In today's ubiquitous SaaS landscape the concept of Land and Expand is a well known sales model. While it has been around for far longer, it is a sales model that is often seen as the default in SaaS companies. However, Land and Expand is not a sales strategy, it is a business strategy which includes the sales model but must go far beyond the sales team. There are differing sales models that can be deployed depending on the product and business strategy, therefore the starting point needs to be looking at which model the business is using.
The execution of Land and Expand is a sales strategy but the sales team need the product, the marketing, pricing, and the whole business to support the strategy. The acquiring Inside sales team that Lands may be the marines, the expansion Enterprise team the artillery, however the business needs to be delivering the supply corps to keep the expansion doing what it is designed to do, which is expanding.
I see three different types of Land and Expand model.
Expansion – This is selling the same product to many different people. Starting in a Department then selling to multiple Departments across multiple Divisions. The sales team sell a small footprint into one Dept, then another, then another; then roll-into Division wide deployment; only when you are the effective standard, do they sell an Enterprise deal. The Enterprise sell is a roll-up of all of the Departments and Divisions. It is a similar sales pitch each time, and the Enterprise deal is based on scale. The product must be designed to benefit from sharing of data, training, implementation, processes etc. The users will all have largely the same user experience. Examples are Salesforce.com in the first years of its existence, Box, Tableau, etc. The sales process is to land in a similar way, land multiple times, and then when a number of landings have been made, expanding breadth, and then join the landings together and expanding upwards into the Enterprise. This necessitates a strategy that makes it easy to get entry time after time.
Extension – This is a diverse but contiguous set of products. The first product you sell creates an anchor that you link additional products. By selling the first product e.g. General Ledger, then you sell extensions for Asset Management, Treasury, Budgeting & Planning. The customer benefits from unification of data, standardization of products, and a single vendor to run multiple processes. The users all have different experiences. Example Salesforce.com as they are today, SAP, Workday, etc. The sales process is to land and push for depth rather than breadth. It is to take the fist landing and use it to go deep across the Enterprise.
Repetition – This is a diverse set of products that are not contiguous, each discrete, each used by a different set of users and each delivers a different user experience. The expansion leverage is not built into the product but is largely in the hands of the sales team and their relationships. The sales process is to land with any number of entry points, understand more about the customer then use this knowledge and the relationships to expand sales while selling different products to different users. The leverage to sell to the Enterprise comes from pricing and relationship synergies. Examples are consulting companies such as Accenture, CA, Infor, etc.
The crucial point is the execution of the Land and Expand sales strategy is different in each case. The product strategy is different, the marketing different, the velocity of revenue is different. When taking a blunt concept such as “Land and Expand” and trying to apply it to every business model, we are not giving sales teams opportunity to maximize success. We need to understand the product strategy, understand the customer’s buying strategy, then apply the optimal Land and Expand sales model.
While SPIN Selling continues to regularly feature in lists of the best sales books of all time and is Amazon's #1 best-selling book on sales, I believe SPIN Selling is dead as it stands and to remain relevant in a modern selling environment, it has to change.
Sales training and sales methodologies remain steeped in a world which is more about the salesperson and internal sales processes, revolving around gathering data from the customer so we can sell to them. As per Rackham’s premise, we still have too many salespeople trying to capture situation data that matters to them and not the customer - hence the need for SPIN in the first place. While many people will advocate Challenger Selling is a replacement for SPIN, I suggest the answer is a combination of the two; the questioning techniques and approach of SPIN remain relevant but need to evolve to meet the digital selling environment of today.
We need to move the Problem part of the process sooner, and so it is SPIN but not as you know it Jim, it is more accurate to rename it PSIN. I accept that PSIN is infinitely less catchy, however, it is more aligned to what I hear when working with customers. The issue, supported by customer feedback, is that with targeted ABM delivering pertinent information to the customer, combined with the depth of digital content that answers the initial customer question of “does this company have a product/solution that fits my problem?” there is an information imbalance between buyer and seller. By the time the customer is finally prepared to talk to an SDR or salesperson the customer already knows if the vendor has a potential solution for their problem, however, the salesperson knows much less about the customer than was the case in a pre-digital world at the same stage in the buying process.
