Category Archives: Culture

A CEO’s High-Level Guide to GTM Troubleshooting

Posted on May 10, 2025 | 2 comments

I’ve written about this topic a lot over the years, but never before integrated my ideas into a single high-level piece that not only provides a solution to the problem, but also derives it from first principles. That’s what I’ll do today. If you’re new to this topic, I strongly recommend reading the articles I link to throughout the post.

Scene: you’re consistently having trouble hitting plan. Finance is blaming sales. Sales is blaming marketing. Marketing is blaming the macro environment. Everyone is blaming SDRs. Alliances is hiding in a foxhole hoping no one remembers to blame them. E-staff meetings resemble a cage fight from Beyond Thunderdome, but it’s a tag-team match with each C-level tapping in their heads of operations when they need a break. Numbers are flying everywhere. The shit is hitting the proverbial fan.

The question for CEOs: what do I do about this mess? Here’s my answer.

First:

  • Avoid the blame game. That sounds much easier than it is because blame can vary from explicit to subtle and everyone’s blame sensitivity ears are set to eleven. Speak slowly, carefully, and factually when discussing the situation. You might wonder why everyone is pointing fingers, and the reason might well be you.
  • Solve the problem. Keep everyone focused on solving the problem going forward. Use blameless statements of fact when discussing historical data. For example, say “when we start with less than 2.5x pipeline coverage, we almost always miss plan” as opposed to “when marketing fails on pipeline generation, we miss plan unless sales does their usual heroic job in pipeline conversion.”)

Then reset the pipeline discussion by constantly reminding everyone of these three facts:

  • How do you make 16 quarters in a row? One at a time.
  • How do you make one quarter? Start with sufficient pipeline coverage.
  • And then convert it at your target conversion rate.

This reframes the problem into making one quarter — the right focus if you’ve missed three in a row.

  • This will force a discussion of what “sufficient” means
  • That is generally determined by inverting your historical week 3 pipeline conversion rates
  • And adjusting them as required, for example, to account for the impacts of big deals or other one-time events
  • This may in turn reveal a conversion rate problem, where actual conversion rates are either below targets and/or simply not viable to produce a sales model that hits the board’s target customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio. For example, you generally can’t achieve a decent CAC ratio with a 20% conversion rate and 5x pipeline coverage requirement. In this case, you will need to balance your energy on improving both conversion rates and starting coverage. While conversion rates are largely a sales team issue, there is nevertheless plenty that marketing and alliances can do to help: marketing through targeting, tools, enablement, and training; alliances through delivering higher-quality opportunities that often convert at higher rates than either inbound or SDR outbound.

It also says you need to think about each and every quarter. This leads to three critical realizations:

  • That you must also focus on future pipeline, but segmented into quarters, and not on some rolling basis
  • That you need to forecast pipeline (e.g., for next quarter, if not also the one after that)
  • That you need some mechanism for taking action when that forecast is below target

The last point should cause you to create some meeting or committee where the pipeline forecast is reviewed and the owners of each of the four to six pipeline sources (i.e., marketing, AE outbound, SDR outbound, alliances, community, PLG) can discuss and then take remedial measures.

  • That body should be a team of senior people focused on a single goal: starting every quarter with sufficient pipeline coverage.
  • It should be chaired by one person who must be seen as wearing two hats: one as their functional role (e.g., CMO) and the other as head of the pipeline task force. That person must be empowered to solve problems when they arise, even when they cross functions.
  • Think: “OK, we’re forecasting 2.2x starting coverage for next quarter instead of 2.5x, which is a $2M gap. Who can do what to get us that $2M?”
  • If that means shifting resources, they shift them (e.g., “I’ll defer hiring one SDR to free up $25K to spend on demandgen”).
  • If that means asking for new resources, they ask (e.g., I’ll tell the CEO and CFO that if we can’t find $50K, then we think we’ve got no chance of hitting next quarter’s starting coverage goals).
  • If that means rebalancing the go-to-market team, they do it. For example, “we’ve only got enough pipeline to support 8 AEs and we’ve got 12. If we cut two AEs, we can use that money to invest in marketing and SDRs to support the remaining 10.”
  • Finally, if you need to focus on both pipeline coverage and conversion rates, then this same body, in part two of the meeting, can review progress on actions design to improve conversion.

