Chris Bustos

The path to $10MM ARR is about finding your repeatable, scalable sales motion. The formula is simple, but not easy. It looks like this: Effort + Enthusiasm + Messaging + Lead Quality = Results When you are scaling a sales team, your job is to manage the inputs. Those are the things on the left side of this equation. If you can reduce the variability of the inputs, you will have more consistent results. Put another way. Consistent inputs leads to consistent outputs. Let's break it down... 1. Effort is the driver for your sales performance. You cannot scale without consistent effort. Effort includes the velocity of sales activity (phone calls, emails, meetings, etc.). Effort also includes the way that you execute your sales activity. This is your sales process and sales playbook. You can improve the quality of your effort with learning and development. 2. Enthusiasm is an amplifier for your effort. You have to act like you want to earn the business. A little enthusiasm goes a long way in closing more business. I've found that you can't teach enthusiasm. You must hire for it. 3. Messaging is how you get prospects to believe what you believe. Your messaging is your value prop. It's how you approach your ICP. It's the way that you convince customers that their current version of the world is no longer acceptable and they must make a chance. The best messaging illustrates the consequences of inaction. 4. Lead quality drives your conversion rate You have to stay focused on your ICP. The more variable your lead quality, the more inconsistent your sales results. The best effort, enthusiasm, and messaging are helpless if you are focused on the wrong accounts. This is the formula for predictable, repeatable, scalable sales. Manage the consistency of your inputs and you will have consistent outputs. What about you? What's your formula for repeatable results?

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There’s a dramatic divide in how GTM teams are setting up signal-driven outbound. Some teams are thrilled with a 2% conversion rate, and others expect 20%. Here’s why: It comes down to whether your motion is for SMBs or MM / ENT. Companies selling to SMBs have a massive TAM. Using Bluebirds, we found ~500k accounts in the US with less than 200 employees. With smaller ACVs and this large of a TAM, SMB motions need to rely on automation to make the economics work. Here are the benchmarks at an account level: - 0.3% meeting rate with just email sequences, no signals - 1% meeting rate with email sequences that are signal-driven (job change, job postings, fundraising, etc.) - 3% to 5% meeting rate with email, call, connection requests and signals It’s difficult to scale beyond these benchmarks without smaller territories and higher-touch rep involvement, which breaks the unit economics. Luckily this works really well if you can automatically touch thousands of accounts per week using tools like Smartleads, Bluebirds, Clay, dozens of inboxes, Orum / Nooks, etc. On the flip side, companies selling to MM / ENT have a much tighter TAM of ~50k accounts. After tiering, reps might be responsible for 100-200 accounts and need to drive $30k+ ACVs. Three VP of Sales running this GTM motion said they expect their reps to convert at a 15-30% meeting book rate, within 2 weeks of working an account. These teams still want signals to improve productivity and know where to focus, but don’t wan’t extreme outbound automation. Their tech stack looks more traditional, using Outreach instead of Smartleads, a moderate number of inboxes, and something like Bluebirds for signals. One approach isn’t better than the other, it just depends on your GTM motion. Feels like this nuance has been glossed over in the signal-driven outbound conversation on LinkedIn.

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Should CRO’s even exist? Not if they’re going to be: - Super expensive glorified head of sales - With no marketing or CS experience - Compensated like an account executive  - No focus on ICP or aligning the entire GTM motion - No coordination with peers in cross-functions - No P&L fluency or ability to read a P&L  - Only focused on new business with no understanding of recurring impact - No knowledge of the bowtie or systems designed to deliver ongoing customer value - Have a short term view and only care about the quarter CROs should absolutely exist if they: - Can come from Marketing, CS, or RevOps not just Sales - Have foundational understanding and respect for other functions - Are compensated like all other executives - Are focused on driving tight alignment across the GTM motion - Are focused on collaborating across Sales, Marketing, CS leveraging data generated from RevOps - Are focused on a customer journey that begins when the prospect lands on the website and continues through at least 3 annual renewals - Have a deep knowledge of the bowtie  - Have built expertise as revenue architects - Have a long term view that balances short term urgency with long term enterprise value Revenue generation is a team sport. Recurring revenue is driven by recurring impact. If you’re leading the revenue function, you have to understand that and you have to be an expert at driving tight alignment across the customer journey to deliver that impact. This is the way.

