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Plenty of reps aren't making quota - but there are some very simple reasons why we see again and again and again.
We talk about the three reasons - and the best part? You can fix them.
We talk about the three reasons - and the best part? You can fix them.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (03:03) - Sales Challenges and Observations
- (05:18) - Problem 1: Lots of MQLs that go no where
- (16:21) - Problem 2: Wrong meetings booked
- (19:42) - Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- (21:58) - Problem 3: The AEs
- (24:24) - The Importance of Accurate Sales Data
- (29:08) - Conclusion
***
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This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni.
[00:00:07] In today's episode, we share three reasons sales isn't making quota, all from very real cases. Enjoy!
[00:00:20] Mikkel: So actually, yeah, since we started doing video on Spotify, I've noticed a thing. I've noticed a thing whenever I wear this shirt, so I'm wearing a black tee. I'm just a floating head. You can literally not see anything but, you know, one or two pale arms and then my head.
[00:00:37] Toni: I think it's a good
[00:00:38] Mikkel: I don't know.
[00:00:39] Toni: I think everyone benefits.
[00:00:40] Mikkel: Yeah. Maybe I should have a green shirt and we could do some green screen stuff on there instead. That would be, that would be pretty
[00:00:46] funny. So
[00:00:47] Toni: fun.
[00:00:47] Mikkel: But actually so this weekend it's my youngest, not youngest, one of my younger sisters.
[00:00:54] Birthday. And uh, invited everyone over they'd set up pavilions on the patio, and we're outside, and the weather was like, I don't know if you recall the weather yesterday, it was very mixed.
[00:01:04] Toni: like, it's like, hardcore sunshine, hardcore
[00:01:07] Mikkel: yeah, that was like, the pendulum was swinging back and forth every hour, and we were sitting there, and it was pretty hot, and then all of a sudden, you know, I think it took about five minutes.
[00:01:16] The clouds, they just rushed in and then the skies just opened up and emptied water everywhere. And I sat with my two girls on my lap and I was like, yeah, we need to get inside now. Hand one off to my dad, take the youngest. And you know what can happen with the pavilion, right? When it's raining.
[00:01:36] Toni: off.
[00:01:37] Mikkel: Well, that can happen, but that's not what happened though, but basically a lot of water accumulated on top of it. And I was like, I had to go just outside and around the table. And the second I do that, it's like, All the water just ejects and what happens is it hits my daughter right in the face and I go, I go like scot free, not a drop of water on me and I could just see her in the face, you know, like when you get a bucket of water in your face and you're not prepared for it, she was just like
[00:02:08] But
[00:02:08] Toni: But also you saw the water coming and just held up your child to block
[00:02:11] Mikkel: And
[00:02:14] Toni: really
[00:02:14] Mikkel: know what that's funny because segways wise that's exactly what's happening, because a lot of folks, they're missing quota, and they're not prepared for it, and what happens?
[00:02:22] Someone pulls up the VP sales to shield themself from blame. That's literally what happened. So this is like, finally, the Segway game is back. We're back in business. We also
[00:02:33] Toni: because you kind of chained some words
[00:02:35] Mikkel: Yeah, that's true. And it was so funny. I was thinking, finally, we're going to record on Monday again.
[00:02:39] We've been a bit off our game. We can finally get that rhythm up and running again. What are you doing next Monday?
[00:02:46] Toni: Oh, I'm uh, I'm I'm, I'm not here.
[00:02:49] Mikkel: you're on a holiday. So it's like, good thing we started up again.
[00:02:52] Toni: But also the good thing is that, you know, it's Monday morning. No one talked to each other.
[00:02:57] Mikkel: Yeah, obviously.
[00:02:59] Toni: And so we kind of got it all reserved for
[00:03:01] Mikkel: No, exactly. That's what it is.
[00:03:03] So, no, but the thing is, you and I have talked a bit as of late about all the wonderful sales reps. You know, I, so I hold a great respect for that work. It's ruthless. It's ruthless. Super practical. Yeah. Also to me.
[00:03:15] Toni: Do you?
[00:03:16] Mikkel: No, I do. Honestly, I do. I could never do that job. It's you know, one moment you think you have it and then deal gone. I could not deal with that kind of pressure. But we've talked a lot about external changes happening, right? Everyone who's listened to probably the last 10 episodes we've aired have heard some of the, the challenges out there about quota completion, win rates, ACVs, sales cycle length, everything is basically shit.