Teamwork and alignment is not about behaving well in meetings or only politely backstabbing each other outside them. It’s about sitting down together to say, “well, we’re off plan, and what are we going to do about it?” And doing so without any sacred cows in the conversation. Just as no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, no pipeline plan survives first contact with the market. That’s why you need this group and that’s what it means to align sales, marketing, alliances, and SDRs on pipeline goals. It’s the translation of the popular saying, “pipeline generation is a team sport.”

Notice that I never said to heavily focus on individual pipeline generation (“pipegen”) targets. Yes, you need them and you should set and track them, but we must remember the purpose of pipegen is to hit starting pipeline coverage goals. So just as we shouldn’t overly focus on other upstream metrics — from dials to alliances-meetings to MQLs — we shouldn’t overly focus on pipegen targets to the point where they become the end, not the means. While pipegen is certainly closer to starting coverage than MQLs or dials, it is nevertheless an enabler, in this case, one step removed.

Yes, tracking upstream metrics is important and for marketing I’d track both MQLs and pipegen (via oppty count, not dollars), but I’d neither pop champagne nor tie the CMO to the whipping post based on either MQLs or pipegen alone.

Don’t get me wrong — if your model’s correct, it should be impossible to consistently hit starting pipeline coverage targets while consistently failing on pipegen goals. But in any given quarter, maybe the AEs are short and marketing covers or marketing’s short and alliances covers. The point is that if the company hits the starting coverage goal, we’re happy with the pipeline machine and if we don’t, we’re not. Regardless of whether individual pipeline source X or Y hit their pipegen goals in a quarter. Ultimately, this point of view drives better teamwork because there’s no shame in forecasting a light result against target or shame in asking for help to cover it.

Finally, I’d note an odd situation I sometimes see that looks like this:

  • Sales consistently achieves bookings targets, but just by a hair
  • Marketing consistently underachieves pipeline targets

For example, sales consistently converts pipeline at 25% off 4x coverage and that 25% conversion rate is just enough to hit plan. But, because the CRO likes cushion, he forces the CMO to sign up for 5x coverage. Marketing then consistently fails to deliver that 5x coverage, delivering 4x coverage instead.

This is an unhealthy situation because sales is consistently succeeding while marketing is consistently failing. If you believe, as I do, that if sales is consistently hitting plan then, definitionally marketing has provided everything it needs to (from pipeline to messaging to enablement), then you can see how pathological this situation is. Sales is simply looking out for itself at the expense of marketing. That’s good for the company in the short term because you’re consistently hitting plan, but bad in the long term because there will be high turnover in the marketing department that should impede their ability to deliver sufficient pipeline in the future.

For more on this topic, please listen to our podcast episode of SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers entitled: Top-Down GTM Troubleshooting, Dave’s Method.

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Posted in CAC, Culture, Demandgen, Forecasting, Marketing, Pipeline, Sales, Sales Model, Salesops

Talking About the Numbers vs. Talking About the Business

Posted on September 30, 2024 | 4 comments

This is a huge distinction and sadly I think many people miss it.

You go a mid-quarter ops meeting. The CMO shows quarter-to-date MQLs. Someone asks how we define MQL. A 15-minute conversation ensues. The SVP of Alliances talks about influenced ARR. Someone asks how that’s defined, but only five minutes are spent on definition. However, a controversy erupts and 20 minutes are spent reconciling different answers from different reports. The CRO discusses the forecast, using seemingly standard words like best-case and worst-case. But nobody, including the CRO, is clear on what they mean. Twenty minutes is lost in a discussion trying to figure out what the forecast actually is. The SDR manager talks about outbound SALs. The usual attribution skirmish erupts, taking 30 minutes on whether we are accurately and fairly giving credit.