While this data capture can be attempted with marketing techniques such as progressive profiling, the challenge is we get a drop-off in customer engagement the more data we collect and we have to balance the volume of leads with well-qualified leads. We tend to default to more leads and so the customer is advanced in their journey with the salesperson lacking base situational information. When the customer and salesperson first meet, the salesperson is trying to take the customer back to a stage in the buying process the customer completed some time ago. Salespeople open the sales call with too many situation questions that the customer doesn’t want to answer, they want to see the product/solution.
The answer is to move the problem stage to the opening part of the sales call. There will be team members telling you that your product is so full-featured, flexible and fixes so many problems that you can’t define a customers problems up front. I disagree; your product only does a finite number of things, and it only fixes so many problems. If you invest time you can get a list of the problems your customers tell you that you need to address.
The challenge is to ensure the problem statements are sufficiently specific that customers recognise their problems, while not being so specific that you qualify out certain customers. Too general and you get statements like Customers like you want to make more money, are you trying to drive additional revenues?, that’s too general. Do you have an issue with validating ads in cross-domain iframes? - too specific.
When you have these problem statements, I suggest using them early in a sales call. Ideally, when a lead is handed to a salesperson, the lead will be passed with information as to why the customer is prepared to meet, and this reason is your company’s ability to solve a problem or set of problems the customer is facing. Having a salesperson open a call with “other customers like you have problems like this, do any of these resonate?” changes the dynamics of the call. Showing you already understand the customer problems creates empathy with the customer, showing your company understands their problems helps the customer confirm they were right in investing time to meet you, and it will help you uncover more problems than simply following up a situation question with “does that create any problems for you?”. The salesperson will still need to understand the customer's situation, but what you will discover is that the customer gives you the situation information without having to ask many of the usual questions which frustrate customers, thus creating a more positive interaction with the customer.
The conversation flow is now closer to “Do you have a problem with users not following the same business process for processing payments?”, “You bet, we have 10,000 users spread over 5 countries, and we can never get them to follow the same process, it’s a massive problem and often keeps me here over weekends”. In summary, SPIN is dead because with the advent of digital and customers qualifying themselves into your solution, it is PSIN. This is a materially different way of selling using the same techniques you learned in SPIN but applied in a different order, supported by a Challenger Sale proactive understanding of the customer's business.
In Blitzscaling Reid Hoffman describes start-ups as dead by default. What he means is as the endpoint for most start-ups is failure, their default position is death. It is this insight that I apply to one of my hardest-learned lessons. The first, and probably most painful lesson, from selling in a start-up - its not about you. Salespeople cant be effective if they dont care passionately about winning.
It is one of the reasons I look at competitive sports achievements when hiring, especially when hiring graduates into sales functions. If they care about winning at sports, they will care about winning at work. It is also rare for salespeople to be light on ego. Combine these traits and it usually translates to salespeople believing that their wins were predominantly to do with their efforts.
I certainly believed this when I joined my first start-up. When it was successful, I was convinced this was attributable to great selling - my great selling. This was exacerbated as this start-up was led by one of the world's first and greatest blitzscalers, sales was the execution engine of the company. Then I joined my second start-up. This did not go so well. My ego kicked in and I rationalised it was not me, it was them and so I moved on.
The next start-up I joined I worked harder, figuring that we could sell our way out of death. At some point in this journey I realised that there was more to avoiding “death” than just selling. I began to learn about product fit, market fit, and over time experienced lack of funds, hiring people from large companies totally wrong for the company, product misfires, no market, incomplete products, and any number of other issues, sometimes more than one at a time, any or all of which could be the driver to take you to the default position – the Uber journey to start-up death. So, what have I learned that could be of use to you?
Using Hoffman's concept of marines to land on the beach, the army to expand, and the police to manage a steady state, I have adopted the following process which I find works for landing and expansion. Once an organisation reaches the state where it needs policing, I have learned that what follows is not required, and much as I loved cop shows when I was a kid, that personally I don't enjoy it as much.