[00:03:41] Everything is basically shit, right? But actually, we've noticed a pattern. We, it's no secret, we talk with a lot of customers and a lot of folks out there in the space and we've kind of noticed a pattern of things that they can change that's hopefully going to help out.
[00:03:56] Toni: Yep. So the and just to make this a little bit more real.
[00:04:00] So this is literally, those are two to three examples. And maybe change some stuff and so forth. But it's actually kind of out of the. I think 10 last customers we saw on, this is, this has been the case with five other. Yeah. So this is not just like a, Oh, Toni found something on LinkedIn or Mikkel rather found something on LinkedIn.
[00:04:19] It's kind of, let's talk about that again. No, this is like absolutely real. The numbers obviously changed kind of some of the details are changed, but ultimately this is really what people still are experiencing out there. And And you might be thinking, Oh, you know, we are super sophisticated, meaning kind of you listener and the team super sophisticated, but I'm telling you out of the people that are listening to us, probably 50 to 40 percent are still having this issue.
[00:04:44] So chances are, if you and your colleague are listening to this,
[00:04:47] Mikkel: going to find something to fix. I think that's the beautiful thing now. It's not like, oh, it's out of our hands. We can't, you know, people are including finance and we don't know how to deal with it. There's so many things that you can't really do anything about.
[00:05:01] That's just a fact of life now. Here, you're going to get three very real examples of things that you can actually go and change that is going to have an impact for the better.
[00:05:10] Toni: That's it.
[00:05:10] Mikkel: So. We have like three problems and three solutions. Let's hop in to the first.
[00:05:18] Toni: So, This is a company and they have been pacing behind their revenue expectations. You know, no, no surprise there. Okay. Kind of that happens all the time.
[00:05:28] Mikkel: that different from revenue ambitions or, you know, is that the same
[00:05:32] Toni: Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, the basic kind of behind target, right. And rolling is out we, as, as part of the rollout kind of do a little bit of an initial you know, go to market diagnostic, you'd say kind of very light, not like a winning by design, something like this, but very light to also teach, you know, how to use the tool and so forth.
[00:05:47] And obviously kind of, we're seeing that the kind of pacing behind what they actually wanted to achieve. And then we're trying to figure out, you know, in the funnel, you know, what's wrong. And basically the, the surprise was on the inbound side, the surprise was they're hitting a lot of, they're creating a lot of MQLs.
[00:06:04] They're hitting, hitting those targets really nicely, right? And we're talking about MQLs in the thousands while they're closing deals in the tens. And, and load hence that, that being that, yeah. So you can already feel ashamed here Mikkel, you know, because you're, you're
[00:06:21] marketing, basically.
[00:06:22] Mikkel: My fault. It's
[00:06:23] Toni: it's your fault.
[00:06:24] And you know, what came out of that is like, well, and this is all just so real, like, yes, we're hitting our inbound targets, but, but what are you guys talking about? Kind of sales just can't convert this shit, but you know, it's, it's, it's sales fault. And then we unfold this thing a little bit. And then we're seeing that out of the thousands of MQLs.
[00:06:44] We, you know, the vast majority is webinar down webinars, white paper downloads you know, maybe lists that were bought, events and so forth. Right. And we're talking like 5% demo requests.
[00:06:59] Mikkel: Yeah. Oh man.
[00:07:03] Toni: And and when you only look at the demo request line you actually see that
[00:07:08] that
[00:07:09] by itself was actually pacing to
[00:07:11] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:12] Toni: you know, I think they were a little bit behind in terms of volume, so they should have had a little bit, you know, more there, but basically kind of the line by itself was pacing to target perfectly, and you know, lots of opportunities coming out, lots of revenue coming out, all of that is absolutely great but just obviously the other stuff, you know, in the thousands of leads, Not going anywhere.
[00:07:34] And we talked about the split funnel analysis a couple of times, right? But I also want to today kind of explore this from the sales person's perspective. So maybe you're a VP sales listening, maybe you're a very sales driven CRO listening. And you're dealing with the same issue, right? Kind of, you're getting a bunch of leads.
[00:07:53] They're all kind of good. They're all, you know, you're hitting the quality threshold, but your team is just not able to convert them into money. And I think to be really honest, if you are, if you're not a RevOps that's in the weeds, Or if you're not the marketing guy that kind of knows, but kind of silent about it, which as you know, Mikkel, the target is a chief check mark.
