Lessons learned 6 months into 2021: One big failure, a new focus.
I'm back from a weeks vacation feeling recharged, excited, grateful, and with an added dose of clarity. I've never been more excited and confident about the vision Sales Huddle and I'm spending today focusing on reflecting on the lessons learned from the past 6 months and using those to make the 6 month goals for the rest of the year to best accomplish the mission. Here are a few themes on my mind today:
I can forget to take breaks and can work myself into the ground. I decided to take at least a week off every quarter and have booked it in my calendar.
1on1 invitations to salespeople to join Sales Huddle was a failure, for now anyway. It might work in the future but it doesn't work now. I spent 8 months trying to make this work and booked 60+ meetings. I thought that by personally reaching out to handpicked salespeople that I thought could be a good fit, I could grow membership. Getting meetings was easy, many would join their first 3, few joined. I feel great that stuck with it for an extended period of time to get a large enough sample size to make my current decision to change directions. I loved all of the people I met and who joined. It worked, but it wasn't worth the effort given the amount of work. Sometimes a lot of work can be energizing, this work I found to drain my energy and would end a day needing a nap. In the last 6 months as I was focused on growing membership through 1on1 recruitment, membership still grow through referrals.
Work on growing membership in a manner that is fun, I'm proud of, and energizes me.
Focus on being loud and proud with content to both build an audience and make it easy for folks who already want to be involved with what we're doing to find us. This will include
Sharing lessons and stories from within Sales Huddle, the little bits of advice we capture.
Sharing the vision/mission/values/beliefs of Sales Huddle.
Sharing my personal sales philosophy and story.
Hosting events like Listening Fest, events that are the spirit of Sales Huddle.
What does success look like? The the question I love to ask! In the next 6 months, success would mean
Existing members continue to referring other salespeople as the #1 source of new members
The second source is salespeople reaching out to me directly because they are interested in what we're going. No outbound, only inbound.
Monthly Listening Fest, a regular event that create a consistently growing email list.
I'm feeling energize by the work and not drained by it.
Cohorts, cohorts, cohorts. It's clear to me that not only do salespeople love these and strongly resonate with the goal, but by increasing the 'sameness' within a Sales Huddle, there can be more trust, and thus more valuable work rounds.