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After 18 months of stalled growth, most companies do the same thing: hire more salespeople.
Adam Jay says that's exactly the wrong move.
In this episode of GTM Uncensored, Adam breaks down why pipeline volume means nothing without quality, why most leaders confuse activity with progress, and why the answer to slowing growth usually isn't more headcount.
Adam and Dale discuss:
- Why "healthy pipeline" matters more than pipeline size
- The dangerous instinct to throw people at the problem
- Why strategy-only leaders are failing
- How AI should reshape hiring decisions
- The biggest mistake companies make with revenue leadership
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:20) Why honesty with the board matters
(06:45) What got you here won't get you there
(10:10) Why smart leaders keep hiring more people
(13:12) Healthy pipeline vs big pipeline
(16:04) AI slop and bad GTM advice
(22:37) Why embedded leadership works
(25:26) When founders aren't ready for change
(28:21) What great organizations feel like
(30:56) Monday Morning Move
(31:55) AI before headcount
(32:24) Uncensored questions
Creators and Guests
What is GTM Uncensored™?
Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.
Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.
The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.
GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.
Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.
What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.
Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.
GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.
Adam Jay (00:00):
18 months of plateau with a quote clean looking pipeline tells me one thing and it tells me that your pipeline's bullshit. Two AEs in a year and nothing's moved. Tells me the problem's not headcount. It's systems, it's definition, it's process, it's what is a deal. The reason it looks fine on paper is no one has agreed to what fine means.
Dale Zwizinski (00:26):
Awesome. I get to interview Adam now for our side of your order story. Oh shit. You were brought into Acme Industries. A company company-
Adam Jay (00:36):
Great company, my favorite
Dale Zwizinski (00:36):
Ever. But they've had 18 months of plateaued growth. The founder's added two AEs in the last year. Pipeline looks fine on paper, but the board's asking questions. What's your first call?
Adam Jay (00:50):
I mean, I'm shocked that the founders just decided to add AEs because that fixes all problems. 18 months of plateau growth, you waited way too long to call me regardless of whether it's in this role or whether it's in a full-time role.
Dale Zwizinski (01:03):
So you're
Adam Jay (01:04):
Telling this on
Dale Zwizinski (01:04):
A board?
Adam Jay (01:05):
Tell you what's not my first call. My first call is not the founder. My first call is not the board and my first call is not the board deck. I want to talk to whoever really owns the number. I'm assuming if it's 18 months of stall growth, we've hired two AEs, it's not the founder. There's likely going to be a sales lead or a VP of sales or someone. Someone is accountable for revenue. And if not, then I'm going to talk to the sellers, but let's assume in this scenario that someone's accountable for the revenues. And I'm going to start likely with one question. What does a qualified opportunity actually look like in this business? 18 months of plateau with a quote clean looking pipeline tells me one thing and it tells me that your pipeline's bullshit. Two AEs in a year and nothing's moved.
(01:50):
Tells me the problem's not headcount. It's systems, it's definition, it's process, it's what is a deal. The pipeline in your scenario looks fine on paper. The reason it looks fine on paper is no one has agreed to what fine means. What you say is pipeline and what I say is pipeline are going to be different things. And I see this all the time. Stages don't have clear entry and exit criteria. We're likely just advancing shit on activity, not like hard evidence. Discovery, maybe it's being done, maybe it isn't, but we're filling a funnel and you talk about this a lot that was never meant to convert. Is this ICP? Are these the right people? Do they belong in the funnel? I would venture to say I'm going to DQ 50 to 75% of that pipeline within a few hours of doing a deep dive.
Dale Zwizinski (02:40):
75%?
Adam Jay (02:41):
50 to 75%.
Dale Zwizinski (02:42):
Woo.
