GTM Velocity: How to out-execute the competition

This is your quick guide to GTM velocity. We cover three simple areas you can focus on to accelerate your GTM — and outcompete your competition.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (05:14) - Work Culture and Four-Hour Work Week
• (07:23) - Go-to-Market Velocity Explained
• (11:28) - High Tempo Testing and Experimentation
• (13:11) - Defining Kill Criteria for Projects
• (14:38) - Experimental Market Expansion Strategies
• (15:40) - Simplifying for Speed and Learning
• (18:34) - The Importance of Speed in Hiring
• (24:01) - Optimizing Team Capacity
• (27:47) - Effective Time Management and Meetings

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, 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 Holbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we are talking about GTM Velocity, how to out execute your competition, and we give you three tips on how to accelerate it. Enjoy.
[00:00:17] Before we jump into the show, today's episode is brought to you by Fullcast. The only AI powered platform that streamlines your entire sales cycle from plan to pay.
[00:00:29] Customers report up 80 percent cost savings, 20 percent growth in pipeline, and 30 percent boost in RevOps efficiency.
[00:00:36] With modules like Territory and Quota Management, Routing and Capacity Planning, Fullcast adapts to your unique needs whether you need one solution or an all in one platform
[00:00:48] Visit fullcast. com, book a demo, and mention the revenue formula podcast. To unlock an exclusive premium gift just for listeners
[00:00:59] And now enjoy the show.
[00:01:01] I mean, you already have glasses, Mikkel. mean,
[00:01:04] Mikkel: but I need glasses with zoom in order to see what those buttons
[00:01:08] say,
[00:01:08] Toni: maybe, maybe that's a great startup idea. Let's do that. Glasses with
[00:01:12] Mikkel: zoom.
[00:01:12] Yeah. And, but people are going to go, wait for like zoom meetings or what are we talking about here? Yeah. Now you
[00:01:20] can
[00:01:20] Toni: Or zoom info. I mean, what is it? You
[00:01:23] Mikkel: but it's also highly inconvenient.
[00:01:24] Just imagine you're driving a car and all of a sudden the zoom meetings start and you're like, what?
[00:01:31] Toni: No, you got
[00:01:31] Mikkel: It's not going to work out. It's
[00:01:32] Toni: no, it's not gonna work That's not
[00:01:33] Mikkel: terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Ugh, anyhoo. So, you just got back from a long, long break. Well deserved, by the way.
[00:01:42] You just got back from a long break. What uh, what was the trip home like?
[00:01:47] Toni: Yeah, it was fun. So I mean, we, we spent three weeks in, in Thailand, basically in the North and in the South. Which is fun. Everything's fun. But then obviously everything was super smooth. And then the trip back.
[00:01:59] Mikkel: Not super smooth.
[00:02:01] Toni: It went a little bit in a different direction.
[00:02:05] So, you know, everything was fine. We, we jumped into the cab, got to the airport, checked in.
[00:02:09] Everything is good. First flight, everything is great. And then we landed as in Delhi. So we kind of had a, you know, a stop in Delhi, which is kind of, Actually on the way, and then first of all, these guys do not have their stuff under control, honestly, right? The next thing we
[00:02:25] Mikkel: what guys are we talking
[00:02:26] about here?
[00:02:26] Toni: the, the, the guys running the Delhi airport, let's just say it like that, right?
[00:02:30] And we were basically kind of going through security there, and basically the, the metal detector blinked red for everyone all the time. So everyone had to get like checked by a person with the other metal detector. So everything took forever. Then, you know, some flights were more urgent than ours.
[00:02:48] So people were shoved in front of us in line all the time. And then we finally get out of this thing. And then basically our flight went to, from boarding to final call,
[00:02:58] Mikkel: Oh,
[00:02:59] great.
[00:02:59] Toni: right? So this is like Cecilia and I, so my wife and I, and our two kids, and we basically kind of grabbed them, started running, not realizing.