[00:08:18] I think VP sales is kind of getting screwed here, right? Because it's extremely difficult from a VP sales perspective to understand, you know, what are the different, different basically leads in this case, where we're going to talk about some other areas, leads in this case, actually coming my way.
[00:08:35] And what's the quality of those, right? You might anecdotally hear from a sales rep, like, Hey, this seems to be, this was like a you know, Facebook lead and they didn't go anywhere, or this was, you know, Hey, I'm trying to talk to this person and download this webinar or this, watch the webinar. He, he doesn't give a damn about what we're doing here.
[00:08:53] You might hear this anecdotally. But it's extremely difficult from a VP sales perspective to scrutinize the funnel on top of him, right? Or her. And this is kind of what's happening here, right? So, in this case VP sales get squeezed, kind of, why aren't you hitting target? And in reality, sales are actually doing a good job.
[00:09:11] Like, if you kind of run the numbers historically, what, you know, they should be getting out of the demos, what they should be getting out of the other stuff, Actually kind of matched up kind of this was, this was as expected, but because the mix shifted behind the scenes, VP sales didn't know, didn't see it anecdotally, kind of had a hunch and stuff, but couldn't prove it.
[00:09:30] Right. Yeah. You know, basically impossible for him and then also subsequently the company to hit, hit target because of it.
[00:09:35] Mikkel: it. Yeah. What always confounded me in this stuff is, we were able to book meetings on the back of SDRs and close them cold. But then you have someone who just has an inkling of who you are.
[00:09:47] Whether it's that kind of, Hey, just because I download it doesn't give you the right. So now I'm not even gonna, like, I just wonder what is
[00:09:55] Toni: So basically why, why are webinar
[00:09:57] leads
[00:09:58] worse than Outbound? Right. So I think the very simple reason is, is that with Outbound, you can at least target.
[00:10:06] Mikkel: True. Yeah.
[00:10:07] Toni: Webinar, you get like anyone and everyone and sure you can kind of sort some of them away.
[00:10:12] But ultimately we know that the shape of the market is you will have more smaller than bigger companies. And then ultimately what comes through the pipeline there in terms of webinar leads that know you, you will have more rubbish that you wouldn't actually outbound to, right? And then the thing is, well, because they know us maybe then we should be outbounding to them.
[00:10:31] Kind of, that's the marketing kind of idea. And that turns out to be false. I would even say, and I've actually done this and it worked. If you give the inbound SDR, because you essentially need an inbound SDR to kind of work through those webinars. Actually you need an outbound SDR because it's really an outbound job.
[00:10:46] But anyway, you need some kind of a human helping you work through this. If you're still running this playbook, right? If you're still running this playbook, some people have moved away from this make that person, make that SDR report to marketing, make, make him or her be part of the marketing budget.
[00:11:01] And what you will find very quickly is that the CMO goes like, you know what, actually. I think I want to use the money differently. And so this is one of, you know, one of those tests you can run there.
[00:11:10] Mikkel: So, and I also think what you really got to look at here, and this is, you know, whether you sit in marketing or sales doesn't really matter.
[00:11:15] You need to look at where are they coming from and how did they convert, right? So that's back to the low intent, high intent. You really want to understand that stuff because this is a classic case where you're just getting a lot of low intent leads and it's not going to go anywhere, right?
[00:11:30] Toni: The thing is, and I had like a this was like more of a sales call recently, actually very large company.
[00:11:35] We're talking a hundred, 150 million. And and the person I talked to basically kind of was faced with In the Excel spreadsheet marketing was hitting again, and again, and again, and again,
[00:11:46] and
[00:11:46] Mikkel: again, and sales was missing again and again. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:50] Toni: Right. And we talked about this kind of actually kind of, we figured out it's probably this, this issue here, right.
[00:11:56] It's just so clear. And I literally asked him I mean, this was a bit of a discovery, a prospecting call and kind of, we were kind of thinking about you know, Growblocks there, but I basically asked him like, Hey, if a kid could give you full visibility into, what the, the quality of stuff is that's coming your way.
[00:12:13] Do you think this would extend your tenure at the company?
[00:12:15] Yes. Yes, Toni.
[00:12:18] yes, totally. Yes, it does. So, and that's what I'm saying. Kind of with so many people are faced with this stuff and now we're. We're only talking about you know, kinds of MQLs in terms of like a hand raisers or not hand raisers you have the same thing happening though with you know, referrals might come your way, which have a different, you know, way of converting.