Adam Jay (02:43):
I want to hear how the team talks about a deal. I want to hear how they talk about what buyers do. Are we talking about our sales process or are we talking about the buying process? Because that's going to tell me everything that I need to know. So what are you going to say? Hold on a second. I'm going to tell the board everything. The board's asking questions because growth stopped. That's why the board's asking questions. I'm asking questions because no one knows the hell why. And that's what I have to figure out to be able to tell the board what we're going to do to solve the problem.
Dale Zwizinski (03:14):
Or do people really know they're just making up excuses because they're afraid of their jobs?
Adam Jay (03:20):
Again, entirely possible, but that's where the data comes in. That's where coming in and analyzing the pipeline, listening to the calls, looking at the exit criteria, talking to customers, talking to lost deals and really understanding what happened versus taking people's word for it. Dude, I started as a rep. I get the rosy eye goggles, you get off a demo and yeah, Dale, this looks cool. Man, we got someone on the hook. They're going to close. No, they're not. And maybe
Dale Zwizinski (03:49):
One thing I just want to add to this, it could be that the ICP has shifted. It could be that you have new competitors. There's a lot of foundational things that you may want to think through on that. I love that. And then what do you do with the board? So they have this thought process of what the pipeline looks like. They want to go from 20 million to $30 million in revenue and they penciled this in for the year, probably a little bit of pen. What do you now tell them? Do you reforecast it? What do you tell them?
Adam Jay (04:17):
I love
Dale Zwizinski (04:17):
An idea. You're going to hit $30 million this year.
Adam Jay (04:20):
Absolutely.
(04:21):
I love and I hate boards and board meetings. A good board is going to want the truth and as uncomfortable as it's going to be to reforecast, you could do one of two things. You could reforecast and I could give you a real number and we have a chance of hitting that number. And in the subsequent board meetings throughout the year, we're going to talk about progress or we're rated explicit. I could say this. I could blow smoke up your ass, tell you we're going to hit $30 million. And in every board meeting, we're going to have the same conversation and my 18 month tenure turns into six months because we're not growing at all. I prefer not to do that. I've always taken the approach of being very direct and very honest with the board so long as there's data to explain why. I would more than likely, given the limited context I have here, recommend that we do reforecast, tell them why we're reforecasting, build that forecast going bottoms up versus top down.
(05:15):
So again, your pencil versus pen and tell them what's actually possible. And listen, 30 million might be possible with additional resources and that doesn't necessarily have to mean people. 30 million might be totally out of the realm. But what we can't do is what it seems this founder has done and set up growth is stalled the solve. We're just going to hire two more people because they're going to fix it. Maybe growth is stalled because you're bringing in the wrong people. Maybe growth is stalled because to your point, there's a new competitor in the market. The answer can't be something happened, go hire more people.
Dale Zwizinski (05:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And oh, by the way, you're probably throwing the person that hired you under the bus, but we'll get to that conversation.
Adam Jay (05:56):
The founder hired me.
Dale Zwizinski (05:58):
That's why you're throwing them under the bus. Okay.
Adam Jay (06:00):
They don't better though. A lot of founders don't know better. I'm coming off a litle bit trite, but let me be transparent. They don't know what they don't know and that's typically why you need to bring in a revenue leader who does know and you need to trust them. It's them knowing everything about go- to-market if they're a product-based technical founder is akin to you hiring me as a revenue leader and telling me to build your product. I could give you voice of customer, I could give you customer feedback. You don't want my hands on the keyboard because I'll break that shit.
Dale Zwizinski (06:31):
Awesome. So you talk about what got you here won't get you there. You say this a lot. And so walk me through what hitting the ceiling actually looks like. What are the tells that most leaders miss until it's too late?
Adam Jay (06:45):
It's an interesting way to word a question, but let's talk about what got you here won't get you there. Go to market changes. This rate go- to-market changes daily, but let's say quarterly. And what skills, processes, systems, generally speaking, you used in your last role or your last three roles isn't necessarily the same as what's going to be successful in this role. And I talk all the time. I was blessed and fortunate to have a lot of success when I was at Toast. Toast was field sales. And listen, I love me some field sales, but the techniques that I'm coaching reps to when we're physically on the street pulling doors probably isn't going to work when you are calling people and trying to run every meeting off of Zoom and to try to run that exact same playbook and just slightly adapt it and say, "Dale, instead of pulling the door, you're going to call someone." The whole thing has to be changed.
