles today. We'll talk about some ideas and concepts. And I just like to make it clear, what we're talking about, it applies to the individual seller. It also applies to the manager that's leading a team. It also applies all the way up the chain.

5:38So if you are an individual contributor listening to this, we might talk about concepts for a team. Just view those as concepts for you. And if you run a team, that's concepts for your whole team to scale. So I always like to put that out there and say, like, it's funny when I work with companies or I speak to a room of sales leaders, everyone always finishes the sentence of, I always say, but we're, and they say, different or unique or special. And I always like to squash that at the beginning and just say, yes, you are. There's unique and special things about you. But what we're gonna talk about today is a lot more powerful if we can have the switch flipped from, this won't work to me, and instead talk about like, okay, what here could work for me?

6:17So that's something I always like to outline before going too deep. To answer your question, I think there's a lot of pressure. If you're a seller or you're a sales leader, it's your job to ramp up sales. You wanna have a reason why your plan will work. You have to show proof to the people you report to or the people you lead that like, here's our plan. And it looks a lot more impressive to say, hey, here's our 27 point checklist that we're gonna hit. That looks a lot sexier than saying, here's our six point checklist we're gonna hit. There's that issue. There's also the issue of all those 27 things are definitely real and true and valid, but we have to ask ourselves of the 27, which ones are the biggest levers and which ones are the easiest to coach and follow and train?

7:00And so I think there's a little bit of everything. Like we feel pressure to be fancy and robust. And then also everything is light and half truths. These things aren't bad, just to your point. They're good, but figuring out like what good do you trim to actually make the biggest impact is what a lot of people should be thinking. I imagine that when you are in these rooms, you're a consultant. We do this a lot at Sales Gravy. You sort of become this like by default outside voice that people can listen to suddenly. But when you do get their complexity down from a leadership room perspective, like you were sitting in this room with leaders and you give them the permission to be simple.

7:34What is the result of that vibe, that energy in that room? How does that sort of change the pH level of the leadership organization? There's a relief and it doesn't matter if it's a seller or a manager or a CRO. So being able to say, okay, we're going to strip down to the basics and we're only going to focus on these six fundamental things or these few things and doing them very well. There's a lot less pressure, but also there's an added level of quality because now instead of trying to do 27 things kind of well, we're going to pick way fewer things and do them extremely well. So the outcome of that is less pressure, but also higher standards.

8:14If we're going to hold our team or ourselves to a super high standard, you really can only do that on a limited lane. And so it opens up that possibility to say, we're not just going to do less, but we're also going to be way better in these few things. The results and the impact is like, you can feel it in your body when you tell a team, all right, here's our new plan. All we got to do is this, the relief is there. And then on the other side of it, the execution and the standard of excellence is there too. So that's typically what you see, which is always fun. I wanted you to say that out loud is, is if you're listening to this be the person in the room that gives permission to others to be simple and try and bring that energy into the room.

8:51Before we get into like what good looks like from a scoring perspective, I want you to sort of talk about what complex looks like when you are sitting with your teams, you're sitting in these rooms and you're maybe you're thinking of this individual contributor all the way up to a leader, kind of walk through complexity. What are some tangible pieces of complexity that you've come across in your career? I think complexity is like way too many scripts, way too many, if this, then that. And you've got like a T chart and tree chart. It looks like the roots of a hundred year old tree and like how to guide a conversation.

9:26And that's complex. Another thing that's complex that a lot of people don't think about is anywhere where there's subjectivity. And if you're creating an environment where you're coaching or training or strategy is subjective and it's based on someone's gut feel or their opinion, let's say you're doing a role play, someone does a half decent job, and now you've got three different people all giving them three different opinions that are based on only their ideas and gut feelings. That is very complex for the person hearing that feedback. And it makes it hard to act on anything. And it leaves them in a position where it's like, all right, I just got nine different pieces of feedback.

