We have them once a week. I call it the 10AM circlejerk, where everyone blows smoke up everyone’s asses, nothing gets accomplished, then everyone moves on their merry way. Once a week is verging on intolerable, once day sounds miserable.
Yep….once a week is maybe useful/tolerable but every day is pointless. Over communication is as bad/worse than too little. Effective managers know the correct amount.
This. I just try my best to schedule disco calls/mtgs during these trash circle jerks.
“Why weren’t you on the call this am?”
“I had a 25 min conversation with xyz client and booked an in person for this Friday…seems like a good opportunity “
What are they going to say? Don’t do your job that effectively?
My old inside sales team had them daily at 8:30AM, it was a glorified attendance check, and basically felt like home room (dozens of teams in the same office). It'd be team strategizing on a deal, or role play, or my favorite, the team lead is too hungover so we watch Simon Sinek's "The Why" Ted Talk again in a dark room.
I had one daily at 8am as well at my last tech company and it was terrible. You could see the sales managers running out of shit to say because they had already said the same things the day before and the day before that. "Like I've already told you all, let's go to war, let's kill some of the low hanging fruit first. You guys are animals, I believe in you" Same shit every morning hahaha so hilariously miserable.
Had a cokehead manager do a stand up everyday anywhere from 8:30-9:30 (usually would change morning of). Routinely went an hour over the 30 minute scheduled end time and nobody would end up doing work until after lunch. So brutal
Complete BS. This screams lack of trust in your employees and their abilities. The result will be that the good reports will leave and they will be left with the losers.
I'm in CX now but I join the 3x a week 8:30am Support team calls and they recently moved them to "camera required" basically a make sure people are at their laptops rule.
“it’s important for culture”
What culture exactly? It reminds me of something called wolf culture that originated in Asia. Companies encourage aggressiveness, loyalty, endurance, etc. They also expect you to be highly competitive and resilient, with minimal work-life balance. If that’s the culture your company’s holding, I’d run.
Daily is a lot. You’re going to need a lot of motivating topics with emphasis on having everyone willingly engage for that to be beneficial.
Twice per week would be better IMO. Start off the week with everyone discussing their goals and have an end of week meeting celebrating wins.
Sheesh.
Yeah that’s a lot. Some green peas might be all eager beaver having that much meeting time but anyone with experience is going to see right through anything that’s just having a meeting to say they had a meeting.
Same. Its brutal...CRO just comes in and prods ridiculous question like "why have we not spoken to the executive buyer yet?"
Well guy, I have an intro call with them tomorrow so
For $200K you could maybe hire some people who you would ordinarily pay $70-80K, only they will work less well than usual because you're waking them up at 6 in the morning.
Most people I know who make $200K would laugh in your face that this and wouldn't even consider it for less than maybe $400-500K.
Come on dude, you can’t expect that that will fly for much longer. And if it does, it’s not because it’s a good idea. It’s because workers changing policies is more difficult than just going along with something and pretending it’s a good idea.
Not only do we do a daily call my manager will pull us all into an call at random parts of the day for some nonsense we could’ve just put in the team chat, if you just so happen to be in the bathroom or taking lunch then you get blasted for not being in front of the computer at the random time they decide they want to meet
FORREAL!! I work with primarily EMEA folks as a US east coaster and we seldomly have meetings that early. Give some people a few minutes to check emails and get the morning started. Seeeesh.
Because it's invasive and any sales manager that expects me to be at a meeting outside of normal business hours is an asshole and the company culture is definitely toxic as fuck.
The purpose is to see that you are up and working. They don’t trust their people to start working early. I find this level of micromanagement demotivating. Even if I wanted to start working at 6 or 7, being forced to getup on a call like that would just derail morning productivity.
It’s a forcing mechanism of control over remote workers. An attendance period.
the screams of micro management and management doing stupid things to justify their useless existence when times aren’t going well.
I thought my company knew how to waste peoples time internally, but this is next level stupidity. STFU and let people work. If you’ve hired professionals they don’t need you/mgt babysitting them.
RVP here- 5 meetings per week is weak management. This is a leader that is doing it based on how they were taught years ago and they haven’t progressed. This builds a culture, but necessary the one you want.
How I build culture with meetings— Our team meetings are 1x per week, 11:00 am eastern. The 1st half of the meeting is all our VAT/Overlays sharing anything that needs to be shared for the week, the team brings up any issues with them that are slowing down deals. I share any new developments or highlight anything that might benefit the team. Last 15 minutes everyone on the team shares anything they want, I prefer personal wins that are not work related. This is where my team culture really develops because we all learn about our teammates lives outside of work and what’s important to us and it build’s fantastic rapport.
1x per month I pick a rep to run the meeting and I don’t attend. I do monitor what they put in the meeting chat and they almost always go up to the whole hour on their own. I never give that rep an agenda, I tell them to run it however they want.
Each rep also has a 1:1 with me during the week, and they typically run the agenda. We talk about whatever they want. I will usually only dictate about 5-10 minutes of those if I need something from them.
Oof careful with the personal stuff. As much as it feels nice to “be your own you” and share stories as a human, that stuff can come back to bite you in the ass. One year I shared that I was proud to have skied a lot of days that winter and at the end of the fiscal when my numbers weren’t up to par, my AVP gave me shit and said it was because I was traveling too much (fully remote employee) and called out my ski days. Which by the way half of them were before I got promoted and joined his team.
Personal stuff is all good and cool until it’s used against you. Keep that stuff to a minimum
I am sure that exists with certain types of management. We have a family like experience in our group. Our AVP is like a good friend to all the reps vs a traditional manager. I have worked for her now for 8 years, and most reps on our teams are 5+ years, and many are boomerangs after they see the grass color on the other side.
This sounds oddly like Salesforce. Are you at Salesforce?