[00:03:07] That this was a 20 minute
[00:03:09] Mikkel: Ru run
[00:03:11] Toni: right? So we are running like crazy. We actually wanted to eat something. We get one and a half hour layover. All of this evaporated. We want to eat something. We went to buy some snacks for the flight because this was the long leg back to Copenhagen. You know, all of that stuff, forget about it.
[00:03:26] All of this gone. We arrived there at the you know, check in, and yes, we were, you know, kind of, you know, some of the last folks there. And then we sat down, and then, you know, the, the plane didn't move for like one and a half more hours.
[00:03:39] So basically, they decided at the gate to just put on the final call sign just to, just, you know, get people going, right?
[00:03:47] So then we're in the air, you know, maximum pissed already at this point, by the way. Then we're in the air you know, I'm watching a movie with, you know, my sounds are good, everything is cool. And then suddenly Cecilia just looks at me and asks like for a bag.
[00:04:01] Like, you, you know, these, these things. And, and, and off she went.
[00:04:05] And you know, that, that then triggered a, okay, you know, what do we do now, kind of me alone with the two, two boys. She was trying to lay somewhere, there was a whole other story developing there. And then, I kid you not, two hours later, one of my boys starts also puking. Like,
[00:04:22] Mikkel: Great. And then you sit and wonder, when am I gonna get hit now? It's like, oh,
[00:04:28] Toni: yeah, and then, you know, we flew, we flew all kinds of other things are happening, but basically kind of two puking people out of
[00:04:34] four. We were known in a nice radius around us. You know, everyone knew us. This, all the steward ass knew us was, was fantastic the way home
[00:04:43] Mikkel: So the thing is, like, are you just super lazy and stealing my intro? Because if, if you go back, what, five, 10 episodes when we were in Thailand, by the way, and had the same thing happen, the same thing
[00:04:55] happened,
[00:04:56] Toni: I was, I was going through the whole vacation, which was also three weeks just like yours by the way. I went through the whole vacation, was like trying to find some drama
[00:05:04] and it took me until the last day of the vacation to finally find it and I was like, oh, okay. I need to write this down.
[00:05:09] This is gonna be a fun story for the
[00:05:11] introduction.
[00:05:11] And there
[00:05:12] Mikkel: yeah, there we go. Then here we are, here we are.
[00:05:14] And now we're going to segue into talking about, I guess having a four hour work week to really speed up the go to market.
[00:05:21] Toni: Yeah.
[00:05:21] Mikkel: That's all
[00:05:22] Toni: I mean, this is. This is starting to be a bit of a thing that I'm noticing actually and and, and let's see how much
[00:05:27] of
[00:05:28] Mikkel: People are working four hours a
[00:05:29] week.
[00:05:29] Toni: Now, let's see how much we're gonna have this cut out, but I'm seeing this more and more. Americans working like crazy, you know, even you and I having a three week vacation.
[00:05:39] Is that for them what we're unemployed? I mean, we are kind of unemployed, but we're unemployed for three weeks? It's like, you know, you don't have vacations like this. So this is a European thing. And, and, and I think there's, there's some good to it by the way. But there's more, more of a notion and like, I don't know, this is not even millennials or Gen X or Gen Z or it's like, like, Oh, let's work less.
[00:05:58] We don't want to work too much. We want to get paid a lot, but we don't really want to show up. And like all of this is shit anyway. And, you know, I think it should be four days a week, not five. You know, we
[00:06:08] Mikkel: I want to earn 200, 000 a
[00:06:09] year.
[00:06:10] Toni: exactly. And I need to have my work life balance. I need to chill with my, with my dudes.
[00:06:14] And, and at the same time, you kind of see how some of this is happening in the US, but there's like a different work ethic, kind of, that's happening there, right? There's a couple of other things also going a little bit better, besides some of the political scene, you could say. A couple of things going, you know, a little bit better.
[00:06:30] And I just feel like we Europeans, we're like, We're like dragging our feet. We're kind of not getting where we want to go in terms of being really important on the planet. And at the same time, everyone is actually like, oh, let's, let's opt to be a bit more lazy. Let's just chill a little bit more.