[00:12:37] You might, you know, some teams are being hit with processing upsell opportunities, right? They convert extremely differently. And there's so much stuff happening on the top and on the front, and we're going to talk about some of the outbound pieces in a second. There's so much stuff happening there where yes, while you're hitting the overall quantity number, the, the makeup of these that sit behind them is usually so vastly different.
[00:13:01] it's basically impossible for the VP of sales to know.
[00:13:03] Mikkel: I also just wanna point out that on the surface, this seems like an easy fix. But it will actually require a bit of work internally. First, you need to shift people around from away from a mindset that's broken, which is inherently in marketing, right?
[00:13:16] We're generating a lot of leads that doesn't create any deals. That's a problem, right? But you have a lot of folks who will be hesitant to shift around. So you need to navigate that. On the other side of the spectrum, you then need to figure out where do you reallocate resources. And if, if let's just say all the budget stays in marketing, It's going to take a while until you start seeing the, you know, the fruits of that labor and shifting around.
[00:13:37] There will need to be experimentation and da, da, da. So it is a lot of work, but
[00:13:42] Toni: agree. The, the VP of sales in the process just shouldn't get fired all the time.
[00:13:45] No,
[00:13:45] Mikkel: exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And I think this is also speaks for me a bit to the sales marketing alignment, because if you can have a VP marketing, sit and pop the champagne. Yeah, we hit target and then the company misses on revenue.
[00:13:57] Something is just really broken as well. No,
[00:13:59] Toni: and, and the, the way kind of, I'm starting to think about this. So in, in one of the companies I worked at we basically created a graph. that had you know, the expected revenue outcome per rep based on the opportunities that he or she received.
[00:14:14] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:14:15] Toni: So, okay, lots of words. What, what does this mean?
[00:14:19] Well, if you have a 250K target, let's just say you do per AE and some AEs are hitting, some AEs are not hitting, kind of the first thing is like, well, why is that happening? Right. And one of the things you might be looking into is, well, you know, some reps got a hundred opportunities in a quarter and others got like 20.
[00:14:38] Actually, the 250k target kind of is irrelevant, actually, for that, right? You actually want to know did they convert those 10 or 50 in the best possible way, or the 100 in the best possible way. Celebrating the guy that converts 100 to hit 250k, probably not, probably not worth celebrating, actually, right?
[00:14:57] So there's a little bit of, like, yes, actually people need to be judged by their throughput, And that is limited and constrained or enabled to buy the input, right? Kind of, you need to kind of take those two things into consideration, right? And the same way you can actually think also about the sales profession in general, kind of the V everything that's sometimes we're starting to refer to them, the, the, the modern VP of sales basically, well, you know, yes, you know, whatever is coming your way, you are responsible for the throughput of that from.
[00:15:26] Interest to then actually closed won, but you need to have an understanding how the quality stacks up of the stuff that's coming your way to judge actually the throughput, right. And based on, you know, modeling and all of that kind of crazy stuff that we're doing you can then actually say like, well, this is what we could have expected to achieve.
[00:15:45] Versus this is what we actually were able to achieve. And some of that might still be the sales leader's fault, by the way. You know, some conversion rate might still be lower than it was expected to be. But at least you have a little bit of like, Hey, this was actually a marketing problem. This was a sales problem.
[00:15:59] Mikkel: I think it's also, you can ultimately just break it down.
[00:16:02] The worst thing you can go and do now is go to the VP market and say, hey, change all this stuff. I just need more inbounds. It's like very unhelpful request because everyone wants that, right? But if you can break it down to say, hey, in these markets, I need this amount of meetings from these types of prospects.
[00:16:17] Then all of a sudden there's something to work with. Let's go to problem number two.
[00:16:21] Toni: So similar, also top final. And again, this is like an actual story. Basically outbound team. Yeah. Fairly successful. Like you look at the numbers, they're hitting 10, 12 meetings a month per SDR.
[00:16:37] Mikkel: In this
[00:16:37] Toni: in, in the, in this environment in the U S my kind of, it's going in the exact right direction.
[00:16:42] And you think like, wow.