10:03Half of them were saying the same thing in different ways. I don't know what any of this means. I can't apply any of it. And I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with this either. That's complexity. That's that all the time. That's such a huge eye-opening moment. I understand this complexity. I've been in these rooms. I've done the role plays with all these teams. And it's a strange environment because you have someone on the team who's maybe a 20-year seller. You have someone who's a four-year seller, someone who has seven years. And maybe you're the first two years into your job and you're just doing some role play and three people gave you three different opinions.

10:34And you go back to your desk and you're thinking, those are all great pieces of advice. How do I implement all of this stuff. So maybe unpack that subjectivity within a room where you have all of these areas of complexity that you aren't even documenting. Like it's not just a piece of paper that you're documenting complexity on. It's just in the environment. What does that do? What is the impact of that complexity? The impact of that complexity is everybody leaves the room not knowing how do I apply this and what do I apply? And so if you got, like you said, the 20 year veteran, the 10 year veteran, and then the new guy who's the expert, because he's been on the job for two days, all giving you feedback after a role play.

11:10Now you've got to figure out what do I apply? And what does my company actually want me to apply? You get in those situations too, where it's like, hey, two of these feedback tidbits were great, but seven of them, that's not how they want it done. And so I'll tell you a story of this company we worked with, they'd just gotten like$130 million in startup funding. So highly funded, ready to scale the sales team, ready to rock and roll. And I went in and I observed the training and they did a role play. And same situation we're talking about here. Somebody goes, it's not great. It's decent, but way too much feedback.

11:41And somebody is saying, hey, you should have built more rapport. Another person is saying you should have had better discovery. Someone else is saying you didn't get any pain points, dig up any pain points. And then they all give some ideas on how to be better. Well, this poor person at role play just got a whole bunch of advice. You know, everyone means something a little bit different, but they're all kind of saying the same thing at the same time. So what we ended up doing was saying, okay, how can we create a model in a system where now their training and their role-playing is based on something concrete that's scorable and objective?

12:11So to the scoring rubric idea, we went back and we listened to tons of calls at this company and we figured out, okay, the six things that need to happen in a conversation to convert and advance someone forward are this. We've named the six things. Now within each of those six things, we are going to determine what's unacceptable, what's good, and what's great. And that can all be sourced from a team, a leadership team, and listening to calls. And you can pick this up pretty quick if you know how to categorize it, which is, you know, six boxes, unacceptable, good, great. Once you get to that point, okay, now we go back a week later, and we're doing the same exact training session.

12:50And we have these six things. We use the analogy you that closing a sale is like crossing a bridge. So we will put a literal bridge on the wall with these six steps. And everybody knows what are the steps on the bridge, what's unacceptable, good and great. We'll color code this red, yellow, green. So once everybody knows those things, now the feedback is completely different. And you've got the same role play with the same three people giving feedback, but they're all tying their feedback to a specific step on the bridge and a specific color on each step. And that changes everything. That changes the game in powerful ways.

13:26So that's the difference on the other side. And you say, okay, we're going to stop giving subjective gut feel and we're at least going to have a filter and a scoring rubric from this. By the way, we call this the bridge score. So you've got the six steps and the bridge. You can calculate a score off that. It changes everything in your training and feedback. I typically have these conversations in a podcast where I'm sort of figuring out, okay, what are the rules of thumb? What are sort of the railroad that we're going to run on that has the structure that then you can proprietize for yourself or you can bring into your own organization?

13:55But you specialize in proprietary scorecarding, which is a process that is different than generally having a scorecard. I think that they're both great and they have a lot of value. Going into a follow up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting. Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's recall has that ready for me.

14:30And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepin S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. But let's talk about the proprietary step. When you walk in and it's not just a scorecard that you pulled off from a trainer or an expert or someone that you trust. I mean, those are all great things. Now you're making it a company's own. What should sales leaders and sales professionals be looking for if they're in an organization to stop using that gut feel, but also start trying to make it look good for them and not just look good in general.

