Cutting-Edge Approach to Sales Optimization

About the Guest

​​Caroline is the new VP of Sales & Customer Success at QuotaPath, a commission tracking software platform.  Previously, Caroline has held various sales and CS leadership roles at tech startups. She has a passion for scaling teams and data-driven coaching.  Caroline started her career in the federal government at the Department of Defense and State Department.  She lives in Denver, CO.

Connect with Caroline Tarpey

Key Takeaways

• A little about Caroline’s new job with QuotaPath and her excitement about the opportunity to join an inspired, founder-led team focused on customer experience.
• What exactly does data-driven personalized coaching mean?
  • It’s about marrying art and science – data and human behavioral elements.
  • It’s an approach that looks at human behavior systematically.
  • The method blends structures and processes that “nudge” desirable behaviors.
  • Caroline fosters a culture of 5:1 – positive feedback needs to be five times more frequent than negative feedback to get the highest performance from your team.
• About the “nudge” framework: Caroline shares examples of tactics to create circumstances that encourage desired choices and outcomes.
• Caroline outlines three steps essential to successful data coaching:
  • Process: Put in place a sales methodology tied to CRM as a means of tracking.
  • Adoption: Team members commit to weekly data checks, link it directly to business outcomes, and integrate the right mindset.
  • Leverage: Performance optimization accelerates when individuals take data and feel empowered to identify where they are struggling and need support.
• Having data available to everyone encourages peer-to-peer support and a positive feedback loop.
• Data provides information that helps individual salespeople pinpoint specific trouble spots, but ultimately the magic is in teams working together to develop solutions and follow the progress of strategies to measure for success in execution.

Quote

“People who have potential to grow are going to be hungry for this information. They’re going to look at it and say, ‘I see opportunity.’ ”

Highlights From the Episode

Go-to-Market Teams: You Don’t Have to Be Binary

Caroline explains the tendency among teams to either go all-in on gut instinct or, at the other extreme, rely heavily on data and constantly consult statistics. By marrying these together, there’s an opportunity for teams to operate at their maximum potential. 

The Data Tells the Story

If used consistently, data can facilitate desired business outcomes. It can measure important metrics and track progress. What it is NOT meant to do is be used as a punitive tool such as might be the case with a performance review. This coaching focuses 100% on the positive.

How to Measure for Success

Caroline’s coaching provides an aggregate view of overall win rates, top-of-funnel pipeline generation, conversion from opportunities to sales-qualified leads. These same measures can also be tracked for individuals, but when you frame it within a larger context and examine the data some examples and clues can lift performance company-wide.

The Role Coaching Plays

Caroline provides a framework for measuring individual success over time, brainstorming strategies with role play, and identifying trouble spots on an ongoing basis so that they can be addressed positively and incrementally.

It’s Hard to Architect an Epiphany

Even if you don’t have a lightbulb conversion moment, there are things you can do to move towards your goals with micro-changes that add up to big impacts. See below for relevant resources to achieve your big-picture, next-level goals!

Recommended Reading/Resources:

“Nudge,” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

In this video Harvard lecturer, Mark Roberge shares a step-by-step guide to revenue growth. 

“Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything,” by B.J. Fogg