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If you want to hit $100M ARR (and position your company for true scale), you must master enterprise sales. Here are the 11 critical skills your team needs to consistently close 6, 7 and 8 figure deals: 1. Understanding fundamental differences between transactional selling and enterprise sales 2. Developing the right pricing strategies to align with your customer 3. True multi-stakeholder and multi-threaded sales processes 4. High impact account-based marketing strategies including dedicated virtual programming 5. Field sales support and in-person program development 6. Territory design and comp planning 7. Building the team including pre-sale architects, reps, and customer success 8. Aligning the organization and staffing new functions 9. Building out services to ensure your customers solve their problems 10. Mutual action planning built around client outcomes 11. Deal management at the Board level These are all fundamental skills Pavilion taught previously but the scope and intensity are different when it comes to true Enterprise sales. That’s why Enterprise GTM School is so important and it’s become a foundation of our educational curriculum. We’ll teach you the entire enterprise playbook, give you the workbooks, tools, and processes, and prepare you to hit true scale. The course is included FREE with Executive Membership. It's an absolute can’t miss! And it starts TOMORROW Apply here: https://lnkd.in/ezspvCZe P.S. Not a member yet? DM me to get 10% off Enterprise GTM School

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The average tenure for a PE/VC-backed GTM executive is 17 months. At this pace, you'll work for 14 companies over a 20 year career. Here's the 7 things you need to achieve your professional goals in this environment: 1. Foundational training on modern Go-To-Market best practices.  You have to understand how the world is moving - doesn’t matter how big (or small) your company is.  You have to understand the new basics and what you learned at Salesforce in 2005 won’t cut it.  2. Functional training in your role from trusted outside resources (your company will NOT have the means to sufficiently train you on anything but their industry and their product). 3. A group of peers you can bounce ideas off of, stress test new approaches, and help you avoid common pitfalls.  You can’t afford to make big bets without asking a few people that don’t work at your company.  You are risking your job and in some cases your career. 4. Regular, centralized access to the newest sales and marketing technologies so you know how to use them and whether they’re a fit for your team.  AI is happening NOW.  You need demos, you need to be testing, and you need to know what's happening. The world is changing RAPIDLY. 5. Centralized access to top tier private equity and VC firms managed independently of your current employer’s financing strategy. You need to be in the room where it happens. 6. The ability to negotiate executive compensation with assistance from the world’s leading experts. The smallest tweak to your equity agreement could have a 5, 6, or 7 figure outcome on your net worth. 7. A permanent homebase filled with people that care about you and are looking out for your best interests without conflicts or obligations to anyone else. A place whose incentives are completely aligned to your professional success. That’s what we do at Pavilion. That’s what we’re building. It’s not about any one course. It’s not about a Slack community. It’s not about a big event in Boston.  Or London.  Or Austin.  It’s about helping you live a meaningful and fulfilling career. It’s about helping you sleep better at night, knowing that a community of 10,000 has your back at all times. It’s about landing in Sydney or Barcelona or Kansas City or Salt Lake or Seattle and knowing you can instantly plug into a group of operating executives that are there to help and support you. It’s about looking backwards in 5, 10, or 20 years and saying to yourself, “All things considered, that was a great ride and I accomplished what I set out to do.” If any of this sounds appealing. If you’re feeling lost or alone or adrift. If you want help with your career and resetting your destination to maximize wealth creation, impact, possibility, and fulfillment. Well then - join us! If you want to learn more, DM me.

