Sales Team Standards
We recently established standards for the Sales team. Like most of our writing, we wanted to share a peak into how we're handling things internally and what we value culturally as an org.
We Prioritize the Customer
The customer comes first for our team.
We give our customers the best experience they’ve ever seen. Our customers choose Clipboard because our product is better, but they also choose Clipboard because they want to do business with members of our team. They believe that the product will deliver most of the time but they trust that our team delivers every time.
Our customers can’t imagine a team more competent than ours. If they send an email to us and five other vendors, we not only respond first but we respond better. A customer has never joined a meeting with Clipboard and waited - we show up to every external meeting a minute early at a minimum. They know we might not always have the answer immediately, but customers know that when we say “we’ll follow up” we do it 100% of the time and we do it quickly.
We Ask the Right Questions
We’re in the business of solving problems for our customers. A solution without a deep understanding of the problem tends to be a bad solution, so we go deep with our customers to understand before we try to pitch.
Using an analogy, each customer is like a box. The box has holes - those holes come in all different shapes and sizes and they need to be plugged. We don’t know where the holes are in the box or what they look like. Our questions are like a flashlight - with great questions we shine the light around different places in the box. That light helps us understand where the holes are and the shape of them, and with that understanding we have the patches to plug the holes. The features of our product and our willingness to create new patches through operational motions allow us to find the perfect fit for our customers.
When a customer complains about an incumbent we don’t say “oh you should try us out”. We ask what the problem is - when we hear that the incumbent has had people flaking out we don’t talk about fill rates or cost, we talk about Clipboard Score. When they complain about continuity of care we don’t bother talking about charting recall, we talk about who gets access to shifts and when they get access. We’re the conduit between the product we’ve built and the customer, but our ability to transfer the things that matter between the two relies on our understanding of what matters. We have to ask questions to know what matters.
We Do Our Homework
There are stupid questions in customer facing roles - our team doesn’t ask them. If we can learn something about the customer from research prior to speaking with them then we’ll know it. We do the homework - putting the customer first requires that we don’t waste their time, which means we’re prepared.
We get into the details with our preparation. When we call an Assisted Living Facility we don’t ask for Administrators, we ask for Executive Directors. When we talk to a customer in California we ask about LVNs, but if they’re in Nevada we say LPNs. When a customer wants to set up a call to talk about challenges filling shifts we go into that call knowing that they have unique document requirements that have suppressed fill rates, we don’t learn that from talking with them. When we talk to a Regional Director of a SNF Corporate about expanding the relationship we know which buildings are already using us, what the trends in utilization have been and what their Administrators, DONs and Schedulers have thought of their experience.
If we’re driving and the customer asks us how to do something in the product we can walk them through step by step without needing to see their screen. We know the product like the back of our hand.
We know all of this because we do our homework.
We Keep Our Promises
When we tell a customer we’ll do something, we do it 100% of the time. We don’t make promises that we can’t keep.
This extends to implied promises as well - we don’t tell the customer we can probably do something unless we’re confident that we can do it. We set expectations at realistic levels because we always keep our promises.
We do the same internally. When we say “we’ll do that by this date and time” we deliver. If we lack certainty about dates or our ability to get something done we’re upfront to the person we’re speaking with - we don’t commit unless we mean it.
We overcommunicate, underpromise, and overdeliver.
We Work as One Team
We’re one organization. Customers receive consistent messaging from everyone within the organization because we collaborate. We know who they spoke to last and what they talked about. We advocate for the customer internally but we walk the tightrope with judgment - we might say things like “I’ll see if there’s any room within our billing team to give you a bit more room on payments since you gave me that additional context” or “I’ll check with our Pricing team to see if there’s any more room on rates for you”, but once we come to a conclusion about a path forward we’re unified.
Like any high performance team, we expect a lot from each other. If we think a teammate isn’t doing their job well enough we’re direct with the person and their manager. When a teammate falls behind we extend ourselves beyond our “traditional” role to make sure the customer doesn’t feel the pain, we take it on ourselves.
Like good teammates, we don’t just ask for help without making an effort first. When we ask Legal to make redlines we don’t just drop it in a channel, we deliver context that helps them do their job.
We’re the best internal advocate for the customer because we interact with them and keep our ears open for clues. We’re pushy on behalf of the customer but we’re also polite to our cross functional partners.
Our Sales Team Standards are downstream of our Company Values. Some of the Team Standards may be repetitive from Company Values, we’re happy to be repetitive on the points that really matter.