15:12Yeah, this is the most important part because a lot of sales training, a lot of sales coaching and sales strategy, it's based on general principles, which are great. And most of them are foundational and they work and they're successful. We have our own foundational generic version of this scorecard and I'll run you through that. Then I'm gonna run you through an example of how to make it proprietary and make it your own. This is a great example of if you're an individual rep listening, you can have a very cool and unique scorecard that no one else in your company has and you're gonna start crushing it.

15:39You can tell them why. If you're a leader, be thinking of, all right, if we got to this level of detail and excellence scaled across our whole team, what would that look like? What results would that make? And so the six things we're looking for in our scorecard are close your eyes and visualize this bridge moving left to right, six boxes. The first step is pinpointing the pain through discovery. We gotta know what problem we're solving. The second step is qualification. The third step is solution matching with pain points. So talking about our product or our service, that's the first half of the bridge.

16:09The second half is Q &A or overcoming objection or education. And the last two steps are clear next steps and then closing or scheduling. So whether you're full cycle selling or you're just advancing to another stage, those are the six categories. And that's the general framework. And that is still too subjective if you're going to coach off of that. What you need to be thinking of is what are the criteria and how can we retitle those steps in my company to match my sales process? So I'll give you an example. Step two in that rubric is qualification. You need to have a very, very clear definition of what is a qualified lead for you to advance and pass on.

16:45And you need to know what's red, a no-go, what's yellow, a maybe-go, and what's green, let's rock and roll, this is qualified. And you need to put into words what that is. So that's an example of how you get more clear. I'll give one other example, which would be in the generic framework, we're talking at the end of the bridge, we want clear next steps and either closing the deal or scheduling. One example, one company that worked with us that are a mortgage provider, their sales process ends when someone gets approved for the loan, right? So they're not going all the way through to the closing of the house necessarily like a real estate agent.

17:16Their job is to get people approved and finish the application. Instead of just saying, we're going to leave clear next steps and schedule the next call, they actually retitled step six on the bridge to be schedule application check-in call. So rather than just saying, hey, I'd love to follow up, they said, hey, we're actually going to have an application check-in call. And that's usually a week out from this first conversation. Now they're able to give next steps on, I'm going to send you the link to the application. And they have a time set to review it. What happened with them was they discovered once they started putting those, that's a forcing function in a sales process.

17:52They said, we have a time on the calendar. I'm sending you the link. And what they would say, which was magical, and I'll tie this back to scorecards is if you finish the application, we don't need to meet because the application's done and they're approved. And if you haven't finished the application, that's a placeholder for us to help you get across the finish line. And the detail in that is now, okay, now this company knows. Excellence is we've scheduled the application progress call. Good is that didn't quite get done, but we had a great conversation. Unacceptable is we didn't even talk about the progress call and we just ended the conversation.

18:25So now you go from the generics and the subjective of like, we want to advance to, no, no, we are scheduling a specific type of meeting for a specific purpose. And those same enhancements can happen at all six steps in that scorecard. So that's when we look at it. And I have other stories, but I'll wait to go into those another time or question. I want to actually go through a few more of these examples, because as someone who strategizes with sales teams, sometimes you do get into these conversations, even when you bring a group of sellers together and you're like, I'm going to lean on you all because you have the experience in the field.

18:54You're the one doing this every day. We're going to bring some leaders in to listen to you and help build out a scorecard. And then you have a conversation that feels really, really good, but ultimately ends up with so many different categories to choose from. If you are coaching a leader to coach their team to actually sit down and go, I got six categories here. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to have an excellent scorecard? What are you doing to moderate that session so that it doesn't get super fun, but really, really, really far reaching? Yeah, well, you asked the right question, Jeb.