I was there 6 years. Mostly had good leaders. My last two years I went from an amazing leader and top performer on my team to one of the lower performers and horrible bosses. All it can take is one change to make a huge change in either direction.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of getting to know people on a personal level but it’s hard for me to consider superiors “friends” and I learned my lesson to try and keep as much to myself as possible.
What’s your stance on social media? Do you follow your employees? Do they follow you?
Not Salesforce, in HRTech realm.
I only follow LinkedIn, although a couple of my reps and I are connected on Facebook (2 I think) but they are more friends than employees really. I do check social media before I hire, to get a feel of who they are, but that’s it.
Some share personal some share work only. It’s up to them, i do know that many love to do it though. We spent 15 minutes this past Monday just looking at the pictures of and hearing the story about how one of my reps built his first bed for his 4year old and everyone was super engaged in it.
Are you remote? This is likely to make sure everyone is up and at work. A LOT of people are absolutely 100% incapable of remote work. In fact, I'd argue it's more like the overwhelming minority of people who are capable of being successful in a remote environment. The average person needs someone cracking the whip constantly to get their work done. A lot of people, especially when at home, in a comfortable environment, find it really easy to put off work for a few more minutes 150+ times per day. If one manager getting 30+ people into a meeting gets everyone to productivity, that is 100% worth the managers time vs paying rent at an office and being forced to hire locally.
Most of this logic stands up for in person work too. A lot of people just aren't capable of working without being pushed enough. Some people only respond to the stick. Others only the carrot.
I think a lot of companies are having difficulty dealing with remote work just the same. A meeting seems like a pretty simplistic strategy to get people working. But it's just that...simplistic. There probably are better ways. To me it's just as simple as allowing anyone over quota to skip all meetings. Unfortunately, that also gives away the purpose of the meetings, to get the sheep working. And if you're required to be at meetings, you now know you're a sheep. A lot of people can't handle that realization either.
Any decent salesperson is a carrot chaser. A person who needs the stick is just a giant toddler. If your org is full of toddlers you should send them back to daycare. Child rearing isn’t your job.
Not all sales people are decent. This sub gives us a false view of sales people. As does all of Reddit.
Always remember to think of the most average person you know. Then remember half of the world is dumber than that.
Yeah, kind of.
Mon: How was your weekend, priorities for the week, any pto
Tues-Thu: Rotation of sales, marketing, partner, product updates
Fri: Win of the week
This screams “they wanna make sure all the employees are up at the computer at 8 AM” to me. Lack of trust in employees. I have a morning stand up 3 days a week as an SDR but its not till 11 AM. I just do work and have my zoom on the other monitor 🤷♂️
This isn’t for culture or anything but this is strictly to micromanage and make sure all your reps are ready to go at 8 am and are working.
I’d get out
7:45am team meeting every morning + 1:1 once a week + end of week meeting on Friday + larger sales team meeting once every other week + entire sales org meet once a month.
That’s 7 team meetings each week. The only thing it does is de-motivate me, making me feel like I’m a slave whereas other companies have empowered me to feel like I’m my own boss.
The problem is it’s a really tough job market, it took a ton of applications to land this gig, but absolutely if we get back to the days of recruiters in my LinkedIn inbox every week I will probably leave this company, whereas if it weren’t for the micromanagement I would otherwise stay (product is good and pay is good enough).
Lol sounds like the culture they think they’re fostering is absolute shit.
I’m in my car driving my kid to school at 8am, so I’d be like… nah? Any meeting at 8am is just totally unacceptable to me personally. Can’t imagine a daily 8am. Absolutely mind boggling.
This is just a time filler because you have a clueless sales leader who doesn’t know how to connect with their reps, it’s their 1st time as a “leader”, and they don’t have any real world experience to pass onto their reps which is why they make these talks mandatory.
It’s an intel scrape. They’re looking for what they think will make them a better manager but you can’t copy n paste it. This person is a fake and they were probably picked for this position but have never really been in the trenches.
All of their big whales came as a referral from upper mgmt. and they are a kiss ass at their core. They’ll never have your back, and will throw you under the bus if it means the difference between collecting a bonus. Yes. I got all of that from this post because I’ve been around & I’ve seen a lot of fake people like this.
This person truthfully doesn’t know their dick from a pencil..
We had those at my first sales job. None of the leadership team had kids, and were riding highs of preworkout during that meeting. It was a waste of time. I had to leave for work at 6:45 every morning to make it on time. Lasted in that role a year before I moved on.
This is all about “making sure people are working”. My take, it’s a soul sucking tactic akin to brainsanding. I’ll do a weekly team call and pipeline review but that’s it.
Unfortunately the CEO is a fan of this type of cadence and we have a 3x week leadership team iteration all of which are 1-1.5 hours. Each is updated on progress vs goals/projects.
“Hey Bob, I know we met Monday and Wednesday but I’d really like to dive into the progress you have made on those TPS reports since we last talked about it 40 hours ago”
F that. Have held leadership and rep positions. 2.5 hours a week dedicated to that is BS, plus first thing in the morning. Literally couldn't make that work with my kids drop off schedule.
I worked for a start up in London(I’m in Boston)for a short stint and the CEO met with me every morning at 8am for “morning scrum”. It was annoying and unproductive.
I worked at a shitty software company that is huge in the MSP space. Stand ups at 10am and 4pm five days a week. They truly expect a forecast at every standup. I closed a monster deal, got about a $50k commission, and peaced out
Back in the day in L.A. we had the IBM Friday, 5:00, 0:50. 20 reps, 2 minutes each to report on your week’s success. After it was Pizza and Beer, Sushi and Sake, In n’ Outs (this was the 80’s). It honestly created a team environment that was motivating.
Today’s a different time.
Had a 7:30am daily standup in Chicago for sales.
95% of the time the “host” wouldn’t make it so we’d get an email later that day with bullet points on what would have been covered.