(07:40):
Building an org from zero to one, two and a half million is a very different skillset than building an org from five million to 10 million. So I'll bring it back to our methodology of the go- to-market gap. You start with stabilization, you move to foundation, you move to repeatability, and then hopefully you've done well enough that you move to scalability. And if you're in an org where things were repeatable and you're making slight changes every couple quarters, every couple months, maybe you're tweaking out one part of a sequence, maybe you're looking at the job structure of who you have in the role. Those are very different changes than when you're going zero to one and you arguably have to iterate on this stuff every single day. And if you don't know how to do that, it's a fundamentally different muscle that you have to flex and you have to exercise.
(08:33):
And I think to your last question of what are the tells that most leaders miss when, we'll go back to scenario one, when your revenue is plateaued, when your emails suddenly aren't getting opened, when you're, I'm not going to use MQL because you know how I feel about MQLs, but when your conversions have suddenly tanked, these are all the things that it's too late. You need to make the changes and you need to iterate before you start seeing this massive swing in data. We have so many AI tools right now and listen, I tell you all the time, one day doesn't make a trend, one missed quarter doesn't make a trend, but if you're not analyzing this shit every day, every week and every quarter, so you hit it before you have 12, 18 months with no revenue growth. Houston, you got a problem.
Dale Zwizinski (09:21):
Yeah. I think you got to look around the corners a little bit. And I think that is what a good revenue leader can help is look at trends and look around the corners. And I think that becomes difficult for operational and technical leaders that are very zero and one design and what the outcome will end up looking like versus what you can perceive based on new competitors, things that are happening in the market, salespeople having rosy eyeglasses and not really digging into the pipeline. Those are all indicators that you're going to get stuck in 12 months. And I think that becomes a very interesting trend.
Adam Jay (09:58):
And then you get stuck and then your revenue burns and then you go off into SaaS apocalypse
Dale Zwizinski (10:04):
Apocalypse. I love that term. I think people are- One
Adam Jay (10:07):
Of the few terms I love from the person who coined it, but that's another show.
Dale Zwizinski (10:11):
People get stuck and the instinct is to add more headcount, more pipeline, more ads, more calls, more volume. It's like just more and more. And instead of, why is this not working? Why is this instinct so wrong and why do smart people keep making the same bet all the time?
Adam Jay (10:29):
I'll start with a dating analogy and then I'll break it down. Oh
Dale Zwizinski (10:33):
Boy. I get dating advice from
Adam Jay (10:35):
Adam. No, it's not dating advice. Listen, you've been married a lot longer than I have, but I think in this scenario it'll make sense to you because it will hear me out. So I'm on marriage number two. My wife and I are about to celebrate six years and I think the reason for that is that we're both committed society has taught us, whether it's go to market or dating, that the grass is always greener on the other side. So when you're in a relationship and things aren't working with all this technology we have, pick up your phone and just start swiping and the grass is going to be greener, you'll hire more people, right? Get someone different. It's just going to be a different story. None of the problems are going to exist, going to be the perfect relationship. And then you find that it's not the same problem.
(11:18):
It's different problems, but it's the same number of problems. So going back to go to market, the grass is always greener and we are far removed but not so far removed from the growth at all costs era where there was a ton of money to throw around. And it was very easy to just say, "Hey, if Adam and Dale aren't cutting it, just go hire Jake and Fred and go hire Bob and go hire Bill." And we got so accustomed to saying, "Badly, if you need $10 million more in revenue, hire 10 more reps, give them all a million dollars a quota and you're going to get $10 million more in revenue." And in very rare instances, maybe you saw 60 or 70% of that, but ultimately it didn't solve the problem, but we still have this instinct of instead of doing the root cause analysis instead of looking inward, instead of saying, "What is really wrong with me, my company, why am I causing this fight?