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What we were promised: a unified ops function for all GTM teams. 😎 What we got: a new name for sales ops. 😔 The labels aren’t really the issue here. It’s the fact that alignment across functional ops teams still seems elusive in many companies. These are some common objections to creating a unified RevOps function: 😰 Functional leaders are worried about their ops teams becoming less responsive 😰 MOPS and CS Ops worry about getting swallowed up by Sales Ops and losing autonomy  😰 Marketing and CS worry their needs won’t be prioritized if RevOps reports to a sales leader These concerns are legitimate and need to be addressed. But they don’t change one simple reality: a lack of alignment among operational teams is usually just a mirror of the lack of alignment among the GTM functions. And these silos harm business performance. Instead of focusing on the challenges, let’s look at what a business can GAIN when ops teams are strongly aligned or unified: 🗺️ A holistic view across the entire revenue process ⚖️ Initiatives prioritized by business impact rather than executive fiat 🥰  A more unified and seamless customer experience 💰 More efficient tech spend with fewer redundant tools 🤝 All revenue teams rowing in the same direction 🤗 Pooled ops resources and mutual support 💪 A stronger ops function that can manage performance rather than just close tickets These teams DO exist, and this week on RevOps FM, I spoke with Julia Kim, who leads one of them at Electric. Julia leads a very mature RevOps function that supports marketing, sales, CS, and partnerships. Not only does this org structure work—her team is a driving force behind the business, which wasn’t at all the case when ops teams were embedded in their functions. In this episode, Julia shares: • The scope and structure of her team • How they plan and prioritize • How they balance running the business as usual with innovation and strategy • How RevOps can have different objectives at different stages of maturity • How she finds efficiencies across the tech stack • And much more Episode link in the comments 👇 —--- P.S. a unified function is one way to achieve alignment, but I don’t suggest it’s the only way. At my company, for example, my team supports marketing and BDR Ops and reports into marketing, while all other ops teams are centralized. This still works very well because a) The marketing leader also reports to the COO, ensuring consistent priorities b) Marketing ops still works closely with other ops teams, has regular cadences, shared OKRs, etc. So the key factors here are a centralized reporting structure and close collaboration. P.P.S. I feel like I've seen the meme I used before somewhere. If you created it first please raise your hand and I'll gladly give credit 😊

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Want to be strategic in RevOps? Find way to improve one single GTM motion: Here are the four most common examples: 1. Sales Process 2. Inbound 3. Outbound 4. Retention/Growth Let's take 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 as an example. If this isn't good, it's the place to start. 𝗙𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗔𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗟𝗦 Do we have the fundamentals in place for our sales team to run an efficient sales process and close deals? Do we have? - ICP well defined? - Buyer Personas well defined? - A Sales Methodology and Process? - Sales Process implemented into CRM? Without this our sales team is, by definition... - Chasing the wrong people - Chasing the wrong opportunities - Missing critical steps in the process - Not generating metrics to show this More importantly, the - Close Rate is too low - Sales Cycle is too long - Average Sales Price is too small 𝗔𝗗𝗢𝗣𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 Is the team executing the process and can we see it? Do we have? - Enablement and training - Pipeline metrics reporting? - A pipeline inspection process? - 1:1 sales coaching cadences? If so, we should see our sales team executing in real time. 𝗢𝗣𝗧𝗜𝗠𝗜𝗭𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 With the above, we have accurate metrics. We can now look for ways to optimize: - Establish a Pipeline Council - Proactive Risk Signals in Deals - Optimized conversion intelligence - Conduct regular sales forecasting If you're in RevOps and you want to be more strategic, you have to find a way to work on things like these, to help management improve the process and, most importantly, the outcomes. Management often doesn't understand that RevOps can make this kind of impact or how, so they need to be shown, one small step at a time. More on this in 📰 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗹𝘆 📰 https://bit.ly/4aT31de ✌️

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At the Gainsight conference last week, I had several folks ask me some version of "everyone used to talk about adoption....now everyone says that it's just about outcomes and ROI. What's your take?" It is and has always been about both. Can you get ROI without adoption? No. Is adoption by itself sufficient to guarantee value realization? Also no. You have to have adoption of the right capabilities that tie to customer business priorities with attached measurable outcomes. That is and has always been the formula. This is easy to say, really hard to implement and manage at scale. Which is why very few companies do it.

