Why you missed Q1 I #050

If you’re scrambling to justify a weak Q1 to your board, start here.

Because you’re not alone, and you’re probably blaming the wrong things.

In this episode, Toni and Raul dissect why so many revenue teams are falling short. They cover everything from unrealistic quotas and planning blind spots to the hidden dangers of action bias and over-experimentation (looking at you, AI-obsessed founders). They also dive into why “just one more deal” isn’t a strategy, how founder-led magic doesn’t scale, and why your reps are probably single-threading deals with fake champions.

Creators and Guests

Host

Raul Porojan

Director of Sales & Customer Success at Project A Ventures

Host

Toni Hohlbein

CEO of Growblocks

What is Revenue Brothers?

What happens when a VC and a CEO come together?

– They nerd out about all things revenue. And they don’t always agree.

Raul Porojan of Project A Ventures and Toni Hohlbein of Growblocks are the Super Revenue Brothers. In every episode they dissect and debate current issues in B2B SaaS, and offer solutions on how to solve them

No matter if you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling unicorn – you’ll always learn something new.

RevBros - Why you missed Q1
===

Introduction
---

[00:00:00]

Raul: I see people taking very early on just, all their money and putting it into AI agents, and like building no sales team whatsoever and all those things.

Now, I'm not saying those things can't work out, but. When a lot of people are trying out a lot of different things at the same time, it means that some of those things, and actually maybe a lot of those won't work yet. And I think that is a big part of the reason why currently I do feel like there's more people missing quota.

It's because they're trying so many things. Now in the midterm, this might lead to you being much better than if you hadn't tried those things. But that maybe means that you have to sacrifice when you're trying out more and more things, when you're adding more and more insecurities to the whole equation that maybe you reaching this goal at the end of Q1 is probably a bit more out of reach.

Toni, it's spring. I look outside the window. I actually see sun. And, I, when I look at yours outside, it also looks like it's very sunny in Copenhagen. it's March 24, by the way, which means more than just the sun approaching. It also means that the quarter is ending. [00:01:00] And for a lot of people, that is a very terrible thing right now.

Why We're Missing Targets
---

Toni: Yes, the reality is like more people are missing target than not. That's, you know, I guess, I guess we can say it like this and I think what we wanted to dissect today, because what's gonna happen, you know, the, this show's probably gonna end a week or two and you're gonna be sitting there realizing you missed target.

You need to talk to the board. why did you miss Target? and there's obviously gonna be very specific things for you, specifically, why you missed. But, maybe we can give you a little bit of a breakdown of what are probably the reasons, like if you, if you were to hire Raul and or me, to kind of come in and give you an idea, that's probably how we would go about it.

and also some of the things we are seeing right now, some of the reasons why people are struggling to hit target. The shifts that they haven't adapted to, frankly. I think those are the things we wanted to cover today.

Raul: So let's first start with maybe the basics in itself. So obviously some aspects pertain to [00:02:00] 2025 and what's happening currently, and I think there are some things to talk about there. But then just in general overall, like what are people doing wrong? Let's assume they did some planning maybe in November or December for what would happen in Q1, and that didn't happen.

And in fact, what happened was something worse. What are the classics here?

Toni: so let's start withthe basics and the boring stuff.First of all, you set the wrong quota. Like it's, it's the wrong target to set. That's just what it is. Number two, You took a target from, okay, those are five sales reps and those are their quotas for Q1. I'm gonna add all of them up.

That's my target. Like that's also not a great way to go about it. So number one, you should always have a buffer. I believe you should have a buffer between what your individuals, quota add up to, to what the company target should be. another one, super classic is. Oops. You know, we didn't hire early enough.

People are actually not near seats. so you don't have enough people to even kind of fill out the quota to begin with. another one is, [00:03:00] oops, we have three to six month sales cycles and we missed our pipeline target in Q3, Q4 last year, but we kind of forgot to, you know, calculate this into the Q1 Q2 results and therefore that's what we are left with.

Right. Another one, especially early days, is like, let's give all of our managers also an individual target. you know, they have to manage a team and then also bring in money themselves. I think that can work once in a while, but, you know, there, there's, there's an, there's an expiry date to this.

Also, did you come up with a target in a bottom up fashion? Like, you know, what can we actually achieve? Or did you come up with a target because the board told you you need to be at 10 million by the end of the year, and you reverse engineered it and figured out, oh, okay, that means we need to hit x, in Q1.

Right. the latter approach, obviously more ambitious and easier to do, but also sometimes it's just disconnected from reality. it just is. that then leads to big disappointments when the time comes. I think kind of top of my head, and maybe I burned through half the content now here, but top of my [00:04:00] head, those would be the things that I would, first just tap on and see, is one of those things, maybe the predominant reason why missing, occurred.