(12:18):
Why is my marriage falling apart? Why is my company falling apart? Why are we not growing?" It's always everyone else. It's my sellers aren't good, or I don't have enough pipeline, or I just need to get more eyes on the org. And listen, there are times more pipeline is the answer. It's not always wrong, but very rarely is the answer, go out and get more headcount, unless everyone is at capacity, deals are closing at the clip that they need to close at when you look at your conversion number and you have so many leads that the reps cannot take them all and you have deals that you're losing because you can't get to them. That's when you go hire more headcount. Other than that, it's usually not a headcount problem.
Dale Zwizinski (12:59):
Yeah, I love that. So flipping it contrarian a little bit. So you've been in a bunch of these orgs, now that we've been running Revenue Reimagined for three years, we've talked to a bunch of founders on the podcast. Three years. Is there a version of this where the founder was actually right and they needed more pipeline? And what does that look like from a structural growth trajectory perspective?
Adam Jay (13:23):
There is a version where more pipeline is needed. I'll even go so far as to say as you always in theory need more pipeline. I say often a big, fat, healthy pipeline solves 99% of your problems. The key word there is healthy. And when we talk about pipeline, it's such an important metric that people look at that I arguably think they fixate on it too much and that starts with the board. It goes to the founder, goes to the CRO. Everyone's like, "We need more pipeline. We need more pipeline. We need more pipeline." What you need is more healthy pipeline and people don't want to do the hard work to really understand what is healthy pipeline. If you analyze, we'll assume you're not a startup with five deals. If you analyze your last hundred deals, what are the characteristics that those deals share? What are the characteristics of those deals who have onboarded the fastest, who are using the product the most, who are getting the most value, who are raving fans?
(14:25):
What are the characteristics, firmographic, demographic, technographic that all of those deals share? How do we then translate that into what pipeline do we go get? Where I find most people go wrong with pipeline is Dale could use my product. Dale works at a technology company that does $5 million and has three people and we could help him, but what we're not realizing is where our real sweet spot is a B2B SaaS company that's FinTech, that is 150 employees, that is $25 million, that's who we're really going to do well with. So that's the pipeline we need. And people aren't willing to make that distinction because they'd rather show this artificially inflated great bullshit pipeline number versus saying, "Hey, you know what? We don't have $10 million in pipeline. We only have $1 million in pipeline." Guess what, folks? If you have $10 million in pipeline that closes at 10% versus a million dollars in pipeline that closes ... And my swing is too big there, but at 80%, you'd rather have a lower pipeline with a higher close rate.
Dale Zwizinski (15:31):
Yeah, 100%. It's all about the quality of it versus that quantity of it. And I think instinctually people do know this, but they always go back to the pattern that they've run, especially if you have leaders that have done these big organizations or we're successful in that. You always as a human being from a psychological perspective will go back to what you know and what you found in success. And I think that becomes our sticking point as human beings. It's just a pattern basing that you got to get out of.
Adam Jay (16:03):
I also think there's so much bad advice out there, right? Listen, the good and the bad of the internet and LinkedIn is advice. And I don't know if we're going to talk about this, but I'll bring it up anyway. A lot of our clients that we come across are people who have engaged with other consultants. I hate that word.
Dale Zwizinski (16:23):
Fractional.
Adam Jay (16:24):
I hate that word too. They've bought the Free 99 playbook. I'm going to build your whole go- to-market system for $1,199 and it's the same recycled bullshit over and over again that doesn't work.
Dale Zwizinski (16:36):
And
Adam Jay (16:36):
Now
Dale Zwizinski (16:36):
You're
Adam Jay (16:37):
Getting
Dale Zwizinski (16:37):
AI slop in it. So you get recycled AI slop in your bullshit GTM playbook.