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The skills to be an effective SaaS CRO have changed. That's not my opinion, but that's basically the crux of what bona fide CROs, and those that hire them, are telling me. Just a few years ago these were 5 desired skills when hiring a CRO. --Proven "scaler", which often meant doing more with MORE (people) --Willing to take calculated risks to and set ambitious goals --Ability to thrive in unpredictable environments with frequent changes (sadly lots of change was caused by literal CRO changes) --Laser focus on achieving revenue targets no matter the cost  --Inspire and motivate large sales teams These are 5 desired skills when hiring a CRO today: --Analytical with the ability to interpret data and identify trends to make decisions --Deep understanding of sales methodology, customer segmentation, and pricing strategies  --Financial acumen to understand unit economics --Customer focused to build long term relationships and loyalty  --Cross-functional relationship builder That said, in MY opinion, the skills needed few years ago are still necessary, but the trick is finding people, or becoming, the person, who straddles both profiles. Those people are also known as The GOATS of Growth, or at least well on their way.

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I believe the inability to prove ROI is the single biggest blocker right now in getting a sale across the line. And there's now evidence to prove this... TrustRadius just released their 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, which found that 71% of buyers end up purchasing the top option on their short list (ie the list they made before they started doing real research and talking to vendors and peers). Additionally, 47% of enterprise buyers said they wished it was easier to calculate ROI. What these two stats together mean to me: - In this turbulent market where budgets are tight, buyers are understandingly very risk averse - and so they are choosing solutions that are well known (and likely more established and "safer" vendors that their boss/CFO knows), and the sales process isn't really changing their opinion. - Emerging vendors aren't doing a good job with the content and sales process to change any buyer's minds, and prove that they have something better than the incumbent worth taking a slight risk on. One big part of this is not being able to show relevant, specific, evidence and success stories that they've delivered success in a similar industry, company size, region, use-case, etc. - Competitive enablement needs to be much more of a focus. While one finding of this report is investing in Brand is important so you make the top of the shortlist -- if you're an emerging vendor - you're not going to outspend the incumbent on Brand - so while important, it's not really an actionable strategy for a lot of smaller companies. What is actionable is harnessing the voice of your happy customers, to get super granular and authentic proof from customers that did switch from these incumbents. Evidence that talks about why you're better/different, what it's like to switch/migrate etc. - Buyers don't believe your (or your Forrester TEI's) 438% ROI claim. It's too broad, it's unbelievable, it's unsubstantiated, and not specific to your exact business and use-case. We need to break the ROI/value argument up into more realistic and believable sub-components (eg hours saved per week, improvements in win rates, FTE salary deferred, etc) that build into a more credible ROI/value narrative. Also - we can't just make sh*t up and pull numbers out of thin air, and pointing to one hand-curated reference customer isn't sufficient evidence, it's anecdotal at best, and a biased sample at worst. Showing more broad-based, relevant, statistically significant samplings of customer success will earn more trust that you've delivered ROI across lots of customers, not just one. Anyway check out the report (link in comments) - there's some great insights in there that should make you rethink how you sell and market.

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Want to compare YTD OB stats to identify trends? Emails sent: 10K - Opens: 48%, Replies: 12% Calls: 8K - Connect: 16%, Positive: 4.5% Opps: 155 OB Opps Created* Note: Not all opps created are yet qualified opps. How do these stats measure up to yours? We spend a great deal of time "sharpening the ax" to find the right people and ensure they get the right message at the right time. So I'm curious to hear how we're doing in comparison to other teams. Share yours in the comments, if you're open to it! Iron sharpens iron, axes sharpen axes.