First, you need to understand that most of the time, when you are brought in from the outside as a sales leader, it is because there is a need to do something differently. Second, the company usually doesn't know what it is that needs doing differently, just that what is being done isn't giving the outcome they expected. The first thing to do is to establish a baseline. What hypothesis drove the delta between what was expected and what was delivered. What does the company think that it is taking to market? Now isn’t the time to worry about the TAM, or the serviceable available market SAM) - the part of the market your product could fit.
The part to focus on right now is the serviceable obtainable market (SOM) - that part of the market that you can actually win. Gain agreement from all on the Executive what they think are the proof points and genetic markers of companies in the SOM, identify which markers you can quantify and measure. Next, segment your targets as tightly as you can within the SOM. Financial Services as a target won't teach you enough.
Financial Services companies range in geography, size, products, target customers, etc. Try to focus in on a specific sub-segment. This helps refine learning that you can use to find other segments that have similar measurable genetic markers you can analyse. While this effort must be data-driven, make the time to listen to the salespeople and others who interacted with the customers, about what works and what doesn't. This is not a win/loss field in your SFA tool, because even if you have a drop-down that says outsold, no salesperson is going to choose it. Most of the time the sales team will choose pricing, and they will do this because that's what the customer told them. No customer ever told a salesperson, were going with the competition because they did a better job selling than you did. Usually they say, you were too expensive, it is more comfortable for the customer to tell them this.
Listen consistently to the people interacting directly with the customers, both won and lost, as to why you are winning, and more importantly, why you are losing. If you were outsold, you could have won this opportunity, and if you could have won the opportunity, you lost because of positioning, focus, effort, training or some combination. To avoid “death”, you need to work out the root cause. When you get it right, work out why and do more of it. When you get it wrong, go back and agree a new hypothesis to test, new measurable markers that will validate or invalidate the hypothesis. Pivot and try to adapt the market focus, the product positioning, the pricing combinations, the promotion, to see if you can get traction before death's icy hand reaches out.
Hypothesis - test - measure - learn - scale. This is what I have learned from my multiple lessons trying to avoid “death by default”. I have found this approach works both in a pure start-up, but also when you are trying to land or expand new verticals, new countries, and new products.
This advice may seem obvious, but how often do we really all agree on the starting hypothesis of what we have before we start selling? How often do win/loss reviews come back with pricing as the reason for loss? Did you measure your last success or failure in a market based upon a sales number rather than the markers you were seeking to understand?
Unless the answer to these were “every time”, “hardly ever” and “Yes”, then I suggest that taking the time to understand what you are testing before you start selling will yield material results. It is this understanding that will guide you to why you are succeeding or failing, where to scale-up efforts, how fast to ramp-up sales, and what to do to optimise for successful and predictable growth.
BOBIBT is something I think every company believes they do well but seldom is that the case. I believe BOBIBT is critical to the success of software companies with more than one product. While the concept extends beyond software companies into any company with complementary products, I believe it is essential in the software industry. I use BOBIBT as an acronym because a) people don’t forget it, and b) because it says on the label what it is in the tin. I will break BOBIBT into its constituent parts.
Best of Breed – no Product Manager gets out of bed saying, “Today I am going to build the third best product in the World”, they get out of bed to build the best product they can. Best of breed should be seen as table stakes and all disciplines from Product to Sales focus on this today. Building and extolling the features, functions, and hopefully articulating the business benefits, is what we do every day. This first part isn’t that hard.
Integrated – this part is a little harder. Many software products interoperate with other products, both from our company and products from other companies. This is also often table stakes, if somewhat harder than building best of breed, because there are many dependencies over which we have no control. We solve integration through API layers, working with third party integration tools, and sometimes just hard coding connectors. Making your product integrate well with other products can be a challenge as you need to keep up to date with changes in your Customer’s use of your products. Integration isn’t a natural first step as it isn’t necessarily focused on being best of breed. Integration means thinking about the Customer’s problems, the Customer’s environment, and understanding they need your product to work well with others. Ensuring this is the case from a Product, and from a Sales and Marketing perspective, requires Customer empathy and focusing on elements that may not seem compelling for you to sell your product today.