[00:06:45] Let's just enjoy our life while we have all of the welfare until it's kind of evaporating in 10, 20 years. And it's like, I don't know. I'm starting to, I'm starting to not like that.
[00:06:54] Mikkel: No, I get it. I was just thinking also about like, it's, and probably this will get cut out, but at least we have Greenland, you know, we could just maybe just lease, lease that out instead of selling it. Can we just lease it out and make a profit and then do a four day workweek? That would be
[00:07:09] wonderful.
[00:07:10] Toni: or at least break even with Greenland, you
[00:07:12] know.
[00:07:12] Mikkel: And probably, I guess all the Americans and rest of Europe, they're going to go Greenland, what is it, what are they talking about? Google it, Google US, Denmark, Greenland, have
[00:07:20] Toni: people
[00:07:20] know,
[00:07:21] Mikkel: people probably don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
[00:07:23] So we're going to talk a bit about go to market velocity, go to market velocity, let's start off by just real quick.
[00:07:29] Why does this matter and what is it? Right. I think it's, it's probably not really a concept. I think when you say velocity, people will usually think sales velocity, which is, I don't even remember. Actually, it's a formula, isn't it?
[00:07:41] Toni: Yeah. It's, it's basically the revenue formula divided by the sales cycles.
[00:07:46] Mikkel: So it's how quickly you earn money, I guess, to a
[00:07:49] Toni: that's right. Yeah.
[00:07:50] Mikkel: And I think for you and I, what we talked a bit about here is when we talk on market velocity, it's really the speed of execution, which is why, haha, we have this funny four hour work week intro because. Really, there's this old saying of outworking the competition.
[00:08:03] There's this joke of, Hey, I don't need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you. Right. And it is, it is a thing in competition. There's no doubt that the faster you can execute you know, the better, the better you're going to be off, but there's also competition at play here. And we want it to focus a bit on, well, how can you actually speed up the go to market?
[00:08:21] What are some of the things that you might be completely ignoring that can help you
[00:08:26] out?
[00:08:26] Toni: Yeah. And I think, you know, where do we get this concept from? Actually, we get this concept from development, product development, right? The whole idea about shipping fast and, and, and giving, you know, showing to people and testing out and getting feedback and so forth, that is a totally legitimate feedback or, you know, way of thinking in product development, right?
[00:08:47] Kind of, there's this well, if you need three months to generate an MVP, You only get four MVPs per year, right? So if, if you were to gut this down to, you know, one month or six weeks, kind of, you would wait to actually increase your shots at the same target by two X or whatever it might be, right? And in that realm is a totally legitimate and normal way of talking about it.
[00:09:07] Basically kind of the velocity you can execute stuff. For some reason on the go to market, that's not really the case. It feels like a new thing on the go to market. You talk about go to market velocity.
[00:09:17] Mikkel: yeah and it's funny I think especially in sports this is something they they will focus on they know The time is kind of finite in one game and whether it's actually baseball or basketball or football Or american football doesn't really matter. There's going to be a finite Like run to the game and in that time you want to create as many chances to score basically win the game Right.
[00:09:38] And I think for some reason and when you transfer that to business You know, time is not necessarily finite. Well, at least it's hard to gauge how finite it is for a startup. It's obviously runway. But who thinks about that when you're in the go to market team? It's like, that's the CEO and CFO problem, right?
[00:09:56] But I think it's you need to look at within maybe a year, are you maximizing then the amount of opportunities you create in order to Score a point, right? And that's what we want to focus a bit on today. And I know the first piece you said MVP is speed of failure. Actually,
[00:10:10] Toni: No, exactly. So kind of the, the first thing is as you build out your go to market, there are going to be a couple of things going to work out and a couple of things that don't work out right. And I think that's applicable both for teams that are very at the early stages of starting the go to market, but it's also applicable for teams that are much, you know, 100, 150 million in AR.