Question: what’s happening in that meeting? Are you having a discussion about the business? Or a discussion about the numbers?

Answer: you’re having a discussion about the numbers. And those are usually painful. Everyone leaves a little frustrated. Nothing gets resolved. And the best part? You get to do it again in a few weeks, because many companies just can’t seem to get beyond having conversations about the numbers.

This is a pretty simple issue.

  • The goal is to have discussions about the business,
  • And to have those discussions using numbers,
  • But not have discussions about the numbers.

There’s a big difference between saying, “I see MQLs are on a steady downtrend, what’s happening with the major new campaign we’re running?” and “how do we (for the 37th time) define MQL?” The first is a conversation about the business. The second is a conversation about the numbers.

Conversations about the business are way more productive. And fun.

But here’s the trick: you don’t get to have a conversation about the business using numbers, until you’ve done the gruntwork of defining the numbers and making sure everyone in the conversation understands what they mean, where they came from, and how they’re defined.

You have to earn that conversation. To do that, you’ve have pay the ante. And if you don’t, guess what happens? Literally endless conversations about the numbers. Painful, slow, unproductive conversations about the numbers. And think of the opportunity cost. All the time you’re discussing the numbers, what aren’t you discussing? The business.

How do you earn the ability to have the right conversation? Here’s my favorite way:

  • Start with a weekly sheet. Not a bunch of dashboard screenclips, but a shared Google sheet that your ops person populates every Sunday night.
  • Decide what you want on it, and where you’re pulling that from. For an e-staff meeting, you’ll want the booking forecast (for both new ARR and churn), pipeline coverage, and bookings to date. Maybe you’ll want to see some triangulation forecasts. Or this/next/all-quarter pipeline. Maybe you’ll want to look at both count and dollars. Maybe you’ll want to separate segments (e.g., corporate vs. enterprise).
  • Present it with context. Whenever you show a number, present context with it. What was it last quarter? Last year? What’s this quarter’s plan? This quarter’s forecast (if applicable)? How much is it forecast to grow year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter?
  • Revew it each week at the Monday staff meeting. After a brief welcome, dive into spreadsheet. See how it works as a tool to drive conversations about the business. Whenever you hit a conversation about the numbers, realize it, stop, and delegate people to resolve the issue(s) offline. A few times per quarter, ask if you should add or cut any rows. Talk about how well the tool is helping you have the conversations we want to have.

Over time, you will refine the sheet into near perfection. Conversations about the business will become the norm. Newbies will realize that they have to learn the numbers — all of them — if they want to contribute to discussions. And nobody will think that they can stall or evade by questioning the data.

The part that people miss is how long that takes. I think it’s measured in quarters, not weeks or months. It takes that long to retrain everyone how to think. And what the numbers mean. And to decide which numbers you really want.

Every leadership team should strive to have conversations about the business using the numbers. The only way I know how to do that is to pay the piper first.

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Posted in Culture, Management, Metrics, Startups

The Three Un’s of Founders

Posted on April 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

[Edited 4/16, see notes at bottom]

I’ve worked with scores of founders and companies over the years and I’ve come to make bright-line distinction between founders and managers.  Let me demonstrate it with a story.

One day long ago I was in a board meeting.  We were discussing the coming year’s budget.  The hotly contested question was:  do we spend $8M or $9M on R&D?  After much wrangling, the board agreed that we should spend $8M.  The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter.  The VCs left first and I was walking out of the room with only the founders.  The CEO said to the CTO as we were leaving, “spend the $9M anyway.”

My jaw hit the floor.  I was aghast, dumbfounded.  What the CEO said was literally incomprehensible to me.  It wasn’t possible.  That’s just not how things are done.

At that moment I realized the difference between a manager and a founder.

As a professional manager [1], we grow up climbing the corporate hierarchy.  We have savoir faire.  We know the rules.  We disagree and commit.  We horse trade.  We split the difference.  But, unless we want to do a deliberate end run to the person in charge, we abide by the decisions of the group.  We are team members in an organization, after all.