19:25That's perfect. What needs to be true for a sale to close or advance? And probably the first thing I would do and what we would do is we'd sit down and say, what are all the different things? You might end up with 20, 27, right? We're actually gonna map them all to one of these six steps. And then we're gonna retitle those six steps in a way that include all of it as much as we can. And maybe there's some opportunities to trim and delete, but that's one step of doing it is just helping people realize sales has a lot of subjectivity in it. So when some people say one thing, they mean the same thing as when someone else says another.

19:57And a lot of things can be combined together. So that's the beauty of forcing it into six steps. And to answer your question of how do you stop it from getting too fun instead of actually working is I think you want some form of conclusion at the end of that session where you can say, all right, we have our six steps and can we make a commitment to aim, to touch on, like how I would do it is, this can't be done in one session. You can certainly lay the groundwork in one session, but you want to leave that first session saying, can we agree on these six things? And can we agree we're going to all make them a better effort to touch on them?

20:34Now you're set up in a place where you can continue that conversation or that training at a future date or the next week or the next time. And now you're jumping off point is based on the right framework and the right steps, which you've already made massive progress just by doing that. So give us some more examples of teams you've worked with where you took these six boxes where you start with the first half or the second half and they've changed the language in such a way that it highlighted the actual uniqueness of their sales process and showed them what has to be done in order for a sale to become true.

21:06If we're struggling to crack the code in some of these things, we like to look at it as a small lever swings a huge door. And most companies have most of these things right, but there's usually something invisible under the surface that, because they're inside the bottle, they can't read the label. And that's what I'm really obsessed with when I get in the door at a company. I say, all right, what can we find? What's the small thing? Two examples of this. One is one company has a product where really you can calculate ROI. It's a calculator tool. So it's a financial product, but you can calculate the impact of that purchase for the buyer.

21:39And they had a really great marketing tool. So they had a cool marketing piece. It was like a self-serve calculator on their website. It was not a part of their sales process. But we, after listening to a bunch of calls, realized this company had no shared language or set standard. The best reps were being creative and kind of going rogue. So they were actually pulling up that online resource during discovery calls and walking through buyers that way. And so rather than just talking about the product, they were walking them through it in a way that was way more unique and personal and experiential.

22:10So we then took that tool and made it step three in their bridge. So now everybody knows that's our standard. We're going to walk everyone through it. And then within that step, it was like, no credit is you skipped it. Half credit is you tried, but didn't get it done. Full credit is you walked them through it and you touched on three unique outcomes that are personalized to that caller. So there's a high, high standard of walking through this tool. It's not just, hey, we're pitching our product. We're going to cover three things and we're going to tie it to unique outcomes that only matter to that buyer.

22:44So now when we go into training or coaching, it's here's the standard. We're not just going to talk about our calculator. We're going to do it in this way where it created some very, very powerful results. So that's one way to, you know, to customize the scorecard. You mentioned the hinges and the doors in this specific conversation where you bring up this like tool that someone's been using in a rogue environment. They're an elite seller on the team. And unless someone like actually looked at their calls, you wouldn't even know that they were doing it. So you found, I call it like a money ball.

23:14And I think this is a similar theory to this. So kind of walk us through some hinges to doors, examples, just like that one that helps illustrate what leaders and even sales professionals themselves should be looking for within their working day. There's two others that come to mind. The first is confirmation of problems and pain points. We know that sellers who ask 11 or more questions have a close rate of 74 % higher than ones who don't hit 11 questions. So that's something like in my mind, when we think of standards, we want to reach for that, right? The reason they hit that close rate increase is not necessarily because it's 11 questions, but because when you go to 11 questions, you're getting to the real deeper underlying challenges.

23:54So if you're not able to get to 11 questions or you feel like you're hitting that pain point, there's two hinges I want to talk about. The first is confirming the problem. So that is saying, Mr. and Mrs. Beyer, from what you're telling me, it sounds like A, B, C, D, you repeat back their words. A lot of people do that, But the tiny hinge here is saying, what else did I miss? And then zipping the lift. A lot of teams forget that or a lot of sellers get excited to pitch. And so they do pick up on pain points. But that is what we would call a magic pivot or a tiny hinge, which is the saying in the phrase, what else did I miss?