[00:10:29] And the reason is that. As you work through your different channels and saturate those channels, you will always need to find another thing that adds something on top, right? Either it's sometimes because the channel is dying or it's channel is just flat lining. So in order to generate growth, you need to add something else on top.
[00:10:48] So that actually pushes everyone all the time into kind of a Perpetual motion of trying to improve stuff and figure things out and get better. Right. And this doesn't only need to be at the super top level of SEO and SDRs and whatever it might be, it might be further down. It might be within the SDR team.
[00:11:07] It might be a tactic within the SEO channel or wherever it kind of, we were working on, right. And executing, experiments and figuring out what you can do in order to improve, and then also seeing the failure happen. So then you don't need to focus on this again, right? Doing this faster is, is basically a way for you to increase your go to market velocity, right?
[00:11:28] And I think you Mikkel, you, you played around previously with high tempo testing, which is almost kind of in this direction. Maybe you can talk a little bit
[00:11:35] Mikkel: Yeah. So there's actually a book by Sean Ellis called, I think the High Growth. You know what? I'll put it in the show notes. There's a book by Sean Ellis. It's Hacking Growth, Hacking Growth. And he has this framework of deploying a lot of tests. And the backstory is he looked at companies like Twitter.
[00:11:50] He looked at companies like Twitter. You know, X today, but at one point they were growing pretty fast up until the the IPO. The reason businesses like that were growing really fast was they were They were doing a high pace of experimentation Right? So maybe 1 out of 10 tests would, would succeed as in outcome positive.
[00:12:09] We're going to now implement it and keep it. And instead of just running 10 tests per year, if they could do 10 tests per month they would grow faster, right? Because those tests were focused on improving growth, certain growth metrics. Now, if the competition would only do, let's say two tests per month, well, then you're definitely outrunning them in, in a pretty massive way.
[00:12:32] And you would see this, if you plotted that out on a graph, by the way, it would be exponent, exponential the improvements stemming from this stuff, right, because you get compounding interest. And I think that's, that's the interesting piece. And so when we ran high tempo testing, we would look at, you know, How much time are we going to allocate to this test?
[00:12:50] That's when we're going to then stop the test, review the data, right? We would have pretty hard mechanisms in place, and we would also have a clear marker for, is this a success or a failure, right? And if it's a failure, obviously let's extrapolate the learnings. If it's a success, let's. Let's now go and implement it and monitor that it actually keeps on delivering the outcome, right?
[00:13:11] There's a whole different process there. And I think, to a large degree, when you talk about small tests, this is fairly easy for you and I to agree on. We're going to run a test on the website. It's going to be these two pages competing. It's going to take this long for it to reach statistical significance.
[00:13:27] And then that's two weeks done. But I feel like when you run a test on a new motion or a new market or a new wherever, You still want to have certain kill criteria also for that in in place because it's it's just on a different scale But albeit you want to also I guess in that scenario fail faster,
[00:13:44] Toni: one thing I just wanted to kind of put a pin on here is you can use it for smaller stuff. You can also use it for bigger stuff, right? Kind of the time it takes to prove something differs, right? If you, if you have enough traffic on the website and you do an experiment there, you can figure this out in a day or two or a week or two.
[00:14:00] If you want to implement a complete new motion from scratch, it might take you a year, right? Kind of, there's different time frames to it, but the interesting piece here I think for everyone to take away is like, you should create a have a kill criteria. Like, at what point do we stop believing in this thing and, you know, basically stop wasting resources?
[00:14:18] Because if you don't do that and you get to the point where you otherwise would kill the project, You're looking at this and then you have the sunk cost fallacy, like, Oh, we already invested so much into this thing, we should keep this alive and
[00:14:29] maybe around the next corner, you know, then everything.
[00:14:32] It's like, no, like have the kill criteria, you know, clearly defined upfront and then basically it helps you to shut this thing down, right?