The Delay Factor in Sales
---

Raul: I think the, to sum it up into one word, in reality, obviously there is all kinds of different mistakes you can make from the planning mistake to kind of the execution mistake and all those things. But I think the one common thread that I see that leads to people really missing targets a lot of times is the word delay and not actually accounting for that.

And again, it's something that makes a lot of founders feel very uncomfortable. and they kind of have this view of themselves obviously as like being very agile and fast. obviously we're much faster than everyone else. By the way, again, 50% of founders think that they're top 10% fast, which is obviously not possible.

But every founder I've ever spoken to thinks that they're so much faster than everyone else. and so a lot of the times, when I have a project I do with them, one of the things I really need to do to make sure that the project can be successful is, managing their expectations on how fast things can go, because they always think they can be five X faster than everyone else.[00:05:00]

But what that leads to a lot of times is that those goals actually will be reached, but they'll probably be reached later than you think. And kind of, uh, the arbitrary point of like Q1, uh, a lot of times is what makes people so unhappy about things.even though everything is probably totally fine, you reach that thing in May or June and you still have the money and it still works out and you're still not spending very much, your burn is fine.

Like. Who gives a fuck? Honestly, at the end of the day, if it's three months later, as long as your burn rate is fine, as long as the cash situation is fine, it doesn't make much of a difference. And the second thing here is what I also see a lot of times is, when you're become a bit more relaxed about that, you also become better at planning the delay in, in there.

And then you become a bit less kind of chaotic when you, when you don't reach the target. And specifically what I've seen also many times is when people. Have not factored in that maybe they're planning a bit too ambitious when it comes to the timing. and let's talk about Q1 here. February comes around, they become a bit jittery and they're like, oh, we're, we're not gonna reach the end [00:06:00] of, March goal.

We need to do do something now. We need to act. All the people who did cold calling, 'cause that's too slow, are now gonna drive out to like events or whatever. And then they have these kind of overnight actions, which. Very often leads them to reaching that goal even later because maybe that it was totally sound to do, the cold calling, it just took a bit longer than you thought.

So now you're going into like full action mode to reach that goal. And the funny thing here is typically that also takes longer than you think. So it's also not gonna lead you to, to reach your goal at the end of Q1. So, you actually fucked up two times. By number one, taking people away from the thing that they should have been doing, but it just took a bit longer than you thought.

And number two, putting them on something and again, expecting that it's gonna work out faster than you, than you

Action Bias in Sales Strategies
---

Toni: It's called action bias, by the way. and people are absolutely prone to it. So what does action bias mean? It means in a situation of adversity, it's easier for us humans to do something about it than just to sit back and, and, and watch. and the thing is. It makes a [00:07:00] lot of sense when you're out in the wild and there's a, there's a, there's a lion charging at you.

You shouldn't be like, oh, you know, I think everything is going to according to plan. You know, I'll just chill here. You should obviously kind off action something, but, you know, nowadays in the AI age, let just say it like that. I think a lot of things that you, ma made good decisions on probably are solid and probably shouldn't mess with that,

Obviously sometimes you have to change and kind of, you know, in your gut when you, when you need to. But the, just be aware there's a bias to change, a bias to action kind of coded into us that kind of sometimes mislead us, in, in that sense.

Raul: a very extreme example of that, by the way, so I actually talked to a friend, I, I'm quite disappointed by this. I actually talked to a friend, I think it was maybe in August or September, who was launching or was considering launching a company with a tech founder, and they had said, we're gonna give this thing 12 months.

And if it doesn't work out, then we're gonna drop it. And we have some criteria for why that that wasn't. And,they've [00:08:00] actually dropped the company like, just a couple weeks ago, even though it was going quite well. they were just a tiny bit slower than they were thinking. and that was really, to them, they were like so black and white about the whole thing.

They had traction, they were already covering their own costs, which was them and a couple of developers basically. In every kind of book. They would also have probably received VC money and everything, but they were very black and white about when that would happen. and I found that to be a very extreme example of this, but I've actually seen this in real life.

Toni: So, taking this back a little bit to the GTM kind of side of things, One way to cheat yourself into taking this action, this bias to action in in the right direction, is to try and do action or to reinforce the same thing.

So let's just say you have an outbound calling strategy. Maybe That's what it is. Kind of what are the actions you can take in order to supercharge that? Right? It's like, well, let's start thinking about spiffs and sprints and stuff like that. Kind of gamify the whole thing.