Founder aren’t.  While they may strive to be some of those things, in this case, the founders were fresh from university, with little work experience and certainly no ladder climbing.  This wasn’t some organization they were part of.  They started it, based on their research.  It was their company.  And if they thought it spending an extra $1M on R&D was the right thing to do, well, they were going to do it.  That’s a founder.

I write this post in two spirits:

  • To former-manager founders [2] as a reminder that you are now a founder and need to think like one.  It’s your company.  Your investors and advisors will have plenty of opinions but if you end up buried, you will be buried alone.  Unlike your VCs and advisors, you have but one life to give for your company [3].  Act like it — you’re not an EVP at BigCo anymore!
  • To investors [4], advisors, and startup execs as a reminder that founders are not managers, even though sometimes we might like them to act more as if they were.

Example:  a founder is raising a seed round off $1M in ARR and a VC is asking a lot of questions about CAC and LTV.

  • Manager response:  “Well, I know a CAC of 1.7 is high but we are ramping quickly and carrying a lot of unproductive sales capacity that hurts the CAC ratio.”
  • Founder response:  “This is a seed round.  I have two barely qualified SDRs and me selling this stuff.  We don’t have a sales model, so why are you calculating its efficiency?  The only thing we’ve been trying to prove — and we’ve proven it — is that people will pay for our software.”

The manager tries to be reasonable, answer the question, and preserve optionality in raising money from this target.  The founder highlights the absurdity of the question, wonders if this is a VC that they want to partner with in building their company, and isn’t shy about letting their feelings leak out.

The first example, combined with many other experiences, has led me to create the three “un’s” of founders.  Compared to managers, founders are:

  • Unreasonable.  Heck, the whole idea of starting a company is unreasonable.  Taking it to $10M in ARR is unreasonable.  Thinking you have the best product and company in the category is unreasonable.  Becoming a unicorn is unreasonable.  There’s nothing inherently reasonable about any of the things a founder needs to do.   In fact, that’s one reason why some founders are successful:  they don’t know what they can’t do.  Don’t expect someone take a series of very unreasonable risks and then be entirely reasonable in every subsequent management discussion thereafter.  It’s not how it works.  We expect every parent to think their child is the greatest and want what’s best for them; the same holds for founders and companies.
  • Uncompromising.  Managers are trained to split the difference, find middle ground, and keep options open.  In essence, to compromise.  Founders can’t compromise.  They know they will fail if they try to be all things to all people; they know the old saw that a camel is a horse designed by committee.  They know intense focus on being the best in the world at one thing is the key to their success.  If one VC on the board wants to go North and another wants to go East, a manager will tend towards Northeast, North, or East.  A founder — because in their mind it’s their company — will make up their own mind about what’s best for the company and potentially travel in another dimension, like up or down.  Getting promoted in a big company is about keeping those above you happy.  Creating a successful company is about getting the right answer, and not whether everyone is happy with it.
  • Unapologetic.  Managers are professionals who are paid to do things right.  Thus, they tend to count negatives like errors and strikeouts.  They apologize for missed quarters or bad hires.  Founders own the team.  They want to win.  While they don’t like errors and strikeouts, they neither obsess over them nor even necessarily care about minimizing them; they’re not trying to keep their resume free of red correction ink.  They’re trying to win in the market and create a leading company.  Errors are going to happen.  Fix the big ones so they don’t happen again, but let’s keep moving forward.  Yes, we missed last quarter, but how do we look on the year?  We don’t belabor the mistakes we made in getting to where we are, we focus on where we are and where we’re going.

I’m not saying all these un’s are great all the time, and I would encourage founders to recognize and appropriately mitigate them.  I am saying that manger-founders, particularly those who founded companies (or took over as CEO) after long successful careers at big tech companies, need to think more like founders and less like managers.

# # #

Notes
[1] Having never founded a company and as someone who has indeed climbed the corporate hierarchy I view myself as a manager — an entrepreneurial, and perhaps difficult, one — but a manager nevertheless.

[2] And, to some extent, first-time CEOs

[3] You are not living, as one friend calls it, the portfolio theory approach to life.

