Early Stage Growth
The Challenge
Scale the business without funding in a highly competitive growth market. A sales leader was brought into an early stage start-up alongside colleagues that had never been in strategic management roles before. Every other individual on the management team had never scaled a business in their career. Lack of experience creates massive layers of complexity for tenured leaders even before revenue production is tackled for several reasons.
The applicable reasons here are:
- Unrealistic expectations that shift on a moments notice (moving the goalposts)
- No impartial board of directors and advisors with experience
- Lack of accountability for operational delivery and contract revenue maximization (revenue churn)
- Expectations that every investment will WIN, and uncontrolled emotional responses when reality sets in
- “Lifestyle” business mindset from ownership while expecting hyper-growth results
Lesson 1
The sales leader would frequently ask themselves, “Am I dealing with someone based in reality or am I dealing with the ego of the individual?” This is an important question. The answer will massively alter the approach to successfully navigating this emotionally charged environment. In this lesson, the sales leader understood and confirmed the goals, expectations and desires of ownership.
After gaining this understanding, the next step was to go through all company data available to assess what type of growth velocity is required to come within striking distance to achieve or over achieve the goals provided by the company ownership. In order words, identify data points such as current sales trend success, close ratios, what % of deals get stuck in “no decision”, average opportunity value of deals won, deal source origination, under what conditions did these deals close (discounts granted), and more.
All these steps are required to grow revenue in a sustainable manner that will not burn out sales. In this part of the lesson, the sales leader was forced to have many difficult conversations with ownership about the gaps between reality and desired goals. In addition, ownership had expectations the COVID success bubble of 2020 would keep pace, without altering company strategy. This created a strenuous relationship and the only saving grace was the data assessments conducted by the sales leader that were based in reality. Data does not lie. Once everyone made friends with the data, the management team was able to create trust and build together.
Lesson 2
The next lesson in this growth story is the network created the growth opportunities. Without these important relationships, it is 10x more difficult to refine sales cycles that elevate business revenue when funding for demand generation is non-existent. These relationships were the first giant leap towards creating sustainable revenue practices to achieve growth.
Partners at well established companies that actively sell into similar target markets are the fastest path to scale business revenue in this scenario, and guess what. Partners help people they like. The lesson here is to show up frequently and often, and get as close to these influential partners as possible. Find a way to help these partners win, and be that reliable source that answers the phone every time. Once trust is established, ask for referrals often and ensure referral leads are treated better than gold. Build a sales process and business reputation of professionalism that shows up no matter what. Guarantee sales response times to these partners bringing referral leads to the business, and double-down on providing strategic advice whether or not the lead signs with your company. Make sure to report successes and lessons learned to the rest of management and partners, above and beyond the expected KPIs.
Bottom line, take care of your business network. Understand the value in your network, invest when asked, invest when you see a gap, and volunteer your time when you are able.
Lesson 3
Follow the newly defined sales process, relentlessly. Don’t let ego get in the way, and be extremely careful of others saying, “they don’t need to follow the sales process” or “the product sells itself, we don’t need to do discovery”. This is the unchecked ego talking. First time business executives have a habit of falling into this ego trap, and have a habit of saying, “man I feel really good about this deal”. Remember, sales can’t forecast a “good feeling”, and certainly can’t guarantee revenue without the vital business case data learned during the sales process. Closing revenue feels good, but unless someone can close revenue day in and day out, year after year, they’re not sales. To all the CEO’s and Founders reading this, please don’t jinx sales by making these mistakes. The future company revenue will thank you, and if you’re lucky, sales leadership may stick around longer than the avg. 18-month tenure seen in the industry today.
The Outcome
Massive revenue growth, company reputation becomes well-known, and referral business grows. Recruiting new staff becomes easier because the company reputation and brand speak volumes. Businesses achieved positions on the Inc 5,000 list in the top 1,000 privately held companies across North America. Invitations by top eco-system partners into esteemed industry groups. Growth velocity exceeding 700% averaged across three years. Repeatable sales practices that win 25% – 33% of sales cycles…..and of course massive impact to top-line revenue.
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