Better Together – this is the hard part. I believe it doesn’t have to be so hard, but it usually is. Better together means that your products are not just the best they can be for your Customers, they don’t just work well with your and other products, it means your products work better together than they do with any other competitor's products. The integration of our products must make using your products together, better, faster, cheaper, and reduce the risk of using multiple products. This can mean aligning the user interface, creating a common user experience, reducing steps in transferring data from one product to the next, ensuring data flows seamlessly, data is enhanced picking up other data as it flows through the workflow; you will need to work out what better together means for your products. When your products work better together, you need to ensure this is also articulated in the Sales and Marketing messaging.
I believe the causality of why "better together" is hard is partly due to the way we organize our Product organizations. We ask Product Managers to run their Product line as a business within a business. We give them product targets and we drive them to meet these goals. The Product teams focus on building the best product they can, focusing on producing the best of breed product in their category. If producing a best of breed product requires integration then they may add this to their focus, however, their primary focus is making the best product they can to meet their targets. We don’t task Product Managers with delivering synergy across our company’s end-to-end product lines. Making their product work better together with another Product Manager’s product isn’t an objective. BOBIBT may not help sell more of the product they are responsible for and therefore not help make their product targets. "Better together" takes work as the entire company from Product to Engineering to Marketing to Sales have to embrace the concept.
I believe the solution, as with Land and Expand, is that a BOBIBT focus needs an owner, someone whose role it is to ensure that your products are not just the best they can be, they don’t just work well together, they actually work better together.
The real value of BOBIBT is you can actually afford to not always be the best of breed. When your Customer knows you have a BOBIBT vision for all your products, they will tolerate one of your products lagging the market somewhat because they know ultimately the whole will deliver more value than the sum of the parts. I learned this approach in my time at Oracle and then Sybase. Oracle had a BOBIBT strategy, Sybase only a best of breed strategy. Oracle’s approach was to sell the whole product suite as working better together, database, development tools, integration software, applications, etc. Sybase’s position was to position that each product was independent and it didn’t matter which other products you used them with, they declared this loudly and proudly. For those that remember Sybase, the lack of a BOBIBT approach was part of the reason, in my opinion, as to why Oracle is Oracle and Sybase is not.
BOBIBT extends beyond software; Apple is a great example of BOBIBT working beautifully. The integration of the iPhone, iTunes, iCloud, MacBook, iPad, etc. is a perfect example. It is also an example of where Customers will overlook best of breed. I was discussing BOBIBT with a colleague and they said they knew the new Samsung was a better phone because it had a better camera and longer battery life (and they hated the battery life on the iPhone), but they would stay with the iPhone because it would be too hard to switch. When executed well, BOBIBT becomes the best of breed positioning for your entire company.
One of the most common problems start-ups struggle with is seemingly great meetings with prospects that stay in the pipeline endlessly. Especially when founders attend meetings, meeting after meeting, with both new and existing prospects, result in sales cycles that never seem to end. At some point, the founder may get frustrated and start to blame the salespeople but the salespeople are not the root cause. These meetings are what I call YAGMs – Yet Another Good Meeting.
It’s easy for start-ups to have YAGMs. In the early days of a start-up, you have a different approach to a business problem, you are populated with super-smart people, charismatic people, industry experts, sometimes all of the above. Customers are prepared to talk to you because you have something interesting to say. Something new, something innovative, something that is worth the customer's time. The customer asks a lot of intelligent questions which further convince you they are interested, especially when they ask if the product does a thing and you state it doesn’t but it could. Now the customer seems more interested. You leave the meeting convinced that if only you go and build that thing they will become a customer.
A material cause of YAGMs is founders often feel more is more. It is twice as good to talk to ten customers than five, and at least four times better to talk to twenty. Being busy in a start-up feels like a substitute for money. But it’s not. You are meeting customers because you want to build a business, to build a business you will need money from customers, and now is better than later.