24:27Because when you do that, now you've turned the floor over to the buyer and they can tell you a lot more than if you were to just advance. Now, we could score based on that. You might say red is skipping discovery. Yellow is you asked a few questions. Green is you asked multiple questions and you confirmed the problem with the phrase, what did I miss? That gives you high confidence to advance and score. Another hinge that we saw that had a big impact was with a subscription service. And we realized, we were talking to the sales team, it felt like a huge process to like sign up for this product.

24:59And so I'm sitting here and I'm like, yeah, like this feels like a two call, three call type process. And I asked like, how long does it take to sign up? And one of the team members goes, 60 to 90 seconds. And so their tiny hinge was saying the phrase, it doesn't make people laugh, but would you like to sign up today? It takes about 60 seconds. And even just that, when it's delivered in the right way at the right time, huge results got an email from them very shortly after that workshop saying like, we're signing people up. And before that, people were ghosting them and not advancing. And I think those are just the little things that sometimes you miss from the inside.

25:34And those are tiny hinges right there. That's a huge insight for that organization. It's a huge insight for many sellers actually is, you know, when you are in the sales process, we often have this ability to make simple complex. We have, for example, coaching services. When I work with coaching clients, often if I don't have a conversation with them and then get them into the coaching program, like day one in that conversation, they have a lot more time to think about it. And so they don't ever end up coming back and being a coaching client and accelerating their sales career. And I have for a long time spent, well, they want to make their decisions.

26:03They want to have conversations. They need to make sure it's right for them. So I'd extend my process out three or four or five, six sales calls. And I realized one day it clicked for me that if I just proposed to them, hey, you're motivated today, why don't we get started? I closed infinitely more of those coaching clients just by saying it in the right way. Tiny hinge, big door. If you were a rep or a sales leader and you're overwhelmed by a massive playbook or no playbook at all, actually, what is one play that you should focus on mastering to close the discovery gap? I wish I could tell you there was a silver bullet.

26:36I think that some of the things we've talked through today probably bring some ideas to mind for the listeners. And it would be malpractice for me to say one thing is working for everyone. But the one thing I would say to do, go back and listen to your last five closed deals, the first call from that sales process and your last five ghosts or no deals, right? You're gonna pick up on what was the one thing you did well in the ones that closed. And you're gonna see that you probably forgot it. in the ones that didn't close. You might not know what that thing is or you might think you know what that thing is now, but until you go in and actually do the digging, then you're gonna find your one thing.

27:13And I promise you, if you find that one thing, you could see a real meaningful boost in conversions, close rate, shortening your sales cycle, and obviously your commission check at the end of the month. And helping your clients achieve more quicker. You're reducing the amount of time it takes for you to get to the closed one. So I love this conversation. There's so much here that we could dive into and get it even deeper on. If you were listening to this podcast and you haven't, give us a review on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, wherever you listen to the podcast, give us five stars. Leave your comments.

27:39I really appreciate that. On Spotify, you can actually leave comments on the podcast episode. So go ahead and do that. Again, go over to youtube.com forward slash sales gravy to watch this conversation, see Johnny's amazing set. And Johnny, before I let you go, I want people to find out more about you. Where can they learn from you? Where can they get your book and learn more from you? Yeah, well, Jeff, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciated it. The book, Fix Your Broken Sales Calls, you can get it on Amazon. It'll come to you in a couple of days. if you order there. You also can download a free version on our website, which is bridgeselling.com.

28:07And if you're interested in talking to me more, learning more about what are the details of this whole process we've talked about today, bridgeselling.com is the way to go. And LinkedIn as well, as I spent a little too much time there. LinkedIn is a place to find me. I love it. Johnny, thank you so much for joining us on the Sales Gravy Podcast, and we'll catch you next time.

28:32Thank you.