I’m relieved to learn that all we need to do to be successful in 2025 is to become hyper-efficient! We still have 11 months to go, imagine how much we can accomplish.
OK, OK, you know how deeply my tongue is planted in my cheek.
For close to two decades, we’ve been driven by a scaling philosophy, stated differently, a volume, velocity approach to selling.
We’ve developed all the math equations to support this philosophy, then adapted the basic strategy over time.
The original volume velocity philosophy was very straight forward. Want to grow 100% in the coming year? The answer is simple, just double everything, 2X the SDRs, 2X the AEs, and so forth. 3X, 4x growth, just do the math and scale–all regardless of expense.
And for earlier stage companies, that worked for a while. Then at a certain point following the equations was very difficult. Adding 5-10 is pretty easy. Adding 500 becomes a challenge (I worked with a client where this was the math).
But then, something else started happening. The math was starting to fail. For example, 5 years ago, orgs needed 400-500 outreaches to generate a response. Recently, it’s 1200-1500 to generate the same response. So we had to ramp up the volume velocity. The old math didn’t work, but we knew the new math. If, for example, we need 100 responses, we only needed to generate 150,000 outreaches.
And we could step up to that through the same tried and true methods: hire more people, leverage more tools and technology. Technology made the incremental expense of an outreach $0, so theoretically, we could to millions of outreaches for virtually no cost. We generated lists, sent emails, increased frequency, always following the scaling equations.
And those started not working well. Win rates, plummeted to 15-20%. Average deal sizes went down, sales cycles went up. But no problem, we weren’t constrained by cost, hire more people, buy more tools, outsource demand/lead gen…. We just ran the mathematical equations.
It became more difficult to scale, but we kept ramping the volume and velocity. There was no limit.
But all of a sudden, investors introduced a new word to their portfolio companies. the “P” word—Profitability. The idea of growth regardless of cost disappeared. We had to manage this within certain spending limits.
But we still had our equations, we could still run the math. We started working in efficiency. How do we get more work done in a given amount of time of for a given cost? The initial solutions were easy, managers cracked the whip, shouting, “Do more or you are gone!” And some small improvement were made, but people didn’t like it so they moved. Then we had to hire and onboard replacements. It was natural to look at tools and technologies. All sorts of tools enabled us to, at very low cost, dramatically ramp up the volume. We could double, triple, quadruple the activities and work that was done with relatively low costs.
So we kept running our equations, do more of the same things, but do them faster!
But the equations weren’t working. Customers weren’t responding. We started leveraging multiple channels for outreach. We learned the importance of personalization. But, going back to the previous example, how to we hyper personalize 150,000 outreaches–Oh, and those 150K outreaches were no longer producing 100 responses, they were only producing 75. But we could do the math, ramp up the volumes.
And then we found our salvation, we were saved! ChatGPT and other LLMs could help us scale, personalize, virtually without limitation. And we are seeing, people slow the process down. We are now creating agents to do this automatically. Outreach agents, SDR agents, all sorts of agents. Getting more and more done in the same day. Doing it at very low cost.
We have now seen the possibility of making the phrase, “To infinity and beyond” a reality (almost literally).
We can imagine a world of hyper-efficiency—getting more and more out of each human being in each hour and reveling over replacing as many as we can through agents. Life is sweet! We just keep running the math equations.
But increasingly, all these things are working less and less. You’ve seen some of the data–the skyrocketing number of outreaches to get a response, the declining win rates and more. Fewer than 40% of sellers are making their goals. So those 60% are hyper efficient. They are doing the volume and velocity, but not producing the results and outcomes expected.
Results continued to plummet. It seemed the more volume/velocity, however efficiently produced, was creating a backlash. First everyone was doing it, inflicting these things on customers. And customers responded: “ENOUGH!” They developed tools to manage our volume velocity outreaches. They recognized our hyper-efficient conversations were creating no value and were not helping, so they stopped them, blocking more and more of seller attempts to engage.
This has forced organizations to rethink their growth and scaling plans. It’s much more difficult to 2X, 3X, 4X growth when all the activities we do are producing less and less revenue! And then there’s the “P” word. Investors have reversed the growth regardless of cost strategy.
But we still have hope, volume, velocity, hyper-efficiency are still within reach. We are being saved by AI, LLMs, Agents!
For the time being!
And I watch this, confused. Why is no one asking:
- How do we increase our win rates? The math changes profoundly if we go from 15-20% win rates to 30-40% win rates?
- How do we increase our average deal sizes?
- How do we reduce the buying/selling cycle?
- How do we learn to focus on what the customer is interested in, rather than what we are interested in?
- What should we change?
- How do we become more effective?
And when we start asking those questions we find pretty easy answers. And the time to results in making these changes is remarkably short. I commonly help organizations double win rates in 90-120 days.
The answers to these questions change the math–shifting it in our favor.
Just doubling win rates has the potential for doubling revenue attainment and growth. And the incremental investment is small, after all, we are already spending time on these opportunities. We just aren’t winning them. So a novel strategy is simply, “How do we win more?”
I’m all for scaling and growth.
I’m all for efficiency–as long as we are focused on being efficient at that which is highly effective.
It seems so obvious, but why are so few doing this? Why are so few asking these questions?
Perhaps, analyzing, reflecting, thinking, strategizing, experimenting, changing is too inefficient?
Perhaps it is right to focus on hyper-efficiency. We have it within our ability to create crap at the speed of light!
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post I was interested in how they would handle this. The post is snarky and very sarcastic. I wondered if they would get the underlying message. They did a great job! Enjoy!
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