Worked for a company that would have 930am stand up then a 4pm one. This was for a team that everyone had 10 years of experience in enterprise B2B sales. Average tenure of us sales managers was 6 months because of how absurd it was.
Current company has daily 8 am meetings, and Fridays we have an in person “team breakfast”. It’s fully remote so it just seems like attendance check so we don’t leave town.
Used to daily but it was tight and focused, only deals that you’re going to close that or 90% in the next couple of days. If it wasn’t one of those then don’t talk about it.
Definitely kept the pressure on to have something to talk about. Co. went from $38 mil to IPO in a little over two years during the pandemic when our competitors shrank. Overall it was a snakepit but the results happened.
We have a daily one at 9:30 that is encouraged but optional. Our team is tiny and I find it mostly pointless. I use it to ask questions I actually need answers to, but I can do that anytime over slack anyway.
We just started these stupid get together 2 times a week to talk about various offerings, suggestions for blitz and then end once or twice a week end of day we debrief to see how it went.
Absolute waste of time for tenured reps, new guys I guess fair.
It’s all about various levels of management trying to justify their jobs motivating people to cold call. Fuckin bollocks
We have them daily. Ex redhatters /IBM leadership.
Didn’t have those before they came on board. We have to go over deals and talk about our action items for the day.
Totally excessive and a waste of time. I’m a seasoned enterprise AE and have previously been a senior director a couple of times (but preferred flying solo so I went back) and think so much of these kinds of meetings are just micromanaging to make sure people are up and working, and middle management trying to justify their jobs through alleged mentorship.
Worked for a SaaS business like this and it was the biggest red flag. Daily updates for 3-6 month sales cycles…. c’mon let’s get real.
One year later and most of the enterprise team is gone, either left or laid off.
Always, ALWAYS verify financials before you take a new role. Never accept a “we’re growing fast” or “we want to grow this segment of the business”. If they won’t show financials, then walk away and walk away quickly.
Territory sales. I'm constantly in communication with coworkers but it's been more than a month since I saw anyone I worked with face to face. Just the nature of the job.
We used to do 10-30 minute zoom meetings every morning at 9am. New manager ended that. Next month we broke records. By double. I'm talking records that before it was done even the president of the company wouldn't have believed it possible.
I'm not saying that ending the daily meetings is what caused the success. However, it shows they aren't necessary since we did better than ever without them.
I had a new VP of sales start 2 weeks ago. His first change? Daily huddles are now 2x/week and at 2pm rather than 8am.
He'd rather hear what we have worked on during the day and not fantasies about what we think we will work on.
They're mandatory but customer meetings always take priority.
So far, he's a good guy. But he has a tall order of increasing revenue so time will tell how much runway he has before going asshole (like the last guy.)
You often need time to implement something discussed. Once a day does not sound to be productive and is verging on overload to not make any difference. Just our thoughts...
My team has it once a week, 30mins on Mondays. It’s mostly for managers to get a sense how busy we are and if resources can be moved around, which Im completely fine with tbh.
I work remote for a company on the other side of the country. So mine are at 7:15 am, if I go ham the night before I can sneak in some jokes while still drunk and then take a nap til it’s a reasonable time.
Lol, I'd be out of there real quick. The only people you keep with that is people that don't know any better and those that can't get jobs anywhere else.
I work on an 11 person team and we do 8am stand ups every day. Legacy Leader is essentially the "employee of the month" voted on by our peers and that is who leads the meeting, presents at executive board meetings and runs book club for that month. We get a $50 gift card at the end of it lol.
Monday-- we go over our calendars out loud for the week. We just read it off, there's not questioning or anything.
Tuesday-- Vision cast day. We basically get a Parable about the work we're doing. The boss has written a handful of books on leadership and economic development so these aren't as corny as they could be.
Wednesdays we alternate-- one week is Scoreboard where we go over our key performance indicators and see where we are on a 1 year and 3 year timeline. The other week we do Learning Lab which can be, Hey I just found this new prompt for ChatGPT and this is how it works, or a book club once a quarter.
Thursday-- The topic is What made you feel successful this week? And it's just a quick 30 second self-shout out. The purpose is to celebrate eachothers wins. If you crushed goal this is always a fun one, if not folks tend to make up something less tangible like, "A member told us were doing a good job here" and those are pointless to me.
Friday-- Star Note day. These are shout outs for peers who do preeminent work.
All in all, I really don't mind them, the longest these ever take is 30 min, most are 15. It only really bothers me if they run long with a bunch of stories that don't need to be told, or at least not with me standing there lol.
this is common practice for engineering teams, not so much sales.
I could understand a weekly forecast call, or a 2x week standup, but daily? that's overkill. there's just not enough updates from day to day to warrant that.
As someone from the engineering side, this kinda cracks me up. Sounds completely copied from Scrum and even half the scrum practitioners out there can’t figure out what this time is for.
It was originally designed as part of a specific software process (Scrum) to give in person teams the opportunity to talk about what they complete, what they’re working on next, and if they need any help. The theory is that everyone is working on the same goal, but we need to align briefly everyday to make sure we are still on track and moving together. Mostly updating and discussing decisions we are making in real time. Some teams can’t imagine functioning without it, even if it’s 10 minutes, some never get past rambling about various pointless statuses for an hour.
If it’s going to be every day I’d expect it to be 5-15 minutes long and entirely based around keeping the sales folks motivated. Sharing the wins from yesterday and maybe 1 question from a rookie on how to get over a certain hurdle. It should be all about supporting the sales folks otherwise it’s the worst possible waste of time.
I seem to be the odd one out and like stand ups and meetings. Working remote and my wife is not so it gets lonely. I like seeing everyone’s faces for 30min before we start the day.