[00:16:44] why,
[00:16:44] is that stuff not converting? Like, that's so weird. And you know, what, what we looked at kind of all the closed won deals where are they coming from? Well, the U. S. Where, where, where we're over 50 percent of the bookings from the SDRs happening. Outside of the US, you know, and it's, so this is this, you know, some people are kind of thinking like, Oh, wow, this is such an amateur thing that would never happen to us,
[00:17:07] Mikkel: Yeah, you would be . Yeah. Honestly,
[00:17:10] Toni: you would be surprised. And you know, I think as a VP of sales kind of thinking or the CRO that kind of is responsible for this number one, you know, RevOps listening, you're right. And you guys need to, you guys and girls need to catch that. That's like a thing you just need to know about this.
[00:17:26] And, but also those are things that your sales reps can actually tell you, like just have a conversation with the AEs. And say like, well, this outbound thing is not working. Someone will tell you, well, half of them are like from somewhere where we can't close any
[00:17:40] business, So so maybe
[00:17:43] that's a reason.
[00:17:44] So, you know, those kinds of things. And Sometimes this, you know, it can go super complicated and try and get there by all kinds of analysis and stuff. But it's usually much simpler than that. Usually some of that stuff kind of already existed. And then, you know, while you might have a hunch, then putting these things side by side, kind of US versus non US, and see how many opportunities were generated.
[00:18:08] How many then converted, how many actually kind of end up being revenue. You start seeing this extremely crystal clear. and then the question then there is like, well, you know, should we maybe stop that? And, and if we were to stop that, you know, will these SDRs actually be able to book The same amount of meetings in the US and maybe not.
[00:18:30] And then maybe you need to look at your targets and so forth. Kind of, maybe you need to have a look, but right now, 50 percent of the stuff coming out of the team is basically useless. You're still paying commissions against that. And they're basically keeping the A team busy with stuff that cannot actually convert, right?
[00:18:45] So, so there's just something that's just so crystal clear. Just look at that stuff and then move these things around. And again, right. Either you're like you know, VP sales, CRO persona, focusing predominantly on the sales piece, which I think is, you might have other areas, but this will be your main focus many times.
[00:19:04] It might be really difficult to suss out what's coming from, you know, now we're just adding outbound to it, right. What's coming top funnel. And what are the flaws for that? Because it looks on a piece of paper, it looks like the SDRs are actually performing extremely well. You know, good stuff is coming out of that.
[00:19:21] You look at it blended and say like, Hmm, you know, actually the conversion rate is only five to 6%. So, you know, maybe it's not, we need to tweak it a little bit, but actually, you know, once you have someone unfold this and be like, no, actually I have 15 percent conversion rate in the U S and zero everywhere else.
[00:19:38] It's like, Oh, wait a minute. That feels like we could have known
[00:19:41] Mikkel: Yeah. You know, it's so funny.
[00:19:42] Whenever I read something around go to market strategy, one of the first things that I always like scoffed at and went like, this is so obvious. You need to define your
[00:19:54] Toni: You
[00:19:55] Mikkel: You need to define, and it's so silly, like, so we had what was his name, Price was it Price Intelligently?
[00:20:01] Harrison Rose. We had Harrison Rose on the show. And he talked a bit about, yeah, from Paddle, sorry, my bad. From Paddle, and he basically was talking about well, they did inbound, and they did outbound. Their ICP was basically just, here's the target list of companies we want as customers. Go, go hit the same, right?
[00:20:19] And in this case, it would be, yeah, they're all going to be in the States. They're all going to be, you know, whatever company X, B, C, D, E, F, G. And I think that's ultimately also where you want to end up at to, in order to book the right meetings, right?
[00:20:31] Toni: Yeah. I'm just, I'm just saying all of this sounds so super obvious and straightforward.
[00:20:35] What we've learned is while this is easy in theory, when Mikkel and Toni are talking about this, Oh, yeah, obviously kind of boring, you know, skip, skip. But in reality kind of, it happens so
[00:20:47] Mikkel: yeah, but it's also like, how often are you going to sit and look at that kind of split analysis by market? It's like, you're rarely going to do that, actually.
[00:20:55] Toni: Yeah. No. And I mean, so, and this is, I think where where, you know, People should just challenge their sales ops, rev ops team. And those, those are things that they just have to catch. And yes, there needs to be a little bit of, well, why is this happening?
[00:21:10] There needs to be a bit of like, you know, just look in that corner over there. But otherwise, I mean, this is,
[00:21:17] you know,
[00:21:17] in another episode, we probably would have called this you know, funnel
[00:21:20] Mikkel: leakage
[00:21:20] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:20] Toni: This is like extremely inefficient. You could probably be growing 50 percent faster.
