Hinterview - Sales Director

SalesScreen: All right, Tell me about what you guys do. Give me the background of the company, your role, your team, etc.

Sam: We are a video-based sales tool, but designed specifically for the recruitment and staffing agency market. We sell globally, but our outbound sales team is focused on the UK and East Coast US markets. I'm the Sales Director and joined in November 2021. I was a customer before I moved over to lead the sales team, and my remit has been to set up a traditional SDR function as opposed to a full cycle and try to equip ourselves with the kind of tools to drive performance, automate manual labor, and really hit the market hard as we grow.

I'm far more interested in having a culture that's carrot lead rather than stick lead in terms of driving performance. So the gamification stuff has been really well received. And it's the most useful reporting tool as well, I will naturally go there instead of Salesforce dashboards.

SalesScreen: I'm wondering what were some of the pain points that you were experiencing before you brought on SalesScreen?

Sam: The pain point was trying to drive a little bit of excitement and effort, and we needed to start doing things properly, and a big part of that is rewarding the right behaviors. I think it's naive for me to say, “well done everybody” every time in a Slack channel. I just wanted to make such noise about it. So, we got a 75-inch TV installed on the wall next to the sales team that basically blasts out that noise that slightly irritates every other department, and it's just fun, you know? I know that if every time you do a good thing, a celebration goes off, salespeople are far more likely to continue doing that thing. So that was just a big part of it, like how do we continue to drive positive reinforcement in a tangible way?

So, a big part of that was the coin setup. One of our SDRS has even said “it's so weird, I much prefer SalesScreen coins to even commission.” That's true, and I think from their point of view, the coins are tangible. And by the time your commission comes around and gets taxed, it's about abstract about what it was for.

And it's been good, you know, if you asked all the SDRs, it would probably be the top of their list of tech to keep if we were trimming down on cost. It just adds good vibes to the office, everybody loves that it gets talked about every day. You know, I have to remind everyone to do everything else, but I never have to remind anyone to turn the SalesScreen TV on in the morning.

SalesScreen: I would love to know what the onboarding process was like when rolling out to the teams, especially since you've been hiring so much, what has been like onboarding new SDRs?

Sam: Yeah, super easy. When there are new SDRs all the other SDRs are like, “Oh, you need to pick your song, you need to pick your song,” and show the reward shop and all the things they can win. And, for me, it’s quite funny, right? Because you’ll have someone that, on the outside, is shy or timid and then picks Rihanna’s “B*tch Better Have My Money” as their celebration song. So I like it for the entertainment of that.

And for the first question, listen is it's one of those where I can tell you the whole thing is perfect from your side. Our side was complicating things because our current tech was implemented quite poorly and we have limited functionality with our other tools. But considering those factors, Vidar(SalesScreen CSM) has been incredibly patient, always sharing ideas and offering guidance on our dashboards and stuff to get us going. Super, super helpful.

It has been great, and I don't say this lightly, Vidar never ignores us, nothing is too much, and there's always someone available. We probably have like eight or nine SaaS products, and yours is by far the best customer success function in terms of communication. So yeah, credit to you.

SalesScreen: Are there any other gamification elements in our platform that you guys really love?

Sam: Absolutely. We're still small enough that we don't have enough inbounds to warrant a team, inbounds just get spread over the existing SDRs, so we have a competition called the "SDR Inbound Relay." And for two weeks, whoever books most meetings gets all the inbounds for the next two weeks.

It's helpful because it motivates people with literally no spend and helps me know a bit more around speed to lead inbounds and stuff. We also use the competitions to track performance without coins, so our current incentive is revenue team wide, which is a long weekend to Barcelona on the first of December. It’s almost a reverse competition, some people work really hard for coins, but nobody wants to be the person that means everyone else doesn't go to Barcelona. But it's helpful to have that rather than a spreadsheet. Or just verbal updates. The points competition is super helpful as well, where you can assign different points to different activities to make it fair. We use it all the time. So yeah, I love that.