Adam Jay (16:42):
Dude, I spoke to someone the other day who reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked me to look at a playbook that their fractional put together for them and I shit you not AI slop, other companies' names were in the playbook. They didn't even proofread it enough to make sure that they pulled out the previous name of their last client. When you have these people whose primary job is selling LinkedIn sponsorships and being a LinkedIn influencer and the secondary job is helping people build their go to market, you probably want the reverse.
Dale Zwizinski (17:13):
So I want to double click on this because I think this is a good topic, but what I'm super curious about in this space is the further you get out from execution, so you have a lot of people building strategies and these strategies have been in, call it even two, three, four, five years ago and they were working on those at that time, but now you're just doing strategy and you haven't been in it and you don't know what's happening with demand generation or closing or CS and you're not close enough to it. I always wonder, because I see this with leaders inside of organizations, they just get so far away from the feet on the ground, what's actually happening. How can they actually give you good advice anymore?
Adam Jay (17:58):
So I was literally talking to someone about this the other day and they said that in order to be successful today as a leader or for a company to be successful, the number one role needed is that of a player coach. I hate that term. I hate the term player coach, but they're not wrong and I'll tell you why. Player coach in the traditional sense I think is a complete fucking waste. You are never going to be successful and you're going to fail because what you're doing is you're hiring someone to come in and part-time manage a team, lead a team. Part of their compensation is going to be based on making that team successful on spending time with them, helping them grow their business, prospect, hunt, be in the field, do whatever it needs to do. And the other part of their compensation is going to be tied to building their rep, right?
(18:44):
So they have to build their own book of business, close their own deals, et cetera, et cetera. And you have this inherent conflict of where do I spend time? And I'll tell you, you say this a lot, compensation drives behavior. They're going to spend time wherever they're going to make the most money. If I can overachieve on my own quota, fuck everyone else. If I can make money helping everyone else screw my own quota, and it's never going to be a fifty fifty split. The problem here is you're not giving the people you're coaching the proper attention, the proper guidance, the proper culture of coaching to make them successful, which as a leader is your number one responsibility. The other problem is you're not giving your personal quota the attention it deserves, which is going to help the company. So the traditional sense of player coach I think is bullshit.
(19:28):
What you need to be successful, going to your point, the days of being able to come in as a VP of sales and be the keyboard warrior and the VP of spreadsheets and setting the strategy and just looking at reports and hitting refresh, we've all worked for that sales leader, right? Those days are gone. You have to be willing to get in the trenches. You have to be willing to spend time with the team. You have to talk to customers. You have to help close deals. You have to partner with marketing. That doesn't mean you carry a quota. That doesn't mean it's your deal, but you can't be so removed that you don't understand what's going on, what's working and know how to execute it yourself. Even with our clients, listen, I am never going to be the guy that's going to go make a hundred cold calls for you every day.
(20:12):
I'm not going to be the guy that's going to write every sequence for you. But I will tell you, I love getting on the phone with reps and closing deals. I love talking to customers. It's the only way we know the business. So any sales leader who thinks that they can just come in and do strategy, you're going to fail. The days of strategy only or over, you have to mix it with tactics.
Dale Zwizinski (20:32):
Yeah, 100%. Let's move on a little bit or else you talk more than I do, so let's move on to- No, I don't think so. So let's get a little splashy here. When you tell a founder who's already at $20 million in revenue or ARR that they need to go back to stabilization, what's the reaction in the room? Because when we first built the GTM gap, I always felt like, "Ooh, that's a tough one. That's a tough pill to swallow."
Adam Jay (21:02):
It depends on the founder and a lot of it depends on how you say it. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. I think that if I were to go in or you were to go in and I were to say, "Hey, you're at $20 million and dude, everything's fucking broken. You need to start over and go back to square one." They're going to look at you like you have three heads. I think we have to be really clear about what stabilization is. And this is the biggest misnomer with the GTM gap that I even struggle to solve as one part of who created it. You can be in stabilization in one phase and repeatability in another. You could be in foundation in one phase and stabilization in another. And I think it's important that when we talk to founders that we're very specific about when we say you're in stabilization, like what part of your go- to market is in stabilization?