[00:21:26] Mikkel: Yeah. And it's not just funnel leakage. It's also just wasted resources, right? If you kind of said, Hey, half the meetings are coming from outside U.
[00:21:33] S. basically means you could cut half the SDR team. Just, you know, think about that for a second, what would happen. And, and, and the other side of the coin is if, if you are like many of our listeners, they scale up and need to grow, it means that that team has to grow. And if you scale it on a foundation of booking the wrong meetings, those problems, they're going to compound, right?
[00:21:55] And, and that's that's just unsustainable over time.
[00:21:58] Toni: So then the, the last thing and this is, this was a team,
[00:22:04] You
[00:22:04] know, as we, as we set this up they were like very worried about their sales teams.
[00:22:10] performance and efficiency, basically. And I'm talking really account executives here. Right.
[00:22:15] Mikkel: Closers.
[00:22:16] Toni: And the closers ain't closing and, you know, all of that,
[00:22:21] big issue, big issue. And basic kind of for that customer, we split it out you know, based on, based on conversations with them, right. Kind of, and how they actually see the world.
[00:22:30] So it's that we didn't add. I mean, maybe a little bit of consultancy thing we added on top, but kind of very little. We just split it out. I think inbound, outbound upsell referrals and self prospecting, like, you know, the, the usual ones. And basically kind of, we were able to, you know, in this case, kind of zero in on the account executive team.
[00:22:51] And what we're basically, we're seeing is that they weren't closing much from the inbound, outbound stuff. Referral upsell was obviously easy. And actually they closed a bunch from the self prospector piece. Right. And you look at this and it's like, well, that's kind of weird. How does, how does that work?
[00:23:07] Obviously no one hit target. Like, obviously, right, kind of, if, if you basically 60, 70 percent of your volume is coming from inbound outbound and it's not converting at all, you cannot hit your target, right? But then they're self prospected on top of that, which, and keep in mind, they have an SDR team and then, you know, and actually.
[00:23:27] They, you know, because they obviously had, you know, time on their hands or something like this the stuff that they were self prospecting was closing extremely nicely. And, you know, you can dig into this, probably was closed, lost, old closed, lost opportunities and, you know, some other stuff and like, You know, stuff that they build up and referrals.
[00:23:42] And that's great. That's how an AE team should be working. Right. But really only looking at the actual opportunities that they receive that, you know, we're working out in general, you could see that that conversion rate was extremely high. Was 20, 25 percent or something like this. And on, on the inbound and outbound stuff, there was a mix and this is a different customer, but a mix of the issues that we just previously discussed, lots of MQLs that are not converting you know, outbounds happening very efficiently.
[00:24:11] But in a completely wrong you know, space or area or whatever it was, right. Kind of that stuff was just not working out. So these AEs did what they could in order to find as many opportunities as possible and actually converted them extremely well, right.
[00:24:24] And kind of our, our analysis you know, when we looked and again, right, this is not us sitting there being winning by design and doing all kinds of all kinds of consultancy analysis, but just looked at the numbers and was like, actually AEs are actually pretty good.
[00:24:37] I don't, I don't think you need to let them go. I don't think you need to fire them at all. Actually. I think you should figure out how you can get them more valuable outbound and inbound opportunities. And that's the problem, right? And that was like a massive aha moment, obviously for the other side, because they were just basically about to make a massive mistake, right?
[00:24:55] And I see this and we were joking about this. Well, the VP of sales shouldn't get fired for this, but this is what happens again and again and again and again. You know, folks are firing the wrong folks,
[00:25:06] Mikkel: Yeah, that's basically, yeah.
[00:25:09] Toni: you know, and that's obviously a shame but you kind of get, you know, messed up pretty badly, right?
[00:25:14] Because you're kind of pushing someone out that actually didn't mess up. You can still do that. You don't, fine. But then you kind of get someone else in that may or may not work out because you know, switching out a leader is always,
[00:25:28] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:25:29] Toni: The, you know, the, the, the organ might be rejected. Uh, You know, the, the organ transplant.
[00:25:34] So that might not work out. So you kind of lose another six months there. But the, the worst thing is actually you, you're actually not addressing the root cause issue. You're actually not fixing anything. You're just slowing everything even further down. And and then the, the, the root cause issue.