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Here’s a frightening number for GTM folks: The cost of growth has increased 72%!  That’s according to David Spitz (of BenchSights) who monitors SaaS closely. This is why growth rates for recurring revenue businesses have been cut in half over the last 24 months from an average of 36% to 18%. So what’s the answer? Here's what I'm doing: 1. Create a GTM office and infrastructure that explicitly aligns Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product.  2. Create a regular weekly or bi-weekly meeting whose sole intention is aligning the GTM departments 3. Incentivize and compensate your GTM executives (eg CRO, CMO, CCO or VP Sales, Marketing, CS) the same way.  4. Dispense with quarterly commissions for CROs and create an annual bonus structure that aligns the GTM team primarily around retention. 5. Use Revenue Operations to create a single consistent data layer that each team leverages and ensure that each team does not have its own data set 6. Explicitly begin the alignment from the moment the prospect becomes aware of what you do and ensure messaging is tightly aligned against an agreed Ideal Customer Profile 7. Ensure that the months and quarters are celebrating Net Revenue Retention and Net Revenue Growth vs simply New ARR or New Revenue booked 8. Extend the understanding of the journey through 3 renewals and map key activities through at least 3 years of engagement with the customer ensuring you are delivering consistent value the entire time 9. Understand that the initial sale is in explicitly in the first ¼ to ⅓ of the relationship and treat it with that level of consideration.  It is not the end.  It is merely the beginning.  There should be at least 3 more annual sales to the same customer over the subsequent 3 years. The only way to grow in a capital constrained environment is to align around long-term value delivery for the customer.  This is the fundamental principle underpinning the GTM movement and the reason me, Sangram Vajre, 🐶 Jacco van der Kooij, and our teams created the GTM Consortium. If you want to join, apply here: https://gtmconsortium.com/

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There are two ways to solve gaps in signal-based selling. Only one is guaranteed to work at scale. 1) Revenue Enablement Provide continuous training for (a) every new hire who joins a team and (b) every 6 months to refresh reps on essential information, workflows, and processes. Many factors can impact the effectiveness of enablement activities (from the comprehensiveness of training materials to the trainer’s institutional knowledge, to how closely the individual reps were paying attention that day). Enablement only becomes harder as more people and processes are added to the mix because there are so many moving parts. 2) Revenue Operations Through automation, RevOps can reduce gaps — especially from human error — that cause friction or inaction among reps. Specifically, end-to-end automation. Most common “automations” in signal-based selling usually don’t go far enough. Therefore teams are overly reliant on enablement touchpoints to stay aligned. Ex: A champion moves to a new role and this is automatically updated in Salesforce This automation gets the process from point A to point B, but still relies on multiple human touches from B to Z. End-to-end automation ensures that essential tasks throughout an entire workflow are set up to keep the process moving toward an end goal. It anticipates gaps and opportunities for human error from point A to point Z (meeting booked). Ex: A champion moves to a new role, the CRM record is updated, a rep is notified, and a multi-step persona-specific email sequence is triggered. Would every rep follow this process if it was entirely manual (even with enablement training)? Probably not. That’s why every signal play should be accompanied by clear workflows enabled with end-to-end automation. The play can scale with your team. Signals without action are just noise for reps. Automation guarantees signals get actioned.