(21:52):
Why is it in stabilization? What do we need to stabilize? What is the path forward after that versus coming in and saying, "We're going to blow it all up because everything sucks." The fact of the matter is at 20 million, we're not talking $1 million or 1.2. At $20 million, there are some things you are doing or have done right. But going back to your first question, what got you here may not get you there. So you have to take a look in the mirror and understand it. And I think that if you word it properly with the data, the reaction will be okay. If you come in and say, blowing it all up and everything you've done sucked, you're calling the baby ugly. You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Dale Zwizinski (22:36):
Yeah, totally. And we talked a little bit about this on our operating model being embedded versus consulting strategy, PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets. And as we talk about, we're not consultants, we're not fractional executives. We're in their Slack, we have their email addresses, we're running meetings for them, we're doing board meetings for people. What does a client have to be willing to give up to actually make our model work?
Adam Jay (23:07):
I don't think they have to give up anything. I think they have to be willing to partner on a few things. I think to really be successful and to help companies grow. And let's be clear, before revenue reimagined, I had part-time consulting engagements where I was not embedded. And I think what they have to be willing to align on, I don't want to say give up, is control. You have to truly look at us as an executive partner, as a copilot, if you will, truly as your CRO operating inside of the system builds trust and credibility internally. It makes us one of the team which we truly view ourselves as both for internal and external optics because part of it is change management. When we're coming in and working with a team, it's change management. We don't want to be seen like an outsider. For me, one of the things that I'm pretty clear of when I'm talking with prospects is I don't want to be involved in an engagement where we don't have a seat at the table and where our vote doesn't count.
(24:10):
You're paying us an awful lot of money to not give us that seat at the table. And when we have that conversation with founders and we explain how we operate and why we want that seat at the table, and that doesn't mean that you're always going to tell us yes, it just means that you're going to listen. They deeply understand that. What else do they have to be willing to give up? They admit that they were wrong.
Dale Zwizinski (24:33):
I actually think they do need to give up a little bit of the control. I don't think that's a bad thing because back to the conversations you and I always have, we don't want to be the first or second CRO in the room because they've already had that battle with themselves and that person. So you have to be willing to, as you were just saying, say you're wrong and give up a little bit of that control. And it's a juxtaposition because the next conversation is like, and it's happened to us where we've had two clients, one's totally agreed to it and they've had to fight through the battle and go through it like, do they want us to be? Do they all want us to be? There's internal politics and then one that's completely not going through it. So walk me through a situation where that company thinks that they're ready to work with us and it turns out they weren't.
(25:24):
And what does that feel like?
Adam Jay (25:26):
We'll have several conversations usually with a founder or a CEO. The discoveries go really well. They appear to be bought into what we say and what our model is. We sign the paper and they generally tee it up with their team as we're hiring Revenue Reimagined to come in and fix our go to market is usually how that conversation goes. No background, no why, and just tells the team after the fact that this is happening, which creates a little bit of a change management issue, certainly causes a little bit of discontent. And in the sales process, they tell us that they're willing to do all the things and let us have a seat at the table and they're willing to get uncomfortable. And then usually what happens is we start looking at the data pipeline, could be one of them ICP, could be another. We come back to that first or second meeting and we're calling their baby ugly, so to speak, and it doesn't go over well.
(26:28):
And listen, founders have egos and that's not a bad thing. I have a massive ego. I've just learned to most of the time check it, but they realize or don't realize at that moment that they're not ready to hear the tough advice or they're not willing to make the tough decisions or they're not willing to say, "Hey, we need to stop for a week and not continue to send out the shitty messaging while we revamp it. " And there's this fear of that's going to slow us down. And dude, sometimes you got to slow down to speed up because all you're doing is burning your Tam Sam and song. So I think when you look at what they didn't know about themselves is how entrenched they were and what they were doing and how unwilling they are to make change and how unwilling they are to solicit feedback from the outside and actually implement it.
