Sales Management Podcast
76. Call Scorecards with David Ashe
Call scorecards are often used wrong. Teams use 1-5 scales. Teams score calls and have reps self-absorb feedback. Scorecards are not used for periodic team / individual assessments.
If any of these topics are interesting, dig into this high-energy discussion around a topic I love and many struggle to get right.
Call scorecards are often used wrong. Teams use 1-5 scales. Teams score calls and have reps self-absorb feedback. Scorecards are not used for periodic team / individual assessments.
If any of these topics are interesting, dig into this high-energy discussion around a topic I love and many struggle to get right.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Today, we're talking call scorecards. David Ash, how are you? I'm doing well, corey, thanks for having me. What a fun topic. And I'm not saying we're talking call coaching, we're talking call scorecards because it is a component of that. There are many things that go into coaching, this being one of them, and I think it's something that is misunderstood and misapplied in a lot of organizations. So David and I were just going to have a talk about our perspective on scorecards and how folks can use them. There's not one specific right answer, but there's a lot of things that can probably up-level your game a little bit. So, david, when it comes to scorecards, just to give some context, what is your involvement these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have scorecards that we use just for our calls. They're call scorecards. We do have some scorecards when it comes to our interviewing process, but I think we should just focus on how we use scorecards on our calls. So, with our team, what we do is we record every call that we have. If it's a one party consent obviously can't do it for two party consent. We record our discovery calls and what we do is, after the call we'll go through it, use a scorecard. There's different things that we score on based on our call framework, and we give them a certain score if they do the action don't do the action. There's different criteria they need to meet to actually get a certain score for that, and then we put some notes in there and then deliver that information. Either we're doing it with them or we're doing it asynchronously.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So I want to dig into one thing real quick. So, when it comes to the scores, there's a lot of ways you can set up the scorecards. I think for a lot of systems it comes out default on a one to five scale, and we were talking a little bit before I pressed the record button. My favorite way to do it is on a zero one two scale. So the two options are either you can put it on a 1-5 scale and have a rubric that says a 2 means this and a 3 means this and a 4 means this, or with the 0-1-2 scale, you can say they didn't do it 0. They did it, 1. They did it well, 2. And that way it translates to anything that you're scoring, regardless of what the criteria are. I know we were just chatting about that kind of for the first time. I'm curious what your thoughts are around how the scores are set up and the level of effort that's required based on the decision that you make here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll say no one got to see this because we weren't recording, but I had that aha moment where Corey changed my mind right. Zero to two changed my mind and he did. Right now it is a one to five and we use a call score matrix where it outlines what a one is, what a two is, what a three is, what a four is and what a five is, and we use that throughout the scorecard. But yes, I know there's no context to this, but not everyone has the matrix when scoring the call.
Speaker 1:The matrix is hard to make. The matrix is hard because you have to specify it to each item. So, for example, if we're doing a discovery call and we want to, let's let's just say we look at agendas, pain and next steps as three things that we want to get out of discovery call. Just keep it real simple. Well, the definition of what a two is is not the same for all three of those things, and so you'd have to build out a matrix that shows. If you imagine a left-hand column, you've got three rows that says agenda, pain and next steps, and then you've got five more columns. So for a one, what does it mean to do a one? What does it mean to do a two? And I also think it's hilarious because if you give someone a one for not doing something, they're getting points for not doing something, which is wildly similar to a participation trophy oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very true, very true.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, we don't even give once. What we find is it hovers around the three to five uh, score for each one. And you're right, it gets confusing. I didn't think about this because I'm usually one scoring it or just another manager scoring it. But now we're moving to have our own SDR score their calls so they can start self-identifying what they're doing well in the call and what they're not doing well in the call. But for them to try to remember that matrix with everything else that they have to remember, yeah, it's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:They're not going to do it. And if anybody else is thinking, oh, they'll remember the matrix, Okay, cool, here's. Here's the test to see if someone knows the matrix. Give them a blank piece of paper and have them replicate the matrix. If they can get within 70% of the actual matrix, I'll send you some free books.
Speaker 2:Send me a note. Yeah yeah, free books, send me a note. Yeah yeah, I created the call framework so I still kind of struggle. If I haven't graded the call in a few weeks I go back to the matrix just to refresh myself. I imagine someone just doing it for the first time and having to score two calls a week. It's going to be a struggle. And, to your point, if if it's a struggle or new challenge for them and they that's not part of their daily tasks, they're not going to do it. This is not going to do it. Yeah yeah, you're right, you won this one. It's funny, I always have episodes.