[4] Who probably don’t need the reminder, but the advisors might.

[Edited] I remove the word “successful” from the title as it was a last-minute, SEO-minded addition and a reader or two correctly called me out saying, “plenty of unsuccessful founders have these three traits as well.”  That’s true and since arguing that “the three un’s” somehow separate successful from unsuccessful founders was never the point of the post — they are, imho, what distinguishes founders (or founder mentality) from managers (or manager mentality) — I removed “successful” from the title.

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Posted in Career, CEO, Culture, Silicon Valley, Startups, VC

What Are The Units On Your Lead SaaS Metric — And What Does That Say About Your Culture

Posted on February 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Quick:

  • How big is the Acme deal?  $250K.
  • What’s Joe’s forecast for the quarter?  $500K
  • What’s the number this year?  Duh.  $7,500K.

Awesome.  By the way:  $250K what?  $500K what?  $7,500K what?  ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed ARR, contracted ARR, terminal ARR, or something else?

Defining those terms isn’t the point of this post, so see note [1] below if interested.

The point is that these ambiguous, unitless conversations happen all the time in enterprise software companies.  This isn’t a post about confusion; the vast majority of the time, everyone understands exactly what is being said.  What those implicit units really tell you about is culture.

Since there can be only one lead metric, every company, typically silently, decides what it is.  And what you pick says a lot about what you’re focused on.

  • New ARR means you’re focused on sales adding water to the SaaS leaky bucket — regardless of whether it’s from new or existing customers.
  • Net New ARR means you’re focused the change in water level in the SaaS leaky bucket — balancing new sales and churn — and presumably means you hold AEs accountable for both sales and renewals within their patch.
  • New Logo ARR means you’re focused on new ARR from new customers.  That is, you’re focused on “lands” [2].
  • Bookings means you’re focused on cash [3], bringing in dollars regardless of whether they’re from subscription or services, or potentially something else [4].
  • TCV, which became a four-letter word after management teams too often conflated it with ARR, is probably still best avoided in polite company.  Use RPO for a similar, if not identical, concept.
  • Committed ARR usually means somebody important is a fan of Bessemer metrics, and means the company is (as with Net New ARR) focused on new ARR net of actual and projected churn.
  • Terminal ARR means you’re focused on the final-year ARR of multi-year contracts, implying you sign contracts with built-in expansion, not a bad idea in an NDR-focused world, I might add.
  • Contracted ARR can be a synonym for either committed or terminal ARR, so I’d refer to the appropriate bullet above as the case may be.

While your choice of lead metric certainly affects the calculations of other metrics (a bookings CAC or a terminal-ARR CAC) that’s not today’s point, either.  Today’s point is simple.  What you pick says a lot about you and what you want your organization focused on.

  • What number do you celebrate at the all hands meeting?
  • What number do you tell employees is “the number” for the year?

For example, in my opinion:

  • A strong sales culture should focus on New ARR.  Yes, the CFO and CEO care about Ending ARR and thus Net New ARR, but the job of sales is to fill the bucket.  Someone else typically worries about what leaks out.
  • A shareholder value culture would focus on Ending ARR, and ergo Net New ARR.  After all, the company’s value is typically a linear function of its Ending ARR (with slope determined by growth).
  • A strong land-and-expand culture might focus on Terminal ARR, thinking, regardless of precisely when they come in, we have contracts that converge to a given total ARR value over time [5].
  • Conversely, a strong land and expand-through-usage culture might focus on New Logo ARR (i.e., “land”), especially if the downstream, usage-based expansion is seen as somewhat automatic [6].
  • A cash-focused culture (and I hope you’re bootstrapped) would focus on bookings.  Think:  we eat what we kill.

This isn’t about a right or wrong answer [7].  It’s about a choice for your organization, and one that likely changes as you scale.  It’s about mindfulness in making a subtle choice that actually makes a big statement about what you value.