Can you, put more people on this calling thing? Can you try and remove time from your SDRs or BDRs to only be calling or to, you know, [00:09:00] how can you get the actions from 75 a day to a hundred a day? can you find ways to get this better and faster and more and more and more?

you know, you should be channeling your action towards that, until you potentially call it, and, move away from it, But again, those, are ways to mess up your target even more as you're building towards it.

I mentioned previously, that we are in Q1 2025.

Adapting to New Market Realities
---

Toni: what are other reasons why people are missing target? We talked about the classic ones and I would probably say they account for 95% of reasons, by the way. So that's just what it is. But, people find super interesting, the 5% kind of the new excuse they can find in order to put their hat on.

What are new good things that, people should know about that are happening in the market that might have caused them to miss their target?

Raul: So some people might not be happy about that answer again, but I think people. probably a right decision to do so. but people are fucking around a lot with kind of like the go-to market actions and the different levers and everything at the moment, which, there's a lot of experimentation happening, [00:10:00] which is probably a good thing in the mid to long term,

Possibly leads to like when you experiment, some things also don't work out. And what do I mean specifically with that? So where maybe a couple years ago, or maybe even for some people right now, it's obviously like, oh yeah, we built this tool. We're just gonna call a lot of people. at some point we're gonna do the, put a little bit of money into branding and then at some point we're gonna put some money into LinkedIn and we're gonna see how that works out, right?

Things are quite clear in their mind, and then they will follow up on that for a couple years and it will work or it won't work. I see a lot more people just really. Fucking around with all kinds of things in go to market. and when it comes to obviously like including AI and every kind of different aspects, tooling very early on when it comes to like leads and lead detection and interest detection and trying a million different things there, I see people taking very early on just, all their money and putting it into AI agents, and like building no sales team whatsoever and all those things.

Now, I'm not saying those things can't work out, but. When a lot of people are trying out a lot of different things at the same [00:11:00] time, it means that some of those things, and actually maybe a lot of those won't work yet. And I think that is a big part of the reason why currently I do feel like there's more people missing quota.

It's because they're trying so many things. Now in the midterm, this might lead to you being much better than if you hadn't tried those things, and I'll fully acknowledge that. But that maybe means that you have to sacrifice when you're trying out more and more things, when you're adding more and more insecurities to the whole equation that maybe you reaching this goal at the end of Q1 is probably a bit more out of reach.

Toni: Yeah, I think this is, you know, if you translate this into board speak, I think there's an angle here where you say like, Hey, we've experimented more than we anticipated for X and y, reason. and. Of those results are lagging, yada yada, yada. Right? I think that can be a way to go about it.

And I think this whole AI thing, people are kind of buying, right? Kind of a usual, at least for the last 10 years. board level excuse was like, ah, the sales team is fresh and they're ramping and there's, you know, reasons like that. so [00:12:00] I think the AI piece is much more interesting. I think, another one that I've seen now happen a couple of times.

Is, you know, you as a company, and this has been going on for now, a couple of quarters, so this is not like shocking Q1, 2025 stuff. but a couple of teams still haven't adapted to the new way of how people are making decisions out there. you have way more stakeholders than you used to have.

you need to, try and engage multiple people. Some of them are champions, some of them are not. I see a lot of people. Holding onto this one contact that they have, hoping it's the champion, but it's really not. They can't get you access to anything, neglecting this whole, like, Hey, we need to try and position broader in the organization.

Running a very risky sales process of like, oops, this person got fired, or, you know, left the job or moved into a different position. They don't care about this problem anymore. And then they're basically stuck with, you know, rebooting the whole process. Right. Kind of this [00:13:00] single threading versus multithreading.

Really kind of doing this in the right way, making sure that you don't fool yourself on who's really making the decision and kind of not read too much into some of the enthusiasm and emotions that maybe the person that you're talking to kind of has. and then realizing, you know, while there are multiple people that need to be part of that decision, what you also have is you are competing for attention and you are competing for.

resources in the organization that have nothing to do with your competitor set, like nothing. you might be in a super busy category, totally might be the case. But the reason why you're losing the deal might be because someone is, rolling out one of those AI SDRs now, and that's the priority of the organization.

and has nothing to do with you. just like, hey, the, the absorption ability of authored organization to take in kind of a new thing. Just isn't there. it simply is not there. So you're competing really with something that you didn't even know [00:14:00] you're competing with, right? And this is where you start thinking about competing on attention, and priorities rather than on features, and stuff like that, right?

So I would say both of these things, managing your stakeholders in a different way and realizing who your real competitor is in a deal. I think that has been leading to lots of, deals, dropping, delaying, pushing out, or just going dark, leading. Then, you know, cumulatively leading to missing target ultimately.

