It's back to school time!

With the UberX Share back in the news, quick commerce start-ups having a field day, and the Playstation 5 on the rise (it really is the end of abundance!), your day-to-day life is looking a lot like a typical September.

And yes! Always that famous month when you have to look for twice as many results to compensate for August, and support your CEO as he realizes what a mountain he has 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 of our best-selling customers for their advice on how to get back on track.

Here are the top 3 tips : get trained, 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, and yet in times of rush, it's often the first thing to disappear 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 moment.
  As a result, they discount less during the negotiation phase. Your goal!
• Increase your pipe's conversion rate: market needs are changing faster and faster, and teams need to anticipate these changes too.
  The key: stay on top of the latest customer objections, understand the latest legal adjustments, know the latest industry news, and at the end of the day hold all the cards to increase your pipe's conversion rate.
• Shorten the sales cycle: training in the trade helps to fortify skills that simplify salespeople's lives, enabling them to assimilate shortcuts and hacks that would otherwise take much longer to discover on their own.

How can we make training as impactful as possible?

High-level athletes discovered it before we did: replay sessions are the most effective way to train.

By reviewing and commenting on players' past games as a group, we can answer several questions:

1. Did the theoretical and practical training pay off?
   The question you need to ask yourself: Has training enabled me to develop the right reflexes and strengths in real-life situations?
2. Is the reality on the ground the same as that perceived by individuals?
   Personal analysis (ranging from "I sucked" to "I was a rock star, but I don't understand") often skews the facts. The third-party coach's comments during the replay force us to take a step back and make the right follow-up points.
3. How to reproduce the best moments?
   As luck would have it, some incredible teamwork took place and the team scored. Why? By replaying the game, we review all the conditions of the match that we couldn't see at the time (our posture, for example), and put in place a training plan to recreate these conditions.

The coach's role here is twofold: to improve his players' performance by pointing them in the right direction using Replay, and also to teach them how to master this type of training, so that everyone can practice Replay on their own and progress even faster.

Tip #2: Personalize each contact

We've often seen marketing teams pre-machine the work of sales forces to such an extent that they simply copy and paste the proposed model, and fail to achieve the desired results.

And yet, the personalization of customer relations has a drastic influence on the conversion rate of an opportunity, not to mention the customer retention rate for Customer Success.

There are 3 levels of customization:

• First of all, by creating a rapport with your prospects, getting to know them and adding a personal touch to every contact.
• Secondly, by a thorough understanding of their current and future challenges. At the moment when the customer has that "aha" moment when they say to themselves, "this sales person understands me", they'll see you as someone who'll fight to solve their problem. To get to that level of conversation, ask questions like "What will happen to you or your team if this problem persists? What are your personal objectives for this year or this position?
• Finally, personalization is a team effort. Martech teams can make an enormous contribution to segmenting the customer or prospect base by problem, and automating part of the prospecting process by adding a first layer of personalization. This is not intended to replace, but rather to complement your research work and deepen it on 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 objectives:

1. Recover every day, to keep energy levels high.
   The best players have sporting reflexes, starting with the understanding that recovery is just as important to performance. It relieves stress, and gives free rein to the mind, which can decant problems and often see them in a different light. What's more, as Albert Moukheiber used to say , working non-stop and resting afterwards is like eating non-stop for the first two days of the month, and not eating at all 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 well 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 5 p.m. every day, you'll be much more efficient at your task. We often see this more in professionals who also manage a family life. We often ask them, "How do you manage 2 lives? The answer is a mix of efficiency, anticipation and reviewing priorities.

Here are 3 ways to set up this routine. First, manage incessant communication by dealing with your e-mails and Slack only once or twice a day at set times. Next, make your list at the start of the week of the 5 things you want to have accomplished, and every morning, reorganize your diary accordingly. And finally, book an activity at the time you want to leave, so you don't have a choice.

This now you have the keys, he not rest more that you create a routine!

Meilleur.