Speaker 1:This wasn't even a debate episode, we were just. We were just chit chatting about stuff. Yeah, cause that's the other piece, right? People are very hesitant to provide negative feedback on themselves because they're worried about broader implications. They're thinking well, I can't tell people that I did bad. Or they've got this whole thing where they think they're great, but they're not. Maybe they are at something Sure, whatever. Maybe you can shoot 73 on the golf course, but that doesn't mean that you set a good next step with that prospect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you can have a good opener and say, hey, this is David from a Lego, Can I take 30 seconds of your time? And then the rest of the call is horrible, but they still give themselves cause it's like hey, I started the call off Well right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's wild, and so I think that the zero, one, two didn't do it. Did it. Did it. Well, I would. I would recommend everybody takes a real hard. Look at that as an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Okay, the other thing is people talk about scorecards and coaching, sometimes as synonyms, and I think I'll throw out my idea and David build on this. There's two places where I see scorecards being used really well. One is on the front end of looking at a team and assessing where they're at, and then two for periodic assessments or certifications of the team and calibrating. So, if I look at it, if I go into a team and I've never worked with them before one thing I like to do and you don't even need to share this directly with the reps just look at the calls and score them up against what they said they were going to do, because one of the best ways to judge an employee in general, regardless of if they're in sales or any other department, is the work that they're doing aligned with what they said they were going to do or what they were asked to do.
Speaker 1:And what's the gap between that? Just using this very simple, overly simplified example of agendas, uncovering pain and setting next steps. Are we doing that? Are we doing it well or are we not doing it? Zero, one or two, and then there might be some kind of enablement activity, training, whatever coaching, then assess it later on after two weeks, a month, every quarter, whatever it is and just calibrate is this working? And the analogy I like to use here. I don't want to dehumanize people I guess I kind of am by saying this, but it's like if you were working on a manufacturing floor is the machine off, is it working okay or is it humming at full production speed? Because at the end of the day, what we're doing as salespeople is processing a lead from some level, either cold or warm, into either a disqualified prospect or a customer. That's what we're doing, and the scorecards can help calibrate how we're doing that along the way. Curious your thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I like how you simplified that. Right it's? Is it working? Is it working okay or is it humming? You know, that's a great way to think about it, and when you think about scorecards, we overcomplicate them and really they're there to understand how the team is doing and where we can make improvements. So, using the KISS method, right, keep it simple, salesperson, and stop trying to overcomplicate it.
Speaker 2:But to your point, yeah, I look at our scorecards and when we're scoring things, we're making sure we have enough volume, so we don't just score someone one month, do a scorecard and say, hey, you did terrible on that call, so that means you're doing terrible throughout the month. I want to have a healthy amount of scores for each call that they've done throughout the month and then compile that data to actually understand where their gaps are. So if we have five things that we're scoring them on, they could be strong in one, two, three, four, but the fifth one they're not, and then use that data to make educated decisions on how we should train that particular rep, or if we can take everyone's scores and look at it from a holistic view and say, all right, the team is really strong here, here and here we're going to do our monthly enablement. Now we know where we do our monthly enablement because we were able to aggregate that data together and actually understand their gaps. Now let's build a training to improve it.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. It might be a group session, it might be individual, and then the other piece is a lot of times it's not even a great idea've completed the training. The one thing that I should be coaching this person on, and maybe that's the root cause of some of the symptoms that are popping up because you can only really coach people on one thing at a time. You can coach people on more than one Sure Long tail, but the people that you can, the people that can handle multiple coaching topics at once, are usually the people that don't need them. The people that need a lot of coaching on different areas are the ones that can't handle more than one at once. So using the coaching, using the scorecards as a input to find a root cause, is a really great way, as opposed to just using that as the final conclusion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And and one of the things that I stole from you and Hillman with the coach book right, it kind of like this, like what I call the grow model on steroids is when I identify that gap that they have, I create a coach model around it and saying this is their challenge, and I don't show them the score, but I let them know. You know, what do you think your challenge is? Well, if a third party perspective is this is your challenge, if this was your challenge, how do we use this coach model to overcome it and fill that gap?