The Challenge of Identifying True Decision Makers
---

Raul: Uh, just not to go too much on a tangent here, but one thing that I've seen also, if you've been in this for, longer than a couple of years, there is some kind of meta movements, in let's say 10, 11 years. And one of the things that I've seen very consistently is that in buyers. You have a much harder time in general reaching the people who are actually the buyers as you just mentioned. And specifically the reason for that is because more and more people within companies kind of feel empowered to buy or feel like they are the right people or like they're [00:15:00] educated or like they're the decision makers than it used to be the case 10, 11 years ago.

So. I remember a time, I don't know if you do, but like, I remember a time when it used to be that you didn't even have to so proactively weed out the non-decision makers because they would do that by themselves. Like, I would call someone and people would just tell me, oh yeah, no, don't worry. That's, that's not me.

Talk to this Toni guy. Right? And that would happen a lot more proactively. Where now I call the same person and they're gonna tell me, yeah, yeah, that's me. I'm the AI guy here. I'm the whatever person, right? Um, and it can be a lot of different things.

It can be that there's more responsibilities on a same person. It can be that they're better educated and everything, but it leads to much bigger problems and you having to be more proactive about this. the extreme on that, by the way, is that also gatekeepers do that a lot more than they did before.

So 10, 11 years ago, you very rarely had gatekeepers who would on their own, try to decide whether what you were. Doing was a good or bad thing. They were just typically trying to avoid their boss getting swamped with calls. And now very often they think that they're actually the decision [00:16:00] makers.

so that's one thread there. I dunno if you've seen something like that as well, that kind of the trend is going that things just take a bit more time there as well.

Toni: I can't say that I've seen the trend because I haven't been selling stuff 10 years ago. I think what I do see though is people being way more liberal with, Hoping that the person they're talking to is a champion or is even decision making.

I think there's a lot more, rep bias in like, oh, you finally got hold of the person, and the owners finally like, after all the outbounds and everything you did, and finally you have someone and he or she is excited. And then because you don't really have more option than this one person.

You, you decide it must be my champion. That's now my champion. but it turns out the person can't really give you access to anyone.maybe sets up a meeting here and there, you know, jumps on a call with you to hash some things out. But, really is, is, is not able to help you navigate the organization or kind of get you into the door somewhere.

Then, you know, in, in, in terms of MEDIC, it's kind of a level one or level zero champion basically. in other words, maybe not a champion all, maybe it's just a main [00:17:00] contact. Maybe it's just a person you're kind of talking to and falling in love with that person is, is probably, I. Part of the reason why you're kind of missing this thing.

Right. And I think kind of if you, you know, how would you take something like this to a board level, right? Kind of on the board level, you probably say like, Hey, we have some execution challenges in the later stages of the sales process, or something like that, right? I think you would package it up like this.

But really the cure to something like this is, you know, stronger, stronger coaching, stronger, you know, VP of sales that, you know, sniffs out the BS and then throws those deals out or forces the reps to kind of, to dig deeper. And if you don't have that person, you need to be that person, right? Which, by the way, it's also a skill to develop, especially in the early days, to make sure that you're leading those reps in the right way and taking away some of the excuses that.

You know, they're not giving them to you because they're lying to you. They're giving them to you because they're kind of married to the deals and they're kind of, they're so deep into it. When you then take those things into your monthly reporting to your bot, and then it doesn't [00:18:00] happen, you really look like a fool, right?

So kind of on that level, you know, that might happen to you once or twice, but then you kind of need to start cutting this stuff. and, and at least it just the reporting one level up, right? I would very much recommend, very much recommend to also cut it level down. Like basically kind of tell AEs in their faces that you don't believe in this deal because of X, Y, and z reason.

Frameworks, like MEDIC is like a good idea to, by the way, achieve that. but at least then you're protecting yourself from looking like a buffoon, in your quarterly, board meetings.

Raul: And I also. It doesn't even matter necessarily. It's the same for a founder or a vp, sales, whatever, or a CRO is. When you have that board meeting and you realize two weeks, let's say you have the board meeting early April and you realize two weeks before that you're gonna mis quota for Q1. And then you go into panic mode and you try to figure out where the deals were at and where things dropped and everything.

And let's say you're kind of like very well educated about that, but now you're like scrambling and [00:19:00] getting all the info out there. At that point, it's already a little bit too late, most likely. You will look like a fool, as you just mentioned in front of the board. now who cares? Like if you look like a fool, but everything's fine.