[00:25:50] Will remain in place and then if you're lucky and that new leader turns out to be good And you actually want to stick with her or him she or he will get fired anyway in
[00:26:02] Mikkel: Yeah, the same problem. It's still there. Yeah.
[00:26:05] Toni: and and kind of the amount of money that is just burned the amount of you know
[00:26:11] Value that's wasted.
[00:26:13] It's just insane for like super super, you know, easy fixes and simple simple improvements,
[00:26:19] Mikkel: it's also funny with this case. It just got me thinking like marketing obsessed about getting leads over to sales, SDRs obsessed about getting meetings to AEs, AEs money.
[00:26:31] They are obsessed about money. That's why the self prospecting in this case, they, you know, might have a different feel. And it's just, there is probably something around the, Hey, what are we working towards here as, as a collective go to
[00:26:41] Toni: Now and again, I think it is It is okay not to pay SDRs necessarily
[00:26:47] Mikkel: for sure.
[00:26:48] Right.
[00:26:48] So,
[00:26:48] Toni: right? So, and it's the same with marketing, but it's just you know, I mean, this is almost a little bit of the Growblocks pitch again.
[00:26:54] It's like just having that visibility, just clearly kind of, you know, what, actually marketing your demo requests. Fantastic. Want to have more of those that kind of, it translates through super efficiently you know, whatever we pay for Google and LinkedIn to kind of get those. Easiest money we ever paid, all the money you're investing with the team with ads uh, with SDRs working those useless leads on the other stuff.
[00:27:20] Let's think about that. Let's kind of move this around maybe. And I'm not saying kind of shut it down or something like that, but, but actually kind of look at this in a different way. Right. And, and that kind of. You know, I want to say, you know, analysis. I don't think you need to do this often. I don't think it's like an everyday kind of thing, but you want to do it, you know, at least once a year period for your planning.
[00:27:39] You want to have that at least once a year. But I actually also think you want to have it at least once a month. You know, without software, because you, you want to understand why did we miss? And by the way, everyone you talk to like people miss all the time. So why is it that we actually missed?
[00:27:56] And then, you know, one of the reasons might be, well, you know, the the stuff from marketing or the, you know, the, the outbounds or whatever actually didn't behave like we thought it would behave. And that's, that's what caused a large pain. Let's just say you missed by 250k, whatever the number, 250k.
[00:28:11] And it actually could be that the VP of sales is getting fired because the third time in a row, kind of missing you know, with, with a big difference here. But if you were to unfold it, you would actually see that 200k of that problem was created top funnel.
[00:28:26] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Toni: And,
[00:28:27] maybe you even hit all the volume steps, all the, you know, oh, you know, high five on MQLs, high fives on meetings booked, maybe hit all of that.
[00:28:34] But the way they were generated and all of that behind the quality basically kind of shifted in a way. That, you know, the system, the, the, the model would actually say like, well, you actually created 200K less in value here. And now you deal sales to make that up. And yes, you know, maybe the sales team also messed up creating another issue in terms of ACVs, giving too much discount, was desperate or something like this uh, which then resulted in another 50K loss.
[00:28:58] Right. And both things together is the minus 250K. But only the VP sales is getting fired for it.
[00:29:03] Yeah.
[00:29:05] Mikkel: Tough luck.
[00:29:06] Toni: Tough luck, man.
[00:29:08] Mikkel: So those were three very real cases that we see again and again. And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully you uh, you're able to spot this and fix it and help sales make quota again because it's going to help the business out. And it is one of those things that you have control over, which I think is super powerful.
[00:29:26] Toni: powerful. Just,
[00:29:26] You
[00:29:26] Mikkel: You know, take back some control and responsibility over your ability to grow. Super critical.
[00:29:31] Toni: But also, you know, the, you know, we sometimes call them the enlightened or the modern VP of sales.
[00:29:36] I think they're the ones that are a bit more data literate that actually kind of need to use that stuff to. You know, not only make sure they don't get fired, but also help the company to make better decisions because that's ultimately, that's actually what this is. Right. Anyway, Mikkel, everyone else, thank you so much.
[00:29:51] If you liked this, follow, like, subscribe. Hit the bell, you know, wherever you're listening on this. And maybe forward this to your, to your RevOps or VP Mar VP sales.
[00:30:02] Mikkel: Could also be VP marketing.
[00:30:03] Toni: Could be, yeah. Well,
[00:30:06] Mikkel: Thank you.
[00:30:06] Toni: Have a good one. Bye-Bye.