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I meet and talk with 5-10 of the greatest GTM minds on the planet every week. CRO’s, VPs of Sales, CMO’s. 100% agree that getting outbound right is one of the hardest parts of their business, why? 1. Recruiting is hard again The same voices that sold tech sales as an easy path to 6 figures are now the voices saying the BDR role is dead. They sold a bill of goods to people who didn’t understand how hard this role is, are surprised these people who chose a path because it was sold as “easy” aren’t performing, and now have ulterior motives to pivot to a new message. Hard jobs are hard to recruit for. 2. Lack of Leadership 2020 through mid 2022 we had a bunch of capital bloat and talent bloat enter the market. Just like we have overvalued “zombie” companies we have overvalued “zombie” leaders who don’t know how to coach good habits for this type of market. Outbound was easy from 2014ish to summer 2022. 8 years is a long time, most of the voices we hear only know those times or only know what type of sales motion. 3. Absolute statements muddy the waters I've been around the block enough to click on their profile and see their track record. 99.9% of folks make these statements only sold transactional commodity technology, sold to GTM teams, or in most cases – only both. What works depends on multiple factors: ASP, buyer persona, and complexity of your sales process/customer’s buying process. Depending on what you sell – sometimes you are going to need to pick up the phone or send a note to get someone’s attention. That will NEVER change. 4. Generational consideration for career pathing is key BDR is still hands down the best route to market for future AE’s. You have to learn to prospect and get meetings before you can run a meeting, qualify, and manage a deal. No argument from me on CAC math – thousands of products require veracious qualification, deal management, and creating customer consensus. You can not run those types of deals and prospect. If any Voice had EVER done that type of role or ran a team that did, they wouldn’t say what they are. For BDRs to stick around for more than 14 months, you need steps in the BDR path where comp, responsibility and role grow over time. 5. Results are tanking Point 1&2. You are the equivalent of a fire fighter that starts a fire then takes the glory when you put it out. I absolutely loved the movie Backdraft – but stop it. These are the ideas of “not famous” GTM people. People who spend all day serving their customer and developing their people – not posting on this platform. They don’t care about clicks, followers, or impressions. They care about revenue and earnings. Outbound is hard. It (almost) always has been. Ya’ll need to block the noise and focus on what works for your business and try everything. Even the hard stuff. #AllGasNoBrakes #DialedIn

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Over the next 36 months, the bloody GTM wars will be won. You may be under the impression the market is saturated. That companies have evaluated the big revenue intelligence and orchestration platforms (i.e. Clari, Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, ZoomInfo) and have made their decisions on what their tech stack will be. But you’d be wrong. Large enterprises are only now waking up to the possibilities of the modern revenue tech stack. The winner of these big categories will emerge not based on their ability to penetrate the mid-market, but their ability to build a clear and compelling sales motion across the non-tech enterprises of financial services, healthcare, and industrial companies.  Who wins the enterprise will win the GTM wars. The winners will do the consolidating. The losers will be consolidated. Buckle up.

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Gong is freaking $. I barely use Hubspot anymore for deal management, forecasting, pipeline reviews. Their new AI features enable immediate and targeted access to this incredible wealth of information buried in call recordings. Also super powerful for identifying customer advocates and upsell opportunities, and spotting trends in customer success and product experience gaps. I know everyone in that space is fighting to build these big suites w/everything from CRM to call recording to sales engagement/sequences, but I think Gong has the biggest entry-point advantage starting in call recording, and my money is on them to win the race vs the rest. Salesforce is in a different boat - obviously SFDC will be fine regardless as the backend CRM/datalake, but they may lose ground on the front-end applications to Gong, although Slack is a game-changing asset and unfair advantage - so should be interesting.

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Three under-appreciated assertions in go-to-market for B2B SaaS... 1. You will gain an advantage focusing your strategy around GTM motions that are more difficult to directly attribute to sales. Don't fall into the trap of thinking difficult to measure = ineffective. 2. If you're willing to make a junior hire, 80% of the time you will save time, money and net better ROI outsourcing to a killer agency *that you know how to manage well*. 3. Having a high-output, engaging content engine that serves both internal stakeholders and aligns to the user journey, leveraging automation and AI *tactfully*, will be a deciding factor for who gets left behind and who gets acquired in the next few years. Companies that can prioritize evidence and reason-driven "directionality" (the more scientific approach) will be faster and gain outsized market share than companies stuck certifying ever-higher levels of attribution with every move. Outsourcing, especially for a new function, nets greater results than making a junior hire and training internally; internal training sounds good but the training quality, stakeholder incentives, and subsequent ROI and results are often lacking. And finally, revenue teams should focus on resonance and harmony of message across buyer channels. Unify content across channels, and tie it together through each part of the buyer journey tastefully and consistently; all of a sudden your "organic" conversion will explode, your sales people will have less no-shows and higher conversion, and your ads will become cheaper per inquiry.