The solution to YAGMs is to ask the dollar question. The dollar question is seemingly simple but often too hard for start-ups, especially founders. The question is, “If the product were a Dollar/Euro/Pound/etc, would you buy it today?” Sometimes you have to follow-up with, “I am not saying it’s a dollar, but if it was, what would you do?”. The reason it is so hard to ask is it is a closed question, it may get a “No”, so if you don’t ask it, you get what feels like a "Yes".
Steve Blank in his book “Four steps to the Epiphany”, which is a great book, suggests a similar approach, but this is a subtle difference. Steve suggests offering the product for free, but I have tried both ways and you get a different reaction when you ask for money. When asking “Would you take this if the product was free?”, if the response is negative; the customer would not use the product even if free, the answer is typically about the features and people try to let you down easily. The business equivalent of the break-up standard of; “It’s not you, it’s me.” The customer lists reasons why it does not fit their requirements at this time but may do so in future. This completely distracts you as you do not truly find out what the real business objections are, worse you believe it is a timing issue and if you just go off and build the right feature set they will buy.
When you ask a prospect to part with money, even a tiny amount, you hear very different answers. The customer replies with a list that may include reasons as wide-ranging as “We don’t buy from small vendors”, “We are reducing the number of vendors we have”, “We can’t get approval for any products at this time”, “I have a vendor that already offers something like this”, "We only buy CRM products from Salesforce". By opening the line of questioning about money, you uncover if they are prepared to do business with you. If they won’t give you a dollar, they aren’t a prospect. If they aren’t a prospect; you should be spending your time elsewhere. This simple question stops YAGMs in their tracks.
In any start-up it is easy to not understand that your most valuable commodity isn’t cash, it’s time. You need to use your time effectively to achieve your goals. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Professor John Dawes, only 5% of the TAM are looking to buy your product in any given Quarter, it is essential you only spend time with those who are most likely to be in that 5%.
This approach isn’t just for start-ups. I have run mature sales teams with AEs having great meeting after great meeting without understanding if the customer can do business with us. Please note, this is not part of the old school qualification process to understand budget. That’s the subject of another post, according to Gartner research more than half of prospects don’t have a budget when they start talking to you, so there is no point trying to understand how much it is, the point of the dollar question is to remove payment from the equation and make certain you are talking to the customer about how they would do business with you, and if they won’t, why they won’t.
The first question to ask is if you are getting the results from your sales team that you want, expect, or need. I suspect the answer is "No", perhaps even a "Hell No!". What follows will start you on a journey to improving sales execution and moving you from an internally-focused sales process to a buyer-centric strategy.
According to Gartner research, 80% of B2B buyer interactions will be via digital channels by 2025. However, that doesn’t suddenly start Jan 1st 2025, that change is happening now. Too many start-ups are based on the principle that 100% of buyer interactions are through salespeople. It is easy to like this approach. We hired salespeople to make revenue, if they don't make revenue, it's the sales team's issue. We hold them accountable, and off they go. Feels good for about a minute until you realize you can't make the number with a freshly ramped team of new hires. Missed goals, blame, and confusion.
The reason this approach is both dated and a material problem, is that by trying to diagnose any sales execution issues, by asking questions like, “Why is Charlie missing their number?”, “What are we going to do about Alex?”, “What the hell is going on with the sales team?”, is not fixing the right problem. This may have been the right way to solve the problem ten years ago (it may not but that's a different debate), but it isn’t the first place to start today. I already hear cries of, “It’s sales execution, of course it’s the right place to start.”
The issue is selling execution but it may not be sales execution. Sales execution is about the sales team, and selling execution is about the process the customer goes through when buying from you. If 80% of interactions are digital, the most likely place to look for the issue is in the digital flow of information from your company to the customer. It is the 80/20 rule where the 80% is literally in the title.
Salespeople selling in today’s landscape are increasingly focused on helping the customer contextualize the multiple channels through which the buyer is interacting; therefore when you are not getting the results you expect, try looking in some of the following places:-
Are you seeing an unexpected drop-off (a choke point) at a specific interaction point in the pipeline – perhaps you are not delivering the buyer the information they need at that point in the interaction
Do you know what information the buyer wants? Are you certain?