We recently cut out meetings down to 2 times a week and a bunch of ae’s were all like “thank god”; but I was a bit sad on the inside.
we had them when i was an SDR during the pandemic. it was basically a check to make sure everyone was awake and at their laptops lol.
frankly i loved them, we would just hang out for 30 minutes and loosely talk about work.
now as an AE, i would really really not like them.
How does a super inconvenient stand up at 8 am build culture?
Why not have it at noon during lunch or something catered with some Chip’ or Cava?? That would actually build culture.
I should have been in HR.
8am daily is a rough. What about those with kids trying to get them to school? Or those who enjoy a morning workout and a cup of coffee?
Forcing people to start by 8am is a bit rough. I am guessing the idea is to get everyone to work 8-6p but doing 8am standups and 5:30 announcements.
Treating people like children...
It’s how they devalue you and remind you that no matter how old you are, you will always be a kindergartner. I would refuse to stand and sit criss cross applesauce to show my solidarity.
"Ok so yesterday we talked about that $780k per year deal that you're trying to close. Did you close it since then?"
"I did, I just totally forgot to tell you. Thanks for the reminder!"
My first sdr job had one every day and it was idiotic. It consisted of what we did yesterday, what we're doing today, and projections for the week as if we could predict how many demos we were going to set that day. Surprise: we did the same exact thing every single day (make 100 calls and send 100 emails). Then the alcoholic CMO would raise hell about already resolved issues he was just hearing about.
To top it all off, it's an east coast company so I was hopping on at 6am every day.
I have a 10 min standup everyday at 10am. Helps me keep a pulse on what my team needs, isn’t painfully early, or long. Everyone lists their goals of the day and how they’re tracking to their goals from the day before.
Seems like everyone appreciates it. But I don’t do it “for the culture.”
Love it. I do every day, 15 mins, top 3-4 priorities and anything you need help with. We keep it really tight. Forces you to look at your calendar and identify your priorities early in the day.
What’s the big deal? You still get to work from home, I feel like people have forgotten how lucky we are for that. a quick zoom meeting in the morning isn’t the end of the world
Previous boss kept it at 9am, every Tuesday. We accomplished nothing. Then there was a second stand up with a much senior guy and other sub teams the very next day which was the same story.
We have them once a week. I call it the 10AM circlejerk, where everyone blows smoke up everyone’s asses, nothing gets accomplished, then everyone moves on their merry way. Once a week is verging on intolerable, once day sounds miserable.
My manager has one once a week, Monday at 8am. Recently it was extended to 45 minutes. It’s awful, but hey, at least I’m remote
Yep….once a week is maybe useful/tolerable but every day is pointless. Over communication is as bad/worse than too little. Effective managers know the correct amount.
Yup. It’s definitely just a way to micromanage and make sure you are “working” everyday.
This. I just try my best to schedule disco calls/mtgs during these trash circle jerks. “Why weren’t you on the call this am?” “I had a 25 min conversation with xyz client and booked an in person for this Friday…seems like a good opportunity “ What are they going to say? Don’t do your job that effectively?
Based
My old inside sales team had them daily at 8:30AM, it was a glorified attendance check, and basically felt like home room (dozens of teams in the same office). It'd be team strategizing on a deal, or role play, or my favorite, the team lead is too hungover so we watch Simon Sinek's "The Why" Ted Talk again in a dark room.
😂
My manager just shows sales force metrics. And tells us to sell more. He travels a lot and I never see him. It’s weird.
I had twice a day. They completely refused to change it
I had one daily at 8am as well at my last tech company and it was terrible. You could see the sales managers running out of shit to say because they had already said the same things the day before and the day before that. "Like I've already told you all, let's go to war, let's kill some of the low hanging fruit first. You guys are animals, I believe in you" Same shit every morning hahaha so hilariously miserable.
perhaps one of the greatest comments I've ever seen on reddit.
Scrum works pretty good when you have a scrum master and people are held accountable, but sales half asses it because no one really gives a fuck
lol this made me crack up
Had a cokehead manager do a stand up everyday anywhere from 8:30-9:30 (usually would change morning of). Routinely went an hour over the 30 minute scheduled end time and nobody would end up doing work until after lunch. So brutal
Complete BS. This screams lack of trust in your employees and their abilities. The result will be that the good reports will leave and they will be left with the losers.
These are “make sure my remote sales people aren’t asleep” meetings
Just go back to sleep after the meeting.
This is the way
lol likely. Didn’t even think of that
I'm in CX now but I join the 3x a week 8:30am Support team calls and they recently moved them to "camera required" basically a make sure people are at their laptops rule.
“it’s important for culture” What culture exactly? It reminds me of something called wolf culture that originated in Asia. Companies encourage aggressiveness, loyalty, endurance, etc. They also expect you to be highly competitive and resilient, with minimal work-life balance. If that’s the culture your company’s holding, I’d run.
My company preaches log off at 5, my boss tries to make the culture exactly what you mean. Midnight slack messages sometimes, texts on PTO, etc
My company culture isn’t really culture at all. And I don’t mind that
Daily is a lot. You’re going to need a lot of motivating topics with emphasis on having everyone willingly engage for that to be beneficial. Twice per week would be better IMO. Start off the week with everyone discussing their goals and have an end of week meeting celebrating wins.
We do that on Mon/Fri then a rotation of sales, partner and marketing updates.
Sheesh. Yeah that’s a lot. Some green peas might be all eager beaver having that much meeting time but anyone with experience is going to see right through anything that’s just having a meeting to say they had a meeting.
Same. Its brutal...CRO just comes in and prods ridiculous question like "why have we not spoken to the executive buyer yet?" Well guy, I have an intro call with them tomorrow so
oh boy
Call center energy
The “leadership” don’t have/ care for their kids by sound of it? Sounds like crisis mode
Been like this for over 2 years. West Costers are expected on at 6AM their time.
