Second Edition

Welcome back to another Update! Over time this newsletter will be getting more granular and focus on specific challenges, but today we’re keeping it high-level so people can retroactively read past Updates and catch up to speed with us. So that’s why today’s edition is centered around how we set and achieve goals as a team.

At the beginning of each quarter, our leadership team meets in person. We have a quarterly planning meeting called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) where we lay out three milestones and sub bullets to illustrate our goals for the quarter. For example, last quarter (Q3 2020) we had these:

• Growing Sales Presence via Industry, Systems, and Team Members
  • Create system for following up with past leads
  • Hiring process & ongoing training of new Account Executives
  • Defining next B2B niches to target
  • Systematizing demo/graphics for follow up calls
• Grow Uptown Brand via Website Redesign
  • Website redesign + rebranding social accounts
  • Lay foundation for Q4 content creation → start to build content library
• Systematize Internal Customer Service Tasks
  • Account Maintenance tasks (i.e. cleaning up HubSpot)
  • Systematizing Customer Service tasks 

A few weeks ago, our team spent a weekend in San Diego to determine our goals for this quarter. For any remote teams out there, we highly recommend the occasional in-person meet-up. It helps us grow closer as a team, reenergizes us to tackle upcoming months, and helps us all realign with the mission & vision of what we’re working to build.

We each prepare for the OKR meeting by bringing our personal ideas of what next quarter’s goals should be. Then, we see where we all have consensus and spend several hours debating the outlier ideas until we settle on 3 final OKRs. Here’s an abbreviated version of what we came up with for Q4 2020 OKRs:

•  Building, Training, and Managing Sales Team
  • Create training plan and success metrics for Account Executives
  • Hire 6 new Account Executives
• Expand Customer Success Team and Training Materials
  • Create online training portal for Customer Success Managers
  • Hire 2 new Customer Success Managers
  • Create online portal for Clients and FAQ
• Create Value-Based Content Across Different Channels
  • Create content to build authority on YouTube, LinkedIn and FB
  • Establish a quarterly webinar
  • Newsletter and Podcast

Realistically, these goals pivot a little bit throughout the quarter. For example, we recently decided not to hire 6 new account executives this quarter because we already have an incredible sales team that we want to invest time towards helping become more successful. Also, as my coach reminded me the other day, it’s important to set goals but don’t be so attached to a plan that you ignore awesome new opportunities. We think of these OKRs as the lens for decision making.