Speaker 2:And, to your point, it's like you can't just coach them on multiple things. You have to identify one root cause of what's happening, or one root pain that they're experiencing, and then build a training and then, over the next 30, 60 days, start working on that, rather than trying to do it every two weeks. And then they just get confused and just say, hey, I suck because I keep getting told I have all these pains or I have all these gaps. This isn't for me anymore. And you're not building up their confidence and you're not creating plans to show them how to actually overachieve or overcome a gap totally yeah, and the best way to build somebody's confidence is to let them win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:People love winning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, we were talking about scorecards, but again, corey, I love that coach model. We use it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:If anybody doesn't know what he's talking about, shoot me a note. Freestuffatcoachcrumcom first 10 people that send me a message. Yeah, cause, coaching is hard If you don't know how to do it. If you know how to do it and you're good at it, it's not hard. Yeah, just like anything. So you watch these, watch professional pool players on YouTube. They make it look easy.
Speaker 2:They're like oh yeah, I'm just going yeah, you're shooting the cue ball off the table and the guys like get out of my pool hall. Do they still have pool halls? I don't know, is that, oh yeah I play, I play all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're shooting the ball on the table, it means you're elevating your cue too much. Keep your cue parallel to the ground, everybody all right, all right. That's your coaching for today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll never go to the bar with you. And let you hustle me now. I know, oh, I stink at pool. This is for drinks.
Speaker 1:No, not gonna do it I always say that the only people you don't want to play for money in pool are people that want to play for money in pool yeah, yeah, very true, very true, yeah yeah, so let's talk about people coaching themselves. Is there an opportunity for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's something that we recently rolled out, allowing our reps, our SDRs, to go in there and score their own calls. This is one of the biggest things that I found over my career is I can tell someone till I'm blue in the face that they need to work on something. I can show them data, but that doesn't mean they have to actually take it in. They don't actually have to listen, right, the biggest thing is you want them to be able to self-identify, and if they can't self-identify and they don't know there's a problem, then it's not causing too much discomfort in their life and they have too much comfort in that they'll never change.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, by allowing them to actually go in there and self-identify and see how, where the disconnect are they actually on this? You know cloud nine and say, no, everything's hunky-dory and this call was amazing. And then you're like, no, this call was a one and you had it at a four. We are not even in the same cities, let alone neighborhoods. So allowing the reps to actually self-identify, it just doesn't help us figure out where we are on if we're on the same page, but it empowers them to say, hey, I'm giving the keys to the castle. I can make changes if I need to, rather than just having someone tell me where I need to improve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. They need to be able to calibrate themselves and say this is good, this wasn't up to snuffing, yeah, that's good. I think the calibration is important also between management and enablement, because I've also seen a lot of cases where folks in enablement are looking at a team and thinking they're struggling and the managers don't see it and one of the reasons is that they haven't calibrated and looked at the same calls and scored the same calls. So if you get somebody in management enablement and even though in the rep go score the same call, it's not wasted effort, it's calibration, which is one of the most important things in business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everyone being on the same page, we're going to be trying to solve for things One of the things that I used to do every or it was biweekly we would do a coach-to-coach session.
Speaker 2:So we'd all get into a room and coach a call together and say, hey, are we on the same page here when it comes to what our call should look like, why this would be a four, why would this be a five? And if we're not, we got to get back on the same page, because then you would find that enablement would have these trainings built out for six months. They're going to say we're going to do this training, we're going to do this training, we're going to do this training. And it's like, well, you really can't do that because things change, like different priorities come up. We may not be struggling in this training, so why are we doing it? Yes, it could be a reinforcement or a refresher, but we need to take the time and try to identify what's happening today or that month and then take action rather than just hey, this is my six month plan, this is what we're going to be doing over the next six months. Why, what data is telling you that we need that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, six month plans are wild man. It's like when people come up with long-term plans for things that should be short-term plans, they end up what's commonly referred to as paving the golden cow path. They're like this is the path, and then they pave it. You guys have a golden cow path. That's not really that interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And maybe they do it because it's like, hey look, I'm working hard, you know this is what our plan is, but it never comes true, right? Sometimes it's not needed. And then you say you have your reps off the phones just staring at the screen and they get no benefit from it.
Speaker 1:Right, so you've been doing this for a while. Imagine somebody just got promoted into a management role and they're trying to figure out scorecards and calibration and all these types of things. What advice do you have to your younger self?
Speaker 2:Watch this podcast probably number one right Because I've learned a lot in a short time.
