Creating culture and cadence for sales managers and sales executives to think and act monthly is a surefire way to achieve hyper-growth. It requires planning, discipline, and creativity. Compensation alignment is required too and Jason Lemkin beautifully handles that in his article. The conversation in this post is about using sales productivity levers to energize teams to focus on the right activities every day of every month.

Let’s aspire to run each month like a self-contained year. Let’s give each month a theme, goals, executive communications, must-win deal reviews, sales training, weekly meetings, and a focus on closing in the last week. Empower sales managers to run every month like it’s the last month of the year and revenue magic will happen

Whether you’re a CRO, CMO, CEO, Sales Director, or first line sales manager, energizing a monthly cadence starts with the decision to make it so. The benefits are clear and proven:

1. Increase quota attainment
2. Improvements in pipeline quality
3. Better forecasting accuracy
4. More best practice sharing and team culture
5. Higher rep retention

Here are some steps to deploy with our sales teams to nurture a culture of monthly cadence:

Create and Communicate a Monthly Theme: Pick a theme that maps to your go to market and is tied back to what our sales teams should be doing right now. If we need more qualified pipeline, then make it pipeline month. If we’re launching a new product, make the theme tie back to our product benefits. If we need to get our deals to close faster, theme our month accelerate or urgency month. It’s a small detail and one that works.

Create Bite-Sized Content: Publish video content and sales tools to sales teams to review prior to weekly meetings. Make the content small enough to be used in weekly team meetings and viewable on mobile devices. Map content to the monthly themes and prescribe action-oriented sales team meeting agendas.

Get First Line Sales Managers On The Program: Work with sales managers to get them up to speed and aligned with the theme and focus for the upcoming month. First line sales manager enablement is key to executing a monthly cadence.

Host an “All Sales” Kick Off Call: Rally troops with a short and focused “all hands” call at the start of the month. Bring all our sales teams together and energize them. Reinforce the theme and the rationale behind it. Celebrate deal wins and successes from the previous month. Make the call short. Engage sales teams in a conversation. Leave time for questions and answers.

Publish a Calendar: The monthly calendar is a simple concept and when executed wins the “hearts and minds” of sales teams. Create a calendar including weekly sales meetings, team based deal reviews, all hands call and any other motivational milestones.

Run Weekly Huddles: Run weekly sales huddles or learning huddles to sharing best practices, reinforce training and development, and refresh sales skills. The weekly sales meeting is sacred. Use it wisely. Practice pitches. Do role-plays and objection handling. Write winning email templates together. Conduct win-reviews and competitive loss reviews together as a team.

Schedule Team Based Deal Reviews: Put time on the calendar to bring teams together in a collaborative conversation around must-win deals. Resist the urge to turn the deal reviews into a shakedown and tap into the collective experience and wisdom of reps by having everyone participate in the deal review process. Everyone pitches a deal and everyone gives feedback. Gamify the entire deal review process.

Save The Last Week for Closing: We recommend having a pretty strict “only must have” meetings in the last week of the month. Don’t host any calls that can wait. Don’t pull reps out of the field for a day of training in the last week of the month. It’s up to sales leadership to block out that time for closing business and working with prospects. Protect that time for sales teams.

Many sales managers and sales team have the right intentions to create a structured monthly calendar. Something happens. People get busy. Meetings are pushed. Content isn’t developed. All of a sudden, it’s the middle of the month and we say to ourselves, we’ll focus on this next month. Then, months and quarters go by, and before you know it, you’re wondering why you and your team didn’t get the invite to the Hawaii Club Event.

Monthly Cadence Checklist

1. Create and communicate a theme for the month
2. Create Bite-Sized Content
3. Get First Line Sales Managers On The Program
4. Host an “All Sales” Kick Off Call
5. Publish a Calendar
6. Schedule Team Based Deal Reviews
7. Run Weekly Huddles
8. Save The Last Week for Closing

It’s proven that when sales teams meet regularly we help each other and close more business. When sales teams embrace monthly cadence they experience sharp increases in close rates, sales cycle time and distribution of quota attainment. It’s proven.

What are your top goals for the coming month? What’s your theme? What’s your plan?

When sales teams follow a disciplined approach to sales productivity and practice messaging and skills, they sell more. Win as a team.