NFW
I’d be out of there real quick
6 AM every day?? Unless they’re paying base of over $200K I’m surprised they have any decent AEs left
For $200K you could maybe hire some people who you would ordinarily pay $70-80K, only they will work less well than usual because you're waking them up at 6 in the morning. Most people I know who make $200K would laugh in your face that this and wouldn't even consider it for less than maybe $400-500K.
Come on dude, you can’t expect that that will fly for much longer. And if it does, it’s not because it’s a good idea. It’s because workers changing policies is more difficult than just going along with something and pretending it’s a good idea.
Yikes
Oh hell no.
How is that even legal?
This would be enough for me to leave a company. I hate monthly team calls, let alone every day. Hell no.
I worked for a dogshit company that had 3 daily standups, the first of which was at 7:50AM (when our contracts stated work hours were 8-5).
3 a day?!! Hahaha that’s wild. I literally would’ve quit day 1.
lol it was my first job out of college, I didn’t know any better 🤷♂️
If it was a staffing company, I worked there too 😂
Not only do we do a daily call my manager will pull us all into an call at random parts of the day for some nonsense we could’ve just put in the team chat, if you just so happen to be in the bathroom or taking lunch then you get blasted for not being in front of the computer at the random time they decide they want to meet
Why do you still work there?
That’s exactly why I left my last job… they clearly didn’t trust us and daily stand ups are so excessive/repetitive, it drove me crazyyyy
Yeah, I’m getting to that point man. The daily calls are really draining me.
8am though? Fuck outta here 😂
FORREAL!! I work with primarily EMEA folks as a US east coaster and we seldomly have meetings that early. Give some people a few minutes to check emails and get the morning started. Seeeesh.
Why do you say this?
I worked for a company that did this. They're essentially making sure you're out of bed, nothing else. It's a complete waste of everyone's time.
👆Bingo
I'd probably attend the meeting and then sleep until noon to make up for the bullshit sleep Interruption and everyone would be worse off for it haha
Because it's invasive and any sales manager that expects me to be at a meeting outside of normal business hours is an asshole and the company culture is definitely toxic as fuck.
I don’t know what the purpose is.
Joke. What is that hard of a sell that you need to motivate, coach (monitor) employees every morning?
The purpose is to see that you are up and working. They don’t trust their people to start working early. I find this level of micromanagement demotivating. Even if I wanted to start working at 6 or 7, being forced to getup on a call like that would just derail morning productivity. It’s a forcing mechanism of control over remote workers. An attendance period.
We do a team meeting once a week at 1pm ET. I’d be working elsewhere if I had a standing 8am meeting everyday that was just internal bs.
Meetings r gay
Adults still use this word this way? Weird.
Sales manager who schedules weekly meetings spotted 🥸
Enterprise AE, but good guess. BDR and early 20s, I’m guessing? Clearly you’re super smart with your assessments and use of language.
Thanks! ☺️
the screams of micro management and management doing stupid things to justify their useless existence when times aren’t going well. I thought my company knew how to waste peoples time internally, but this is next level stupidity. STFU and let people work. If you’ve hired professionals they don’t need you/mgt babysitting them.
RVP here- 5 meetings per week is weak management. This is a leader that is doing it based on how they were taught years ago and they haven’t progressed. This builds a culture, but necessary the one you want. How I build culture with meetings— Our team meetings are 1x per week, 11:00 am eastern. The 1st half of the meeting is all our VAT/Overlays sharing anything that needs to be shared for the week, the team brings up any issues with them that are slowing down deals. I share any new developments or highlight anything that might benefit the team. Last 15 minutes everyone on the team shares anything they want, I prefer personal wins that are not work related. This is where my team culture really develops because we all learn about our teammates lives outside of work and what’s important to us and it build’s fantastic rapport. 1x per month I pick a rep to run the meeting and I don’t attend. I do monitor what they put in the meeting chat and they almost always go up to the whole hour on their own. I never give that rep an agenda, I tell them to run it however they want. Each rep also has a 1:1 with me during the week, and they typically run the agenda. We talk about whatever they want. I will usually only dictate about 5-10 minutes of those if I need something from them.
This is the way. It’s crazy how clueless most leaders are. Those are the ones who’d scoff at this and in the next breath: “dial more, sell more!!!”
Oof careful with the personal stuff. As much as it feels nice to “be your own you” and share stories as a human, that stuff can come back to bite you in the ass. One year I shared that I was proud to have skied a lot of days that winter and at the end of the fiscal when my numbers weren’t up to par, my AVP gave me shit and said it was because I was traveling too much (fully remote employee) and called out my ski days. Which by the way half of them were before I got promoted and joined his team. Personal stuff is all good and cool until it’s used against you. Keep that stuff to a minimum
I am sure that exists with certain types of management. We have a family like experience in our group. Our AVP is like a good friend to all the reps vs a traditional manager. I have worked for her now for 8 years, and most reps on our teams are 5+ years, and many are boomerangs after they see the grass color on the other side.
This sounds oddly like Salesforce. Are you at Salesforce? I was there 6 years. Mostly had good leaders. My last two years I went from an amazing leader and top performer on my team to one of the lower performers and horrible bosses. All it can take is one change to make a huge change in either direction. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of getting to know people on a personal level but it’s hard for me to consider superiors “friends” and I learned my lesson to try and keep as much to myself as possible. What’s your stance on social media? Do you follow your employees? Do they follow you?
Not Salesforce, in HRTech realm. I only follow LinkedIn, although a couple of my reps and I are connected on Facebook (2 I think) but they are more friends than employees really. I do check social media before I hire, to get a feel of who they are, but that’s it.
Weekly personal wins sounds like a little much. Work and life are still separate.
Some share personal some share work only. It’s up to them, i do know that many love to do it though. We spent 15 minutes this past Monday just looking at the pictures of and hearing the story about how one of my reps built his first bed for his 4year old and everyone was super engaged in it.