Speaker 1:So you've gotten there. You've gotten pretty far. People up to this point. So good job accomplishing number one. So you can't get a one on the scorecard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't try to do it on your own. Go out and talk to other people who are doing it and then take their ideas and make it your own. You know, take the good from here, here, here, here and here, and also learn what they did wrong and how they fixed it. I think that's one of the things that I didn't do when I was starting off in my management career and I thought I was going to be the best coach and I said, hey, I'm going to coach everyone the way I do it because I'm awesome. And I went to President's Club, hit 150% every quarter, so do it the way I did it. And then, when I got into management, absolutely failed my first time. It was horrific, right, everyone didn't like me because I was trying to make them me and you can't do that. You have to treat them like individuals. So go out there and learn from others. Read books on how to coach and how to score calls. Take as much information in as you can before you try to go build something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not going to make them, you no?
Speaker 2:no, because I don't think the world wants another David Ash to be honest with you.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing the next you doesn't want to work for you. The next you wants to be you. Yeah, that's the. That's the hard thing for people to realize. I, I, I have this challenge with founders a lot. When I talk to them about who they want to hire, they're like yeah, I want to hire someone to come in on sales and build out the strategy and build out the team and close deals and get our marketing engine going and figure out customer success. I say, all right, so you want another co-founder? Cool, yeah, you got 25% equity laying around somewhere. No, no, no, that's not what I want. Okay, well, what do you actually want? And then, all of a sudden, they realize that they either need part of that now and they want part of it later on, or they need to hire three people and it's going to cost them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, true.
Speaker 1:The challenges of growing a team. Yeah, and you're not going to make them you. So figure out, I think, the assessment piece. I just want to hammer this home when do you want them to be? Because if you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up someplace else. Yogi Berra, american philosopher, and there we go.
Speaker 2:Nah, you don't know where you're going.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll get into it. What was the? Uh, who's the? Did you see Aaron Boone get thrown out the other day? See aaron boone get thrown out the other day? Uh, I heard about it, yeah, yeah, he's sitting there. So he's he's. He's mouth mouthing off to wendell stat, hunter, wendell stat. And hunter says one more, aaron, you're out of here. And aaron doesn't say anything. Guy in the fan, the guy in the stand says something. Hunter throws him out. Well, the fun thing is that hunter, wendell stat, his family is the royalty when it comes to mlb umpires. They, they have the Wendelstadt umpiring school.
Speaker 1:Oh, really Wow yeah so you've got that on the top end. And then two weeks ago, you've got our favorite umpire, Angel Hernandez, calling strikes that were 6.8 inches outside of the strings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw that. Yeah Well, I'm a Boston bred person, so you know I grew up in Boston. I saw the Red Sox win the World Series in 2013 against the Cardinals. Right there, four rows back, right behind the away bench our way dugout. So, yeah, aaron Boone is in one of my family. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, pedro Martinez won me my 2001 fantasy baseball league championship, so I'll uh, I'll go with you on that. Yeah, there we go, all right, so that. So you've got to get them to calibrate what they're doing and understand where they're at. So so the assessment's huge what, what is our goal? If you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up someplace else. And then where are we at on the path to that goal? And break it down into components that people can understand and people can control.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if you're, if you're talking about a cold call, the opening of the call, the elevator pitch, the next steps, managing objections, questions, talk time, executive presence, whatever you want, whatever's important to you so I'm not telling you that's.
Speaker 1:That's what you should do Just pick out the things that are very important to you and then define what good looks like.
Speaker 1:So, even if you use that didn't do it, did it, did it well, I still like putting what does did it well look like and maybe have a library of what did it well look like and so you can train against it, but also have examples of what didn't do it or did it poorly look like.
Speaker 1:I think one place here is CRM notes. If I think one place here is CRM notes, if your company's using a qualification framework like Medic or Bantz or something like that, what do twos look like for CRM notes? What do ones look like? What do zeros look like? And just make it clear, because if you only show people what good looks like, they're often and this is very important I know we're joking around about baseball, but this is very important If you only show people what good looks like, they're going to misinterpret what they're doing as some flavor of good. If you show them what good, okay and bad looks like, then you can help them understand where they're really at relative to all three of those. So don't just define what good looks like when you're going out and doing these assessments and calibrations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's a good point of having the library of calls right. We have, back in the day, we had the hall of fame calls that were just like hit everything and it's like these people are rock stars and you would see it from a wide variety of people, we'd see it from our rock stars, but you know, we'd see people who were core performers have fantastic calls. So we would be able to highlight that in the hall of fame calls to make them feel good. But you have a good point of making sure that you have the good, the bad, the ugly, so everyone can understand that.