That's not the biggest of deals, but everything's probably not fine. The main issue here is that you let it get to a point where you don't have a grip on where your funnel really looks like, and that ultimately is the responsibility of the whatever commercial founder and then the VP sales that is under that.

Nobody else is responsible for that. If you as a commercial founder, CRO, co-founder, type, whatever, do not know what's in that funnel of yours, especially early on when it's like just three, four salespeople, you're completely fucking up. And if you can't roll that back and kind of anticipate that in January or February that it's probably not going to work out for Q1, that is your fault.

And if you can then unpack that and argue in front of the board why that happened and how you got there, then obviously you're not gonna have to have the confidence of making the right decision that [00:20:00] maybe you believe in. For example, Hey, I know we fucked up. Here's why, but we're actually gonna double down and hire a coach for this.

Toni: the thing though is, and this is so difficult to swallow early on, is, you know, the previous year, so you only got to this point where you get to hire sales reps and have a VC run. You only got there because you sometimes probably were lucky before. Like, that's how this works. Right? And if you had bad luck before, maybe you wouldn't even be at this point.

Right? So it's like a survivorship bias to the degree. what happened last year and the year before for you to kind of feel good, you know, about yourself right now is, well, it kind of figured it out. It always worked out in the end, right? There was this one deal and it got over the line and then we kind of, rang the bell and hit the gong and we hit target.

but now new level, you know, first of all, just one deal that you swing in the end will probably not make it work, anymore. And then number two, you know, regression to mean. You will sometimes be unlucky. Like whether or not you were lucky last time doesn't really matter, but at [00:21:00] some point you will be unlucky, right?

And it's just going to hit you at some point, right? So, having this feeling of, hey, it's kind of gonna work out. I think you need this to sleep well at night, by the way, at the same thing. but also you kind of need to force yourself or someone else on the team. to take the worst case approach or at least the less, you know, less optimistic approach.

And try and figure out why that is and what you can do about it. I'm not sure you're gonna package this up for the board, by the way, but, that's kind of stuff that you're probably gonna be thinking about yourself anyway.

The Transition from Founder-Led Sales
---

Raul: And part of the reason this phenomenon happens, I think, is because this is where you move from. Maybe the reason why it worked out a year ago was because you as a founder were doing that the whole sales yourself. So this is the typical move from founder sales to founder led to then maybe VP sales led,

Before that you were much deeper into the tank and, and you were much deeper into things and in the funnel you had a better understanding. And, and maybe at the time it was enough to call up those two, three friends of yours, get one lead and one guy you [00:22:00] went to university with closed the deal. And now that's obviously not enough from a volume size anymore, but also because there's a lot of founder magic missing in the team and they can't just make things magically happen at once.

For whatever reason, like we talked about this in a different episode, like standing, the network, maybe kind of the urgency that they can't create and a lot of different things that they can't just do on their own. and where to you maybe it seemed like, yeah, I can just make those things happen.

Maybe you're a team of three people who just started two or three months ago. Can't

Toni: So, and this is, I'm gonna plug now kind of the product we're working on by the way. Uh, but one of the issues we found was, many things, but one of the issues we found is like, yeah, people are recording stuff with Gong and, you know, all these other kind of tools. They kind of end up not using all of that unstructured data actually.

one really cool use case, we build out is actually around, the objections you're running into and that maybe you as a founder would've, just, batted over the quarter but maybe your reps aren't And being able to scroll and, crawl through all those calls and try and understand what are the objections that are coming out [00:23:00] and how my people are reacting to that.

We make it just really easy to surface this, right? To kind of go through these things. But, you know, maybe, different point where I kind of talk a little bit more what we're building at aav, but that's one of those pieces where we think like data analysis should just be easier, right?

And it's not a gong tool. it's much easier than this. You know what, maybe we wrap here actually, Raul, unless you have another, thing that's, no, not necessarily.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts
---

Raul: I think the one thing that I would really leave it with here is, when you get to this point. And you are in March or wherever you're at, or maybe it's over March already, try to resist the urge to immediately change something because as Toni talked about, like the bias towards action, right?

It might be that you have to change something, but very often it might be that you have to double down on what you're doing, which are two complete different directions. And, it can be very hard to act, confidently on which one to take.

And there's ways to do so, although we just hinted at a couple of those. but I find that just as many times as, as changing course is the right action.sticking [00:24:00] on that course just for a bit longer and a bit better is probably also right. Action.

Toni: Okay, everyone, thanks for, listening to the, I hope we added some value. Please hit subscribe if you haven't already. tell your friend about this episode who maybe is struggling with a similar problem right now, and otherwise, thank you so much, Raul and see you next time.

Raul: Thank you.

Toni: Bye-bye.