Dale Zwizinski (27:20):
Yeah. And that's really good. I love the way you break that down into how each one of these things can actually culminate or completely get destroyed. And I want to add one other thing to this. For us to be successful, it needs to be articulated, agreed to and managed from the CEO down. If it's underneath the CEO, that's where we always have a bit of a challenge through that process.
Adam Jay (27:47):
Yeah, I'll agree with that. If the CEO's not on board and the CEO's not a partner,
Dale Zwizinski (27:51):
For
Adam Jay (27:51):
Us or for us anymore. It's
Dale Zwizinski (27:52):
Just like they have to be aligned, that's a
Adam Jay (27:54):
Great
Dale Zwizinski (27:54):
Word, and they have to be involved. It doesn't mean you have to be to every meeting or every conversation, but you got to be involved and you have to be able to decide alongside of us and not-
Adam Jay (28:05):
Aligned. Aligned is the
Dale Zwizinski (28:07):
Right
Adam Jay (28:07):
Word.
Dale Zwizinski (28:07):
So before we get into our Monday morning move, our 3M, I want to have a conversation about what does it actually feel like to be inside a company and genuinely got it right? What does that feel like for the departments? And I want you to get super specific around it.
Adam Jay (28:21):
The easiest word is harmony, but let me go a litle bit deeper and be specific. So when things are going properly, you do not have the infighting that you typically see. You will never hear people say sales owns the number or marketing owns the number or success owns the number. You will hear that we collectively have a revenue number and it's everyone's job to get there. And when a deal is lost in the sales process, you're not going to see ... It was a shit lead from marketing. And marketing's not going to say, "Oh, it was a great lead, but the sales rep messed it up." Collectively, everyone's going to look and be like, "What was the root cause? Was this a right ICP fit? Did we blunder somewhere in the sales process? Is it a combination of both?" When a customer churns, same thing, there's not this finger pointing, "Oh, CS couldn't get the renewal." Everyone wants to understand back to the very beginning, was this a right fit customer?
(29:18):
You will have executive meetings where there is always pushback on one another in the most respectful and positive way where people want to be challenged, they encourage others to make them think differently, they ask for that feedback and they don't take it personally and then they collectively align on what the right path is forward. And that's hard, right? It's hard to disagree and commit but want deeply that feedback and don't take it personal. And I struggle with this with you, I want feedback and I want to get better, but it's hard not to take things personally and it takes a mindset, whether it's individual a group to not feel like something is being a personal attack, but in the right orgs, you're very deliberate with your words and you're making sure that you're not making people feel deeply attacked personally. I think the other thing you already touched on, Dale, is alignment from the CEO.
(30:16):
The CEO has to drive this behavior throughout the organization, throughout his or her actions at every stage, otherwise it doesn't matter. Departments feel like they're a team, departments feel like they're not a department like they're one big group and that they're all charging towards the same one to three goals. Everyone's goals should arguably roll up to the same big goal, otherwise you're running in silos and you're getting it
Dale Zwizinski (30:44):
Wrong. I think a lot of times we're looking for one word and I think harmony is such a great word to use with how that feels. I love that piece. So let's move on to our Monday morning move. So if you're about to hire your next revenue hire, you need to answer this question first. Do you know why you hit or missed your last revenue number? Not what happened. Don't get into the story. Don't get into the emotional attachments of it. If the answer is like you're guessing, then you're not ready to hire anybody. Let's fix the problem. So you need to diagnose the internal problems before just throwing more people at the problem. We talked a lot about this. I'd like to encourage you to just not go hire more people to try to solve a problem that you don't even know what you're trying to solve for.
(31:36):
One piece I wanted to add on to this is because of the world of AI right now, you need to outline what has happened transactionally, very process oriented and find out if you can automate it or you really do need a human in that place as people are moving towards this agentic world.
