The debrief is one of the key disciplines of sales management.
I did not aspire to become a sales manager, but like many others, I was offered a job in sales management because I was one of the best sales people. The best sales people don't necessarily make the best sales managers and initially that was true about me. Early in my sales management career, I tried to hire people similar to me and I was either too involved or not involved enough with my team. Over the years I have developed a regular cadence of sales management activities that have helped me recruit, retain, and develop top talent. This cadence includes:
QBRs (quarterly based reviews)
Yearly planning
Weekly forecast calls
Weekly best practices training
Formal sales training
Weekly one on ones
Networking and recruiting activities
The ride along
The ride along is a three step process that includes 1. Pre-call planning. 2. The meeting. 3. The debrief. While a sales manager may only be able to attend a few meetings per quarter with each sales rep, a good sales manager can provide coaching in more sessions through pre-call planning and the debrief. The sales manager needs to resist the urge to play the role of a sales rep during the meeting and should limit contributions to what was assigned to them by the sales team. This will allow the sales manager to read body language of the customer, take notes, and prepare to coach the team during the de-brief.
I believe the debrief should be more than just a status update. If a manager is just asking for a status update, he is likely to miss opportunities to coach the team. John Rosso, best-selling author and Sandler sales trainer, recommends asking "how did the meeting end? vs. how did the meeting go?" This allows the manager to assess how their reps are closing for next steps as well as to provide coaching on how the team can better follow up with customers.
A good debrief should have a defined structure. Dave Mattson said that when he was a sales person working for Dave Sandler, Mr. Sandler told him that he was always going to ask him the same ten questions after every sales call. I like to compare the pre-call plan to the debrief. In most cases, if we have a good sales rep and a strong champion, the pre-call should look very similar to the debrief. A sales methodology like MEDDIC is a good template for the sales manager to use to review the customer pain, the impact of our proposed solution, who is involved, and the customers decision criteria for the project.
In the debrief I like to ask what we did well, what could we do better, and what are the next steps. I want to compare the pre-call plan to what actually happened and discuss why we might have been surprised in the meeting. For instance was there more or less people in the meeting than expected? Do we understand the role of each person who attended the meeting and what they think of our solution? What is our follow up plan for each person that attended or should have attended the meeting? What assistance does the sales team need from the company to succeed in this sales campaign? It is critical to have to have the team summarize the call in writing and store the call summary in the CRM system. A summary of the meeting and action items should also be sent to the customer participants.
By having a structured debrief process the team will better understand what is expected of them. If your are new to the debrief process I recommend learning more about the military's A.R.R. (After Action Review). In the book Extreme Ownership Jacko Willink discusses the importance of both the planning process and the A.R.R.