# # #

Notes
[1] For clarity’s sake, ARR is annual recurring revenue, the annual subscription value.  ACV is annual contract value which, while some treat as identical to ARR, others treat as first-year total contract value, i.e., first-year ARR plus year-one services.  Bookings is usually used as a proxy for cash and ergo would include any effects of multi-year prepayments, e.g., a two-year, prepaid, $100K/year ARR contract would be $200K in bookings.  TCV is total contract value which is typically the total (subscription) value of the contract, e.g., a 3-year deal with an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K would have a $600K, regardless of when the cash payments occurred.  New ARR is new ARR from either new customers (often called New Logo ARR) or existing customers (often called Upsell ARR).  Net New ARR is new ARR minus churn ARR, e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, adds $2,000K in new ARR and churns $500K, then net new ARR is $1,500K.  Committed ARR (as defined by Bessemer who defined the term) is “contracted, but not yet live ARR, plus live ARR netted against known projected ARR churn” (e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, has signed contracts that start within an acceptable time period of $2,000K, takes $200K of expected churn in the period, and knows of $500K of new projected churn upcoming, then their ending committed is ARR is $11,500K.  (Why not $11,300K?  Because the $200K of expected churn was presumably already in the starting figure.)  Terminal ARR the ARR in the last year of the contract, e.g., say a contract has an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K, the terminal ARR is $300K [1A].  Contracted ARR is for companies that have hybrid models (e.g., annual subscription plus usage fee) and includes only the contractually committed recurring revenues and not usage fees.

[1A] Note that it’s not yet clear to me how far Bessemer goes out with “contracted” ARR in their committed ARR definition, but I’m currently guessing they don’t mean three years.  Watch this space as I get clarification from them on this issue.

[2] In the sense of land-and-expand.

[3] On the assumptions that bookings is being used as a proxy for cash, which I recommend, but which is not always the case.

[4] e.g., non-recurring engineering; a bad thing to be focused on.

[5] Although if they all do so in different timeframes it becomes less meaningful.  Also unless the company has a track record of actually achieving the contractually committed growth figures, it becomes less credible.

[6] Which it never actually is in my experience, but it is a matter of degree.

[7] Though your investors will definitely like some of these choices better than others.

 

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Posted in Culture, FP&A, SaaS, Sales, Startups

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The Holy Grail of the Repeatable Sales Process: Is Repeatability Enough?

Posted on January 11, 2021 | 6 comments

Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup.  In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process, and infrastructure in place – and end up with a pattern that looks like:

  1. Hire 1 salesrep, which seems to be working so we …
  2. Hire 2 more salesreps, which seems to be mostly working so we think “Eureka!” and we …
  3. Hire 10 more salesreps overnight

With the result that 8 of the 10 salesreps hired in phase three flame out within a year.  You end up missing numbers and hiring a new VP of Sales who inherits a smoldering rubble of a salesforce which they must rebuild, nearly from scratch.  The cost:  $3-5M of wasted capital [1] and, more importantly, 12-18 months of lost time.

But let’s say you heed Leslie’s lessons and get through this phase.  Once you’re up to 20-30 reps, you don’t just need sales to be working, you need to prove that you have attained the Holy Grail of startup sales:  a repeatable sales process.

Everyone has their own definition of what “repeatable sales process” means and how to measure if you’ve attained it.  Here are mine.

A repeatable sales process means:

  1. You hire salesreps with a standard hiring profile
  2. You give them a standard onboarding program
  3. You have standard support ratios (e.g., each rep gets 1/2 of a sales consultant, 1/3 of a sales development rep (SDR), and 1/6 of a sales manager)
  4. You have a standard patch (and a method for creating one) where the rep can be successful
  5. You have standard kit including tools such as collateral, presentations, demos, templates
  6. You have a standard sales methodology that includes how you define and execute the sales process

And, of course, it’s demonstrating some repeatable result.  While many folks instinctively drift to “80% of salesreps at 100% (or more) of their quota” they forget a few things:

