We focus on scaling and growth. We revel in incredible growth rates, doing better than we did last year, having aspirations to do better next year than we did this year. We are hitting the numbers, maxing our comp plans, keeping our investors happy. We engage in high fives and chest bumping all around.
Of course, that it getting more and more difficult. Fewer are doing this, and it is never easy. We struggle to do more and more, leveraging technology to help get us on target.
What if we hit pause and started doing some math? What if we asked ourselves the question, despite all our success, could we do better.
Let’s walk through some sales math.
If we assume we made our numbers, but reflect on how we did it.
We competed in 1000 qualified deals (We’ve got a good team of SDRs, AEs, and Sales Support). We invested the resources to work those 1000 opportunities to close, hoping to win as much as possible. And we hit our goal!
Our investors want us to scale, we want to earn more. The goal is to double net new revenue next year. We have to close 2000 deals. We start thinking about demand gen, outreach, all the stuff we have to do to find and qualify twice as many deals. There is some relief, we have tools that enable us to scale, infinitely, so we set about the task of finding and closing 2000 deals.
And this is the math too many of us have followed to hit our numbers. And it worked! For years, this formula has led to very predictable growth. Yes, it’s becoming much more difficult. But we know the formula, if we just hit keep hitting the numbers. Or maybe our investors, recognizing this, scale down their expectations. After all, we have the recurring revenue from this year’s deals, last year’s. We focus on renewal retention. But they still want scaling and growth, so we have to find more!
And we do what we have always done, searching for and qualifying more deals.
But then, a propeller head in Sales Ops, poses the unthinkable, “Do you realize, we hit our goals with a 20% win rate?”
We ignore her. we know the scaling formulas, we just work the numbers.
But she persists. “We don’t have to find more opportunities to scale! We just have to win more of the opportunities we find! Why don’t we do that?”
Clearly, she doesn’t understand top of funnel. Scaling is simply a function of top of funnel.
But she keeps on going, “Last year we made our number winning 200 of the 1000 qualified opportunities we competed for. But if we won 300 of those, we would have grown another 50% over what we achieved. What does it take, what do we have to change to win more of the prospects we are already selling to?”
She doesn’t get it, we are striving for efficiency, getting more work done in the time that we have.
But she asks, “Why are we trying to qualify 2000 new opportunities? What if we focus on 1000 and winning 400 of those? We’d still hit our scaling goals!”
She keeps on going, “What if we tried doing better with what we have found, rather than continuing to focus on doing more?”
And that’s the light bulb moment. Better is different than more. Doing better should precede doing more.
And perhaps, when we learn how to first do better, before doing more, we do what is best.
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