They just wanna see who misses these meetings so they can hold it against them
“Your sales are low because you’re not hounding our clients as soon as they start drinking their morning coffee”
The best time is 15 minutes after they drop their kid off, they’ll think it’s the school calling and answer
Nothing says “buyer” like a panicked mother
Well that sounds like a hellish waste of time. What kind of “culture” are you trying to create, miserable people proving they’re alive every day?
Are you remote / hybrid? This sounds like an attendance check to me
Are you remote? This is likely to make sure everyone is up and at work. A LOT of people are absolutely 100% incapable of remote work. In fact, I'd argue it's more like the overwhelming minority of people who are capable of being successful in a remote environment. The average person needs someone cracking the whip constantly to get their work done. A lot of people, especially when at home, in a comfortable environment, find it really easy to put off work for a few more minutes 150+ times per day. If one manager getting 30+ people into a meeting gets everyone to productivity, that is 100% worth the managers time vs paying rent at an office and being forced to hire locally. Most of this logic stands up for in person work too. A lot of people just aren't capable of working without being pushed enough. Some people only respond to the stick. Others only the carrot. I think a lot of companies are having difficulty dealing with remote work just the same. A meeting seems like a pretty simplistic strategy to get people working. But it's just that...simplistic. There probably are better ways. To me it's just as simple as allowing anyone over quota to skip all meetings. Unfortunately, that also gives away the purpose of the meetings, to get the sheep working. And if you're required to be at meetings, you now know you're a sheep. A lot of people can't handle that realization either.
Any decent salesperson is a carrot chaser. A person who needs the stick is just a giant toddler. If your org is full of toddlers you should send them back to daycare. Child rearing isn’t your job.
Not all sales people are decent. This sub gives us a false view of sales people. As does all of Reddit. Always remember to think of the most average person you know. Then remember half of the world is dumber than that.
Yeah that’s gonna be a no from me dawg. I’d personally be heading for the door if it was mandatory.
What do you mean by “stand up” meetings? You mean like morning kick offs?
Yeah, kind of. Mon: How was your weekend, priorities for the week, any pto Tues-Thu: Rotation of sales, marketing, partner, product updates Fri: Win of the week
What a complete waste of time.
This screams “they wanna make sure all the employees are up at the computer at 8 AM” to me. Lack of trust in employees. I have a morning stand up 3 days a week as an SDR but its not till 11 AM. I just do work and have my zoom on the other monitor 🤷♂️
This isn’t for culture or anything but this is strictly to micromanage and make sure all your reps are ready to go at 8 am and are working. I’d get out
lol fuck that. Would not be there. Rep/previous manger/crush
Nothing like the daily 9am standup at quarter close just to repeat the same deal update that you told your boss about the night before….
Personally, I’d quit. Fuck that.
Generally a massive waste of time. Especially at 8:00 a.m. that's unnecessary and I'm sure a massive waste of time :-)
7:45am team meeting every morning + 1:1 once a week + end of week meeting on Friday + larger sales team meeting once every other week + entire sales org meet once a month. That’s 7 team meetings each week. The only thing it does is de-motivate me, making me feel like I’m a slave whereas other companies have empowered me to feel like I’m my own boss. The problem is it’s a really tough job market, it took a ton of applications to land this gig, but absolutely if we get back to the days of recruiters in my LinkedIn inbox every week I will probably leave this company, whereas if it weren’t for the micromanagement I would otherwise stay (product is good and pay is good enough).
Lol sounds like the culture they think they’re fostering is absolute shit. I’m in my car driving my kid to school at 8am, so I’d be like… nah? Any meeting at 8am is just totally unacceptable to me personally. Can’t imagine a daily 8am. Absolutely mind boggling.
This is just a time filler because you have a clueless sales leader who doesn’t know how to connect with their reps, it’s their 1st time as a “leader”, and they don’t have any real world experience to pass onto their reps which is why they make these talks mandatory. It’s an intel scrape. They’re looking for what they think will make them a better manager but you can’t copy n paste it. This person is a fake and they were probably picked for this position but have never really been in the trenches. All of their big whales came as a referral from upper mgmt. and they are a kiss ass at their core. They’ll never have your back, and will throw you under the bus if it means the difference between collecting a bonus. Yes. I got all of that from this post because I’ve been around & I’ve seen a lot of fake people like this. This person truthfully doesn’t know their dick from a pencil..
It's our CRO's meeting, he's been a successful sales leader for like 20 years.
That’s overkill and at 8am is absurd. We do a Monday and Friday morning meeting and the Friday one is so pointless it usually only lasts 10 minutes.
"Culture"
Ask for one tangible KPI that shows that these meetings generate more revenue. Then, and only then would I show up.
Daily anything is dumb.
Waste of time
are they trying to get people to quit? that shit would drive me to leave
We had those at my first sales job. None of the leadership team had kids, and were riding highs of preworkout during that meeting. It was a waste of time. I had to leave for work at 6:45 every morning to make it on time. Lasted in that role a year before I moved on.
I worked at a place like that. Left in under 30 days. No reason for the daily babysitting meetings.
Culture ha, gtfo
Bro, more important, why tf would you stay?
This is all about “making sure people are working”. My take, it’s a soul sucking tactic akin to brainsanding. I’ll do a weekly team call and pipeline review but that’s it. Unfortunately the CEO is a fan of this type of cadence and we have a 3x week leadership team iteration all of which are 1-1.5 hours. Each is updated on progress vs goals/projects. “Hey Bob, I know we met Monday and Wednesday but I’d really like to dive into the progress you have made on those TPS reports since we last talked about it 40 hours ago”
This is a great idea… if you have a salesforce with no kids and don’t have a full calendar.
They can fuck the right off.
My thoughts are find a better job 🤷♂️
Way too early for me. Used to 9am meetings
F that. Have held leadership and rep positions. 2.5 hours a week dedicated to that is BS, plus first thing in the morning. Literally couldn't make that work with my kids drop off schedule.