  • The percentage should vary as function of business model: with a velocity model, monthly quotas, and a $25K ARR average sales price (ASP), it’s a lot more applicable than with an enterprise model, annual quotas, and a $300K ASP
  • 80% at 100% means you beat plan even if no one overperforms [2] – and that hopefully rarely happens
  • There is a difference between annual and quarterly performance, so while 80% at 100% might be reasonable in some cases on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis it might be more like 50%
  • The reality of enterprise software is that performance is way more volatile than you might like it to be when you’re sitting in the board room
  • When we’re looking at overall productivity we might look at the entire salesforce, but when we’re looking at repeatability we should look at recently hired cohorts. Does 80% of your third-year reps at quota tell you as much about repeatability – and the presumed performance of new hires – as 80% of your first-year reps cohort?

Long story short, in enterprise software, I’d say 80% of salesreps at 80% of quota is healthy, providing the company is making plan.  I’d look at the most recent one-year and two-year cohorts more than the overall salesforce.  Most importantly, to limit survivor bias, I’d look at the attrition rate on each cohort and hope for nothing more than 20%/year.  What good is 80% at 80% of quota if 50% of the salesreps flamed out in the first year?  Tools like my salesrep ramp chart help with this analysis.

But all that was just the warm-up for the big idea in this post:  is repeatability enough?  Turns out, the other day I was re-reading my favorite book on data governance, Non-Invasive Data Governance by Bob Seiner, and it reminded me of the Capability Maturity Model, from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute.

Here’s the picture that triggered my thinking:

Did you see it?  Repeatable is level two in a five-level model.  Here we are in sales and marketing striving to achieve what our engineering counterparts would call 40% of the way there.  Doesn’t that explain a lot?

To think about what we should strive for, I’m going to switch models, to CMMI, which later replaced CMM.   While it lacks a level called “repeatable” – which is what got me thinking about the whole topic – I think it’s a better model for thinking about sales [3].

Here’s a picture of CMMI:

I’d say that most of what I defined above as a repeatable sales process fits into the CMMI model as level 3, defined.  What’s above that?

  • Level 4, quantitively managed. While most salesforces are great about quantitative measurement of the result – tracking and potentially segmenting metrics like quota performance, average sales price, expansion rates, win rates – fewer actually track and measure the sales process [2].  For example, time spent at each stage, activity monitoring by stage, conversion by stage, and leakage reason by stage.  Better yet, why just track these variables when you can act on them?  For example, put rules in place to take squatted opportunities from reps and give them to someone else [3], or create excess stage-aging reports that will be reviewed in management meetings.
  • Level 5, optimizing. The idea here is that once the process is defined and managed (not just tracked) quantitatively, then we should be in a mode where we are constantly improving the process.  To me, this means both analytics on the existing process as well as qualitative feedback and debate about how to make it better.  That is, we are not only in continual improvement mode when it comes to sales execution, but also when it comes to sale process.  We want to constantly strive to execute the process as best we can and also strive to improve the process.  This, in my estimation, is both a matter of culture and focus.  You need a culture that process- and process-improvement-oriented.  You need to take the time – as it’s often very hard to do in sales – to focus not just on results, but on the process and how to constantly improve it.

To answer my own question:  is repeatability enough?  No, it’s not.  It’s a great first step in the industrialization of your sales process, but it quickly then becomes the platform on which you start quantitative management and optimization.

So the new question should be not “is your sales process repeatable?” but “is it optimizing?”  And never “optimized,” because you’re never done.

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Notes

[1] Back when that used to be a lot of money

[2] You typically model a 20% cushion between quota and expected productivity.

[3] The nuance is that in CMM you could have a process that was repeatable without being (formally) defined.  CMMI gets rid of this notion which, for whatever it’s worth, I think is pretty real in sales.  That is, without any formal definition, certain motions get repeated informally and through word of mouth.

[4] With the notable exception of average sales cycle length, which just about everyone tracks – but this just looks at the whole process, end to end.  (And some folks start it late, e.g., from-demo as opposed to from-acceptance.)

[5] Where squatting means accepting an opportunity but not working on it, either at all or sufficiently to keep it moving.

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