Speaker 2:And if they do have a bad call and they start progressing and start having better calls and they hit a lull or they hit that you know the the valley that some salespeople do you play that bad call and then you play a recent call for them and you're like, hey, this one, you scored a four and it was bad. This one, you scored a 12 and it was good. You did bad, but you know you can do good. Yeah for sure, having those on hand is very important. So when you think about scorecards, never have them. Just an Excel spreadsheet, never have them just an Excel spreadsheet. Never have them written down that you have a file cabinet of because you hand it to them and that's just thrown out right after you hand it to them.
Speaker 1:File cabinet. That's funny. Yeah, the other thing that's fun with call recordings is you can sit there. So let's say that there's something that we scored poorly on. Maybe we're doing a demo and we say one of the things I always catch people on with demos is they're doing presentations, not conversations. We do this and we do this and you have the ability to do this and then they ask a dumb question like does that make sense? Or they ask a leading question where they're trying to convince you to say yes, do you think something like this would be beneficial to you?
Speaker 2:Is that the need for a payoff?
Speaker 1:question yeah, so you play that. And then you hit pause and you say, okay, what would you ask at this point to close off this 60 or 90 second monologue? And it might be something like you know, how's this compared to what you're doing today? Or what jumps out at you as I show you these things, get a what or how question, for example. You get them talking and get them elaborating what you just showed, as opposed to a yes or no question. So little things like that that they know that they've gone through training with, but they might not be actually doing under pressure in the moment. Or if they're getting brush offs on a cold call and you want them to come back and ask one more discovery question or attempt one more time to get next steps on the calendar, how would you do that if you had the opportunity to pause, go and you can role play in the moment. So it's not this contrived role play where you're making things up, it's actually real.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know, thinking back, when I started out in sales, we really didn't have that. I think call recording was just starting not to age myself right, I've been doing this for quite some time. But you know, sales reps nowadays have so much more technology at their feet that can make them better, but they don't take advantage of it. And to your point of having just that call recorded and then you can stop and say, hey, what would you do here? But now you can take that and elevate it into or let it evolve into having a bot, an AI bot, do it for you.
Speaker 2:Hey, take that call, put it into a bot and then tell me how you would do it differently. Or you could have just the call and have little prompts in it that says me what you would do and you can help them output options. Or you can have an open contact field where they would type it in, so you don't actually have to sit there as a leader, yeah, and wait with them to do it. You have assign it out to them, they complete it and then it's pushed to you. So much more technology that, if I, you know, not sound cocky if I had to be a rock star living in a mansion on a boat. The mansion would actually be on the boat a boat mansion?
Speaker 1:yep yeah, because then you can have legalized gambling yeah, there you go many states. What would they have on the ozark, the missouri bell?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, yeah that's great.
Speaker 1:well, yeah, and I think that's the other thing is that a lot of this technology it'll move us from a place where a lot of companies are having managers for four to five to six people and they're going to be able to handle much bigger teams, which I think is good, because then you'll be able to up-level the quality of the management staff that you can have. And then the folks that are performers, you can keep coaching them, coach them better and they don't feel like they have to get a management promotion or leave every nine months.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good point, good point, cool, david. Well, let's wrap this up. Anything that you want to plug or let people know how to find you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. David Ash at Allegro, Director of Sales Development, here Love to plug Allegro. We kind of talked about the scorecards and how you would take those scorecards and aggregate all the data together to actually understand where your team's falling short. Also, being able to use AI simulators the bots, to practice is very important because if you're hiring green salespeople, one of the things that they're probably not used to and we were talking about this earlier about people being in office or not in office they're not used to making calls around people. They're not used to role playing. So with a bot, you can do the crawl, walk, run to get them on the phones so they learn about it. They use a bot to practice their call framework or whatever script that they have. Then they move to recorded role plays where the manager can actually grade that recorded role play, tell them where they're doing well and where they're falling short, and then they can move to the phones and they're just slowly building their confidence Because, as you know, in sales, if you don't have confidence, you're going to fail.
Speaker 2:Confidence is key. But yeah, check out Allegro. We're a revenue enablement platform, the leading revenue enablement platform If you're looking to get your sales team level their skills up, feel free to contact us. I appreciate you having me on. You know I've been a fan from afar, reading all your books. I have my SDRs read the sales development book when they start with me and you've helped me grow my sales career. But you've also helped my SDRs grow their sales career and Hillman has too. I want to leave him out.
Speaker 1:Thanks Hillman, thanks David, really appreciate it. Appreciate the kind words. Everybody else thanks for tuning in Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 2:Take care you.