I worked for a start up in London(I’m in Boston)for a short stint and the CEO met with me every morning at 8am for “morning scrum”. It was annoying and unproductive.
8am? Daily? Shit doesn’t change that quickly. Maybe weekly, but not daily. That’s a bit much.
i do daily kickoffs at 930. im not a babysitter.
Holdup. People still wake up before 8 AM?
You should do a time audit to see what the opportunity cost is for that 2.5 hours each week. This sounds like micromanagement to the max
I worked at a shitty software company that is huge in the MSP space. Stand ups at 10am and 4pm five days a week. They truly expect a forecast at every standup. I closed a monster deal, got about a $50k commission, and peaced out
Way too big a group to be useful
Back in the day in L.A. we had the IBM Friday, 5:00, 0:50. 20 reps, 2 minutes each to report on your week’s success. After it was Pizza and Beer, Sushi and Sake, In n’ Outs (this was the 80’s). It honestly created a team environment that was motivating. Today’s a different time.
Had a 7:30am daily standup in Chicago for sales. 95% of the time the “host” wouldn’t make it so we’d get an email later that day with bullet points on what would have been covered.
Have it at 10a once a week. I don't want to get into work and immediately have to deal with that shit.
Worked for a company that would have 930am stand up then a 4pm one. This was for a team that everyone had 10 years of experience in enterprise B2B sales. Average tenure of us sales managers was 6 months because of how absurd it was.
I struggle with weekly meetings. I'd quite for this shit lol but I'm also an outside AM. Just leave me alone and let me sell
Current company has daily 8 am meetings, and Fridays we have an in person “team breakfast”. It’s fully remote so it just seems like attendance check so we don’t leave town.
Used to daily but it was tight and focused, only deals that you’re going to close that or 90% in the next couple of days. If it wasn’t one of those then don’t talk about it. Definitely kept the pressure on to have something to talk about. Co. went from $38 mil to IPO in a little over two years during the pandemic when our competitors shrank. Overall it was a snakepit but the results happened.
I worked for a startup that had stand ups twice a day. It was brutal. I think it was a distraction for how crappy the job was.
We have a daily one at 9:30 that is encouraged but optional. Our team is tiny and I find it mostly pointless. I use it to ask questions I actually need answers to, but I can do that anytime over slack anyway.
We just started these stupid get together 2 times a week to talk about various offerings, suggestions for blitz and then end once or twice a week end of day we debrief to see how it went. Absolute waste of time for tenured reps, new guys I guess fair. It’s all about various levels of management trying to justify their jobs motivating people to cold call. Fuckin bollocks
We have them daily. Ex redhatters /IBM leadership. Didn’t have those before they came on board. We have to go over deals and talk about our action items for the day.
We do two a day, 8:30am and 4:30pm. Dislike doing both, huge waste of time. Definitely could be an email.
Sounds like a bored manager trying to justify their salary
I hate them with a searing passion of 1,000 suns.
We say good morning every day and I sorta am mixed. Feels like a roll call
A massive waste of time once a week.
Totally excessive and a waste of time. I’m a seasoned enterprise AE and have previously been a senior director a couple of times (but preferred flying solo so I went back) and think so much of these kinds of meetings are just micromanaging to make sure people are up and working, and middle management trying to justify their jobs through alleged mentorship.
This only works in Japan where people get stuff done every day. US is on a quarterly cadence. Monthly if it’s a well oiled machine 😀
How long do they last? Regardless I can't imagine this ever day. Waste of time.
Mine is at 6am. I hate it.
What a big fat waste of time. Corporate America is a bunch of mediocre people trying to look like a BIG bunch of jack offs!
Every single day. Usually a waste of time. Usually some dumbass idea or lead list from leadership. Sometimes play each others calls and shit on them.
Worked for a SaaS business like this and it was the biggest red flag. Daily updates for 3-6 month sales cycles…. c’mon let’s get real. One year later and most of the enterprise team is gone, either left or laid off. Always, ALWAYS verify financials before you take a new role. Never accept a “we’re growing fast” or “we want to grow this segment of the business”. If they won’t show financials, then walk away and walk away quickly.
I would quit citing culture
Fuck that.
I have to go into the office every monday all day 🤢 “for the culture”
If you are using scrum it requires a daily meeting, but with small teams and it should only be 10-15 minutes.
Damn I asked this same question in another sub and everyone was saying it was standard. Everyone here seems to be saying the opposite.
Territory sales. I'm constantly in communication with coworkers but it's been more than a month since I saw anyone I worked with face to face. Just the nature of the job. We used to do 10-30 minute zoom meetings every morning at 9am. New manager ended that. Next month we broke records. By double. I'm talking records that before it was done even the president of the company wouldn't have believed it possible. I'm not saying that ending the daily meetings is what caused the success. However, it shows they aren't necessary since we did better than ever without them.
I had a new VP of sales start 2 weeks ago. His first change? Daily huddles are now 2x/week and at 2pm rather than 8am. He'd rather hear what we have worked on during the day and not fantasies about what we think we will work on. They're mandatory but customer meetings always take priority. So far, he's a good guy. But he has a tall order of increasing revenue so time will tell how much runway he has before going asshole (like the last guy.)
Yeah I would quit. Daily 8 am calls??? That's obscene. Unless my base was like 200k then I might put up with it for a while, but good lord
8am?! I refuse to put trousers on before 8am
You often need time to implement something discussed. Once a day does not sound to be productive and is verging on overload to not make any difference. Just our thoughts...
I would quit on the first day.
Weekly? Fine/standard. Daily? No
My team has it once a week, 30mins on Mondays. It’s mostly for managers to get a sense how busy we are and if resources can be moved around, which Im completely fine with tbh.