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Outbound isnt dead, it is just harder because we have made it easier to spam the market… The average sales org has: A database tool - easy access to emails to mass send A sequencing tool - easy access to mass email Intent data - easy access to automate “personalized” emails Lead scoring - easy to set threshold to automate emails Technology and data are great… But your: Hey First Name, I hope things are going well at Company Name. I noticed your in the X Industry, and exploring Y topic we help organziations do Z with our state of the art (pitch slap) service. Do you have 15 minutes to connect this week? Emails just dont cut it anymore…. The reason PLG is on the rise and people dont want to talk to sales reps is because most reps arent great at what they do… Im not saying dont automate some things, but cmon yall we can do better! #SalesTips #SaaSSales #DoBetter #SalesLeadership

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In the last 12 months, Rev has increased our close rates by 300% and shortened our average deal cycle from 100 days to 40. Here's the 3-step playbook we used to increase sales velocity (without adding headcount): BACKGROUND Since 2021, sales benchmarks in SaaS have trending down: - Win rates have dropped 18% - Deal sizes have shrunk 21% - Deal cycles are 16% longer We’re all working harder and longer in every deal for less money! Unfortunately, this environment is here to stay. So what’s a Sales Leader to do to generate velocity in this market? At Rev, we follow a process that I call “SLC” - for “Stalled, Lost, or Churned.” Here's how it works: 1. Convene a SWAT team of your GTM leaders (Head of Sales, RevOps, Marketing, etc). It all starts here. Without getting the right people in place who can impact change across the org, nothing matters. The team is going to meet daily at first to generate a new and valuable report (see #2); then they will divide and conquer to resolve the issues slowing down your GTM. 2. Generate your Stalled-Lost-Churned Report The key insight here is that a standard “closed-lost” report isn’t going to cut it. Instead, you’re going to create a new report of every deal that closed-lost, but also any customer that churned and any deal that “stalled” (i.e. where there hasn’t been a positive change of close-% within three weeks). 3. Map your sales cycle and attach to each step exactly HOW MANY and WHY deals stalled-lost-churned. The WHY is the hardest part — the simple answers in Salesforce will not be good enough. You need to scrub the heck out of the opportunity list to dig deep and figure out real “why” answers. For example:  “Customer went dark” is not a good enough reason. What was really happening in the deal when the customer stopped responding? Were they not impressed enough by the demo? Missing a key feature? Scared off by pricing? Did a key persona refuse to engage or fail to see value? Talk to your AEs and listen to more Gong calls. The answers are there. You just have to find them. 4. Assign each of the WHYs to a member of the GTM team and work through a meaningful improvement Are we missing a slide that speaks to a key persona? Mishandling a certain objection in the sales cycle? Is our order form sitting in procurement too long? Each SLC issue gets assigned to an owner and worked until it no longer slows deals down. Here’s an example: One “SLC issue” we found at my past company NetBase was that our order form was being sent to legal review by our customer 90% of the time. So we removed the legalese from the order form and referenced online terms and conditions with a URL. The result was our buyers only sent the form to legal 10% of the time! That was a savings of 2-3 weeks on 80% of deals! TAKEAWAY Want to improve sales velocity? Find out the real reason WHY deals aren't closing. Not just why you LOST deals. But why deals stalled and churned. Use SLC.

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