Do you have the information the buyer needs at that point in the interaction, or are you relying on the sales team to create this content?
How, and when, is the information to be delivered? Is it being delivered as per the plan?
Have you trained salespeople on the ideal buyer interactions and the context behind the content delivered to the buyer via all channels you are communicating with the customers?
This is not an excuse that salespeople should not be accountable for revenue, however, we must recognize the days of the salesperson as the channel to the market, whose job it was to build relationships and drive sales forward as a one-man band has gone the way of the fax machine. Buyer's behavior has evolved, starting with the move of product content online twenty years ago, and this change in buying behavior accelerated with the pandemic. When we diagnose sales execution issues, we have to start with the buyer interactions, and how the customer buys. As that has changed, we have to adapt from simplistic sales execution, "Let's fire Nic," to look at our end-to-end selling execution and how the buyer is consuming and understanding information.
Salespeople have work to do, evolving from product salespeople to context sherpas, making certain the customer is consuming the information that convinces them to choose our product and helping them make sense of the information overload they find themselves buried beneath in this digital-first environment. Where we must hold the sales team accountable is for understanding what information we should share with the buyer, helping the customer understand this information, understanding what the competition and analysts in the space are saying and why, and helping the customer sort through this firehose of information to make an informed decision. It is the salesperson as a sherpa rather than the salesperson as a mountaineer ready to plant the flag.
This move by buyers to digital interactions should be a benefit. It is scalable, it means salespeople deliver materially more revenue per head, the outcome can be optimized through data analysis, and most importantly it means we are selling the way our customers want to buy (more on this in a subsequent post). When we are focusing on sales execution and not the selling motion, we are going to replace salespeople and not fix the underlying problem because we have not evolved with the customer. Understanding the customer, understanding how and why they buy, then selling to them the way they want to buy, is the key to the future of selling.
In the next five years, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to revolutionize the way business-to-business (B2B) sales are conducted. Here are just a few of the ways AI will transform B2B sales in the coming years:
Lead Generation - AI algorithms will become increasingly skilled at identifying and targeting high-quality sales leads, making the sales process more efficient and effective.
Predictive Sales - AI will analyze vast amounts of data and make predictions about future sales outcomes, enabling sales teams to prioritize their efforts and close more deals.
Personalized Sales Experiences - AI-powered sales tools will allow sales teams to provide more personalized experiences for their prospects and customers, helping to build stronger relationships and drive more sales.
Streamlined Workflows - AI will help automate repetitive tasks and streamline sales workflows, freeing up sales teams to focus on more strategic activities.
Improved Customer Insights - AI will provide sales teams with deep insights into their customers' behavior and preferences, enabling them to make more informed sales decisions and better understand their customers' needs.
With these and other advances in AI technology, B2B sales will become more efficient, effective, and customer-focused. As a result, sales teams will be better equipped to grow their business and drive success for their companies.
Anyone who reads my LinkedIn articles will know I try to take the best of what we have learned from past successes and failures, look to the best of the technology we have available today, and combine this to deliver a new way of seeing how we can be more effective when selling. With that in mind, please note I did not write any of the above, this was all written by ChatGPT. I asked it to write me a blog post on the future of AI in B2B sales. While I don't like the writing style, and I hope I would offer more creativity in the answers, I think it is hard to read this, which took about 5% of the time it would have taken me to write it, and not see that AI will make a material difference to the role of B2B sales in the future. Initially, I think we will need to learn how to use the technology to our advantage, longer term, we will need to rethink how we go to market. When everyone is using similar technology we will need to bring human creativity to differentiate our offering but we are going to have to think fast and move quickly.
I can only take credit for the idea of writing this post in this way and the last paragraph. Sleep well :)
This was written as a response to a blog by the brilliant Dave Kellogg - if you don’t read https://kellblog.com/ I recommend you start. Having written what was meant to be a short response to an article Dave wrote on GTM troubleshooting and how to address the underlying issues, it felt there was enough content to warrant a post.