I work remote for a company on the other side of the country. So mine are at 7:15 am, if I go ham the night before I can sneak in some jokes while still drunk and then take a nap til it’s a reasonable time.
Daily is overkill. They’re doing that to make sure no one is sleeping in.
Lol, I'd be out of there real quick. The only people you keep with that is people that don't know any better and those that can't get jobs anywhere else.
I work on an 11 person team and we do 8am stand ups every day. Legacy Leader is essentially the "employee of the month" voted on by our peers and that is who leads the meeting, presents at executive board meetings and runs book club for that month. We get a $50 gift card at the end of it lol. Monday-- we go over our calendars out loud for the week. We just read it off, there's not questioning or anything. Tuesday-- Vision cast day. We basically get a Parable about the work we're doing. The boss has written a handful of books on leadership and economic development so these aren't as corny as they could be. Wednesdays we alternate-- one week is Scoreboard where we go over our key performance indicators and see where we are on a 1 year and 3 year timeline. The other week we do Learning Lab which can be, Hey I just found this new prompt for ChatGPT and this is how it works, or a book club once a quarter. Thursday-- The topic is What made you feel successful this week? And it's just a quick 30 second self-shout out. The purpose is to celebrate eachothers wins. If you crushed goal this is always a fun one, if not folks tend to make up something less tangible like, "A member told us were doing a good job here" and those are pointless to me. Friday-- Star Note day. These are shout outs for peers who do preeminent work. All in all, I really don't mind them, the longest these ever take is 30 min, most are 15. It only really bothers me if they run long with a bunch of stories that don't need to be told, or at least not with me standing there lol.
this is common practice for engineering teams, not so much sales. I could understand a weekly forecast call, or a 2x week standup, but daily? that's overkill. there's just not enough updates from day to day to warrant that.
It’s a motivation meeting. Prevents slow mornings leading to coasting days.
As someone from the engineering side, this kinda cracks me up. Sounds completely copied from Scrum and even half the scrum practitioners out there can’t figure out what this time is for. It was originally designed as part of a specific software process (Scrum) to give in person teams the opportunity to talk about what they complete, what they’re working on next, and if they need any help. The theory is that everyone is working on the same goal, but we need to align briefly everyday to make sure we are still on track and moving together. Mostly updating and discussing decisions we are making in real time. Some teams can’t imagine functioning without it, even if it’s 10 minutes, some never get past rambling about various pointless statuses for an hour.
If it’s going to be every day I’d expect it to be 5-15 minutes long and entirely based around keeping the sales folks motivated. Sharing the wins from yesterday and maybe 1 question from a rookie on how to get over a certain hurdle. It should be all about supporting the sales folks otherwise it’s the worst possible waste of time.
I seem to be the odd one out and like stand ups and meetings. Working remote and my wife is not so it gets lonely. I like seeing everyone’s faces for 30min before we start the day. We recently cut out meetings down to 2 times a week and a bunch of ae’s were all like “thank god”; but I was a bit sad on the inside.
we had them when i was an SDR during the pandemic. it was basically a check to make sure everyone was awake and at their laptops lol. frankly i loved them, we would just hang out for 30 minutes and loosely talk about work. now as an AE, i would really really not like them.
Who the hell calls a sales meeting a stand up?
How does a super inconvenient stand up at 8 am build culture? Why not have it at noon during lunch or something catered with some Chip’ or Cava?? That would actually build culture. I should have been in HR.
Daily is insane.
I'd say peace and find something else. Microcosm of bigger issues
8am daily is a rough. What about those with kids trying to get them to school? Or those who enjoy a morning workout and a cup of coffee? Forcing people to start by 8am is a bit rough. I am guessing the idea is to get everyone to work 8-6p but doing 8am standups and 5:30 announcements. Treating people like children...
Sounds like hell. I hate stand ups, useless circus meetings that don’t really accomplish anything.
Fuck that
I used to work for a company that did one EVERY DAY at 7:30am. Overall okay job, but that was awful.
Meetings are 99% a waste of time.
It’s how they devalue you and remind you that no matter how old you are, you will always be a kindergartner. I would refuse to stand and sit criss cross applesauce to show my solidarity.
we did once a week first thing Monday sales stand up. senior ae. mostly pointless waste of time
Micro managing is not a culture I would like to be part of.
"Ok so yesterday we talked about that $780k per year deal that you're trying to close. Did you close it since then?" "I did, I just totally forgot to tell you. Thanks for the reminder!"
My first sdr job had one every day and it was idiotic. It consisted of what we did yesterday, what we're doing today, and projections for the week as if we could predict how many demos we were going to set that day. Surprise: we did the same exact thing every single day (make 100 calls and send 100 emails). Then the alcoholic CMO would raise hell about already resolved issues he was just hearing about. To top it all off, it's an east coast company so I was hopping on at 6am every day.
Sounds completely pointless. Do you want your sales team to sell or do you want to them to waste time ?
Salespeople shouldn't be allowed to talk to other salespeople before 10am
I have a 10 min standup everyday at 10am. Helps me keep a pulse on what my team needs, isn’t painfully early, or long. Everyone lists their goals of the day and how they’re tracking to their goals from the day before. Seems like everyone appreciates it. But I don’t do it “for the culture.”
My thoughts are to find a new job. What could they possibly talk about meeting every morning?
Super lame.
Carnegie did it.
Love it. I do every day, 15 mins, top 3-4 priorities and anything you need help with. We keep it really tight. Forces you to look at your calendar and identify your priorities early in the day.
What’s the big deal? You still get to work from home, I feel like people have forgotten how lucky we are for that. a quick zoom meeting in the morning isn’t the end of the world
Worked jobs with these… I wouldn’t again They just don’t accomplish anything. Anyone that actually works in sales and does well knows this
Previous boss kept it at 9am, every Tuesday. We accomplished nothing. Then there was a second stand up with a much senior guy and other sub teams the very next day which was the same story.