Training teams on Dead Leads & Escalations
I had to hire 9 managers in a span of 15 months or in true Sales-Ops terms 5 quarters. It was not just about hiring the right kind of managers, but training them, empowering them to build their teams and making productive cohorts who could deliver on the month on month benchmarks by 6 quarters. The challenge here was how to train a successful Sales-Ops manager with the least gestation period in such a way that it can be repeated 15 times in a short period of time.
I trained my Business Managers on dead leads and escalations.
Dead Leads
Every new manager who joined my team was thrown a first month challenge of “how many can you convert from these dead leads”. This brought in a bunch of efficiencies into the system such as —
- Their mistakes do not cost us marketing dollars. The leads given to them are the ones which we have already squeezed the conversions juice out of, hence their “learning” is not costing us.
- They understand the entire breadth of possible reasons for deactivation of leads. Usually for a manager to go through 100 leads it would take about 3–4 months however here they are given more volume of leads in 4 weeks. By the end of it they are abreast on all the used cases of Clients not being interested in our offering in a quarter of the time, hands on.
- The new energetic managers find at least 3–4 conversions for every 100 dead leads given to them. Even if 30% were mistakes made by earlier managers, 70% is because they have found better ways to serve the customers. While they are trying to learn they teach everyone in the team on how these cases can be cracked.
Not only the new Manager gets trained sooner on sales but the overall conversion ratio of the team improved with every generation of managers joining as they elucidate everyone on the team on their findings. Enthusiasm of new joinees!
Escalations
The Business Managers not only made the sale but also program managed the deliveries of the sale in our organisation. Each delivery had a fulfilment period averaging 4–6 months and by the time a manager fully understood the ropes of the business and all the possible used cases it usually took about 2–3 quarters. For these managers to then implement better processes or correct the inefficiencies it took more than a year of they being a part of the organisation. The above learning curve can be packed into a 1 quarter for a new manager if they are handling escalations from the word go!
To be able to hasten their training periods I started off new managers with a seller who has been a part of the system and has live projects going on. Since I was transitioning this resource to a new manager I would be more hands-on involved with the escalation and the client and just introduced the new manager to the client as a resource who will take the project forward after we handled the escalation.
How did this help?
Correcting mistakes makes one immune to making the same ones again
- I allowed the new manager to point out everything that could have prevented the escalation instead of defending any processes we set in place. For all their suggestions it was easier to point out the pros and cons of it and any history we had using this process earlier. And also allow them to try anything new that they were suggesting, after all they are suggesting from a pragmatic view point.
- This gave me the perfect opportunity to point them to the right people/departments of the organisation who could help us solve the escalation. They not only learnt about the organisation structure but the SLAs (Service Level Agreement) of each department hands on.
- By dealing with escalations their Project Management skills immediately improved as they now knew the usual mines to avoid.
- The Managers not only learnt Sales and Ops but also what kind of people to hire. Their hiring decisions now were made by more awareness and ownership.

A Sales-Ops team is an organism, a organism with collaborative competition between Sales Managers.
Unless every manager is learning from one and other the team together will not be successful. The older bunch of managers taught the new managers the logistics of the organisation and hence became invested in the new breed’s success and the new breed were happy to share their findings or new strategies they were implementing that drove better efficiencies.
These training hacks allowed me to hire and train not 9 but 14 managers (teams) in 5 quarters in three generations. The overall conversion ratio of the Business Unit went up from an average of 3.5% to 5% to 7% by the end of the 5th quarter. In a growing business where evaluation metrics for Business Managers were uncertain year on year this method of training along with a deep understanding in Unit Economics and Value chain of the Business helped them meet targets every month.