Adam Jay (31:53):
That's exactly what I was going to say. The very first question you have to ask is, can this be done with AI or can a portion of this be done with AI? And I'm not advocating for AI replacing humans. You need humans to run the AI properly. We talk a lot about human in the loop, but don't hire people for repetitive tasks. It's a colossal waste of money.
Dale Zwizinski (32:14):
Yep. We're seeing this all the time. So let's wrap some of this up with some uncensored questions and see if I can get some of your spidey senses up. What's the thing you believe about how revenue works that most of your peers would publicly disagree with?
Adam Jay (32:33):
How revenue works that most of my peers would publicly disagree with. You got to get rid of the heroics. If you have one person who is a hero and who is selling well but is a cancer to the organization, I don't want to say follow the rules, but isn't on board with the systems, isn't a team player. I would cut them as quickly as I would cut anyone else.
Dale Zwizinski (32:55):
And trust me, I've seen this in action in play. So he doesn't only talk his talk. He walks his walk.
Adam Jay (33:01):
What's the most- It was the first interview question the then CEO of Toast gave me in my interview. And I didn't realize it was a real situation, but he said, "You have a top performer on the team, hypothetically, bringing in 55% of the team's revenue never submits a forecast, never does this, never does that, is openly disrespectful. What do you do? " I'm like, "Gets one warning and gets fired. That's not how you're going to be on my team. Come to find out. " Very real situation. He got one warning and he got fired. And our revenue still was number one in the country.
Dale Zwizinski (33:33):
What's the most overrated move a struggling GTM team makes?
Adam Jay (33:37):
Hiring more people.
Dale Zwizinski (33:38):
We talked about the whole podcast.
Adam Jay (33:40):
It's the theme of this episode, hiring more people. Other than that, the most overrated move a struggling GTM team makes that I'm seeing lately, decision by committee. We get so bogged down in this analysis paralysis. Yes, you have to analyze, but there comes a point where you just got to make a decision.
Dale Zwizinski (33:56):
Yeah, totally true. One thing every founder gets wrong in their first revenue hire.
Adam Jay (34:01):
Hiring for logo over experience. And when I say experience, mean not in the sense of overall experience, but have they done this job at your stage or slightly above? Slightly above. If you are a startup looking for a VP of sales, you do not want someone from Salesforce. You don't want someone from Facebook. You don't want someone who's only sold on brand recognition. Hiring for X Google, X Facebook, Xanthropic, et cetera, et cetera. Big mistake.
Dale Zwizinski (34:28):
What's your favorite restaurant in the United States?
Adam Jay (34:32):
Oh, shit. Near and dear to my heart. I'm going to give you two answers. It was a restaurant called Conroe in West Palm Beach. It is the single best meal I ever had in my life. They have since closed because the chef founder is a disgusting human being and almost killed his ex- wife. So to hell with them, but it was the best meal I ever had in my life. Other than that, my favorite restaurant in the United States right now is probably ever in Chicago, which is a Curtis Duffy three Michelin star tasting menu.
Dale Zwizinski (35:02):
Awesome. So you do a lot of traveling and I ask this question on every podcast episode.
Adam Jay (35:08):
Let me guess, what's my dream vacation destination
Dale Zwizinski (35:12):
That you have not been to?
Adam Jay (35:14):
Yeah, I desperately ... There's two. The more near term future will be Tokyo, Kyoto, dying to go to Japan, but the true dream vacation destination is an African safari.
Dale Zwizinski (35:26):
Nice, nice. Adam, thank you so much for joining my hosting of the-
Adam Jay (35:31):
So
Dale Zwizinski (35:31):
Weird,
Adam Jay (35:32):
Dude, to be
Dale Zwizinski (35:32):
On this side. ... podcast. If your GTM is broken and you can't prove it yet, that's exactly why the show exists. Subscribe to GTM Uncensored. New episodes drop every Wednesday.