Whitehat JR is a startup unicorn in the Ed-Tech industry in India, which offers online coding classes for children in the age group of 6-14. Within 3 years, they have grown from a small team to 5500+ proud Whitehatters, innovating the education landscape for both educators and young students. Today, we have a great opportunity to chat with one of its members about what it takes to ride in the fast lane.
When Arshdeep Sharma, Director of Sales at WhiteHat Jr, started in June 2020, there were only about 500 sales managers working at the company. Now WhiteHat Jr grew to 1500+ employees in sales and 5500+ in the total company headcount. Sharma is leading 72 sales managers in the News Sales team with up to 90% quota achievement every month, without missing even a beat.
Sharma shares with us his "secrets" to successfully build and lead a big-sized sales team to consistently high performance against the specific challenges that come with Whitehat Jr's fast-paced growth.
The sheer size of WhiteHat Jr's sales teams in addition to its high speed can easily throw off players that are not well-adapted. For Sharma, if a team wants to deliver their sales targets, it is not enough to only follow a few metrics.
“Our main KPI is the number of leads converted”, continues Sharma, “but if you only look at that, it won't be much use.”
Indeed, the KPI reporting can tell you whether or not you are close to reaching your quota, but not the whole story behind it.
Before using Salestrail, sales team leads like Sharma would resort to manual call logging to assess individual performance and provide more coaching. Tools like Google Spreadsheet or Excel are with no doubt very convenient and affordable, but when it comes to accurate data points and quick reporting, it can get very time-consuming and overwhelming.
Now, there are up to 20 metrics WhiteHat Jr's Director of Sales are tracking with Salestrail. Thanks to the automatic call tracking solution, the sales managers on the phone every day don't have to lift a finger to log data such as inbound/ outbound calls, call duration, answered/ unanswered. Sharma shares some of his most favorites to keep track of:
Picture: Salestrail Call Analytics Dashboard
As we go on to discuss the biggest challenges in team management, employee motivation surfaces. Besides promotion, bonus compensation and little things like birthday cakes for family members (who wouldn't love that 😍🧁?), data itself has been one of the key drivers of performance for WhiteHat Jr.
Sharma shares an example when sales managers were shown the call analytics report on how talk time influences conversion rate (a whopping 1% increase), more spent more time on the phone with prospects, which does lead to great improvement at the end of the funnel.
Data itself has been one of the key drivers of performance for WhiteHat Jr.
Most of the times it can be difficult to effect behavior change with the carrot-and-stick, people are most likely to make the better choice when they can see it for themselves - that's the biggest thing about data.
With Salestrail’s real-time data input, Sharma can easily follow the calling activities in the whole team without opening way too many tabs in his browser. This is important for 2 reasons: visibility and data analytics.
When the gap between the top and bottom is huge, it’s time to dig deeper into their daily calling patterns. Sharma's go-to reports to look at that are the calling activity report and sales report.
He goes on to explain, “It's easily to be stuck in a certain way of thinking or be trapped by your own bias, by looking at a broad picture of different data sets, you allow for unbiased interpretation of a sales manager's performance metrics”.
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