The M.O.D.J.O method for working less and selling more

It's back to school!

As the news is going crazy, between the return of the UberX Share, quick commerce startups getting the short end of the stick, and the rise of the playstation 5 (it's really the end of plenty!), your daily life is looking a lot like a classic September.

And yes! Always that famous month where you have to look for twice as many results to compensate for August, and support your CEO who realizes the mountain to climb in 4 weeks.

Meanwhile, your prospects and customers have no time for you, busy with IFA, Retail Week and other trade shows, their children's schooling and their 2023 roadmap.

So, in order to properly navigate the month of September, we decided to go back to the basics of Sales, AM and Customers Success team performance.

This summer, we asked some thirty top sales & customer successes for their advice on how to get back to work.

Here are the top 3 tips: train, personalize your contacts, and work fewer hours.

And to learn even more, join us at our live event on September 14, to hear Doctolib, Welcome to the Jungle, 360Learning and Alma share their best business practices.

Tip #1: Keep a non-negotiable part of your time for training.

As Picasso said, genius is only 5% of talent; the rest comes from practice.

Everyone knows that training is useful, yet in times of rush, it is often the first thing that disappears from the calendar, while many unimportant tasks remain.

Here's a reminder of the direct impact of training on your team's performance:

• Maximize revenue per opportunity: a better trained person is better at selling the value of the product, and knows how to highlight the features that interest the customer at the right time.
  Therefore, this person will statistically discount less during the negotiation phase. Your goal!
• Increase pipe conversion rate: Market needs are changing faster and faster, and teams need to anticipate these changes as well.
  The key: stay on top of the latest customer objections, understand the latest legal adjustments, know the latest industry news and at the end have all the cards in hand to increase your pipe conversion rate.
• Shorten the sales cycle: training in the trade helps to build skills that make life easier for salespeople, assimilating shortcuts and hacks that would otherwise take much longer to discover on your own.

How to make the training as impactful as possible?

High-level athletes discovered it before us, the most effective way to train is to watch the team's or opponents' games (replay).

By reviewing and commenting as a group on past player play, several questions can be answered:

1. Did the theoretical and practical training pay off?
   The question you should ask yourself: Did the training allow me to develop the right reflexes and strengths in a real situation?
2. Is the reality on the ground the same as the one perceived by the individuals?
   Personal analysis (ranging from "I sucked" to "I was a rock star, I don't understand") often skews the facts. The comments of the third-party coach during the replay force a step back and the right follow-up points.
3. How do you replicate the best moments?
   As luck would have it, an incredible team play was made and the team scored. Why did this happen? Through replay, we review all the conditions of the game that we did not see at the time (our posture for example), and we put in place a training plan to recreate these conditions.

The role of the coach here is twofold: to improve the performance of his players by pointing them in the right direction thanks to Replay, and also to teach them how to master this type of training, so that each one can practice Replay alone and progress even faster.

Tip #2: Personalize each contact

We have often seen marketing teams that pre-mach so much the work of the sales forces, that they just copy/paste the proposed model, and do not get the expected results.

And yet, the personalization of the customer relationship drastically influences the conversion rate of an opportunity, not to mention the customer retention rate for Customer Success.

The customization is done on 3 levels:

• First of all, by creating a rapport with your prospect, by getting to know them and by keeping a personal touch at each contact.
• Secondly, by a thorough understanding of their current and future issues. At the moment when the customer has that "aha" moment where he thinks "this sales person understood me", he will see you as someone who will fight to solve his problem. To get to that level of conversation, ask questions like "What will happen to you or your team if this problem continues?", "What are your personal goals for this year or on this job?"
• Finally, personalization is a team effort. Martech teams can contribute enormously to segment the customer or prospect base by problem and automate part of the prospecting process by adding a first layer of personalization. This is not meant to replace but to complement your research work and deepen it at first return.

Tip #3: Leave early

It may seem counterintuitive, but the best performers leave work early, and often at a set time.

Here are their two goals through this:

1. Recover every day to keep your energy level high.
   Top performers have sports reflexes, starting with understanding that recovery is just as important for performance. It relieves stress and allows you to let your mind run free, which helps you to see problems with a different eye. Moreover, as Albert Moukheiber used to say, working non-stop and resting afterwards is like eating non-stop the first two days of the month, and not eating the rest of the time. Mental rest is only restorative if it is exercised daily.
2. Impose a time limit on actions.
   According to Parkinson's law, the more time you have to do a task, the more time you take. The reverse is also true: if you force yourself to leave at 5pm every day, you will be much more efficient on your to-do. We often see this more in professionals who also manage a family life. They are often asked "how do you manage 2 lives?". The answer is a mix of efficiency, anticipation and review of priorities.

Here are 3 ways to implement this routine. First, manage incessant communication by only dealing with your emails and Slack once or twice a day at set times. Second, make your list at the beginning of the week of the 5 things you want to have accomplished, and each morning, rearrange your schedule accordingly. And finally, book an activity at the time you want to leave, so you don't have a choice.

Now you have the keys, all you have to do is create a routine!

Best.