When my team started missing our targets a few years ago, I implemented an approach that proved so effective I now recommend companies I advise to explore whether it could work for them. When first making the change, it went against everything I believed in for 20 years, but it made a fundamental difference on many levels, most importantly on the results.
Starting with some context, because if I put myself in your shoes, as you read my suggestion, you will create the same objections I went through, so I will address them head-on. It was an enterprise software company. We had long sales cycles, we closed large seven-figure deals with large corporations, our largest market was the US, but we had sales across the world from the US to New Zealand to Beijing to Berlin. While the suggestion is something we see in companies with high volume and low transaction values, it is often not how we behave when there are enterprise-class customers. Often, the enterprise approach of thinking in quarters then pervades the rest of the organisation.
The change was to stop measuring, thinking, and acting in quarters. We stopped at every level, except the CFO, who had to pull that part of the plan together for the BOD. It is important to stress that even if we have a monthly approach, as per above with high-volume/low-value transactional sales, if we still think in quarters it pervades the organisation from how we think to how we speak, to how we compensate teams. To make the change effective, we need to make the change everywhere other than the CFOs desktop.
We started thinking, working, and delivering in a monthly cadence. The first few months, it felt so uncomfortable that I thought I was going to work wearing a thong for someone half my size. Every part of it felt wrong. We made the change because we were not delivering and decided to focus on the smallest meaningful increment, but the unexpected consequences and benefits became so material that we stuck with it.
The overriding benefit was wthat e started to make our numbers and continued to make our numbers. I know I will forget some, but the benefits came in many other areas as well.
Marketing and Sales started working more closely together. We would monitor the pipeline weekly and work together to adjust. If one week was down, sales would try to help build the pipeline, but when we were down for a month, we treated it like an all-hands-to-the-pump action. When we previously measured in quarters, we just didn't have the same urgency. We had time to course correct when we were going in the wrong direction.
Close cycles within the quarter went from back-end loaded - too often at 5:55pm on the last day of the quarter, which gave me ulcers - to smoothing across the quarter. We started to do more business in the first and second months of the quarter, eventually ending up with a position where sometimes the biggest month in any given quarter was the first or second. This not only reduced emotional stress, it also reduced stress on the organisation, from on-boarding, to legal, finance, and sales. All had more time to spend with more customers earlier in the quarter.
We became more customer-focused. While it may suit customers' purchasing departments to take advantage of sales organizations focusing on a quarter end - as we created our own internal compelling event for the customer to take advantage of - we were not aligned with the customer buying centre who just want a solution to their problem when they are ready to buy it, not when our quarter dictates.
We stood out against our competition. Having removed salespeople's quarterly bonuses, we looked like we meant it when we said what we cared about was solving their problems. When sales start asking the buyer if they think they will be able to get the contract completed by the 30th September, it is clear to the customer we prioritize our needs, what we want is not what they want. The change is easy to make from a customer perspective as it is aligned with their needs.
Every quarter we would exhaust our team and the customers' teams. We would fall over the end of the quarter like a marathon runner crossing the finish line—fatigued, bruised, worn out. The first month of the next quarter we were massaging our aching muscles, then the second warming up, until we did it all over again.
The hardest part of the change, other than letting go myself, was selling the approach internally. The CEO and CFO were resistant, with the arguments you would expect: "We are measured quarterly, the sales team need to be held to account," "It's your job to make sure they do what they need to, you're letting them off the hook," and many more. The first time I had to go with a "trust me" approach and the evidence meant we maintained it, subsequently I was able to go with an "I did this before and these were the results."
It is a daunting change, it feels counterintuitive, and there is innate muscle memory wanting to pull back to quarterly focus as soon as there are a couple of bad months. However, I suggest trying it. It makes a material difference to the organisation, to the customers, and the results.
Adding one point of clarity thanks to input from Steve Fearon. We need to think longer term than the month just not in quarterly chunks, and ideally not in annual ones either. Think in terms of a rolling sales budget and pipeline. If we have 9 month sales cycles, we need to be looking at leads coming in today, when they will impact results and we need to make certain we have what we need. What we need to move away from is thinking in quarterly increments and move to a monthly increment that, like our targets, roll forever into the distance.
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