[00:14:38] And in terms of you know, entering new markets, so what we actually did was we rolled out, so in one of the companies I worked for, CRO, we kind of rolled out a PLG motion, which was back then, you know, kind of established already in the industry, but not yet kind of the standard.
[00:14:53] And we basically decided to, okay, we want to go really heavy into the next market. We had lots of regulatory stuff, salary pieces. So it's like, oh, should we go to France? Should we go to Spain? You know, where should we go next? And we basically decided we don't know. We did a bunch of desktop research, but we just didn't know.
[00:15:11] So what we did is we basically created a PLG motion stripped the product a little bit down so it doesn't, it wasn't that deep, you know, it was easier to onboard, rolled it out globally and basically then saw where the interest might be highest and then kind of invested additional resources, both marketing and product in order to go further into those markets.
[00:15:28] Right. And, and that's kind of a, like an experimental way. To, to expand and kind of find another growth layer. It's on another channel, but it's not a geo in this case. Right. In order to layer these things on top.
[00:15:40] Mikkel: So I think the point really here is also, you need to find a way to slim certain things down to the point where you can execute it fast and still learn. Right. So some would do the fake door approach, even have like no product and just say, we are, we, we can do it and then actually test out. Right. And I think it's just it's risky to get caught up in this.
[00:16:01] Fact that it has to be perfect. This is what the end destination for us should look like. So that's what we're going to build versus saying, no, we're going to remove a bunch of functionality from the product and go in super simple to a lot of markets and figure out where does it actually work? Maybe run some advertising behind it to speed up that kind of, to accelerate the learning and validation of which market to go for.
[00:16:22] Right. And I think that's just super important. Can you, can you simplify things down rather than over complicating it? Because. As soon as you go through that route, like I remember by the way, implementing PLG at, at Falcon is like all kinds of things you need to think about. Like, what do we do with it's a, if there's an existing opportunity, then an account executive owns and blah, blah, blah, like try and remove all the complexity you can to just go and learn really fast because, you know, then, then you'll know, and can potentially have some of the, those successes implemented a faster as
[00:16:53] well.
[00:16:54] Toni: And to be honest, like some people listen and say, okay, growth hacking, that's like 10 years old now, or growth hacking. That seems like some startup does. It's true. But you will even catch people like Elena Verna, like Dropbox and, you know, all kinds of other companies she worked for, talk about this, not in terms of growth hacking.
[00:17:11] But in a very scientific
[00:17:13] instrumented way. To kind of, to kind of get better and better and better and better, right? So really, you know, this is again, this is something that, you know, is very well established in the product development space. It's very well established in the PLG space. And we think some of those pieces actually should be taken into consideration for broader go to market application.
[00:17:35] And so, so really kind of folks don't think about this as like a, you know, The 22 year old growth hacker that writes a little bit of JavaScript and kind of can connect some things. It's more of a structured way to figure out what, what to do and then also what to stop doing. Right. But that's just one example out of the go to market philosophy I wanted to talk about.
[00:17:53] Mikkel: I think quite frankly, also, it's like when you plan out your quarter or half year or whatever, and you sit and look at those projects, just think for a second about how much time are you allocating to them? How long will it take for you to ship it? Can you ship it sooner if you compromise on certain things?
[00:18:11] How do you determine whether it's a success or not? I think some of those pieces have to be very clear unless it's like. One off almost campaign elements that now is shipped done onto the next but you do want to figure out what has that kind of staying power and, and not necessarily think of it as a, oh, now we need to run a split test that runs, that gets statistical significance.
[00:18:31] That that's not even the point here necessarily. Right.
[00:18:34] So the other is in terms of speed is hiring, speed of hiring. I don't know about you, Toni, but at least from my part, when. I've worked with teams and you had a specific team working in an area and someone resigned and left it kind of left that team in almost like a void or a vacuum that.
[00:18:56] Now they just, they need to scrape by in order to survive kind of, right. We are not expecting magic to come out of that team until we go in and find a replacement. And even then person needs to ramp, right. So I've at least found that the, the, the speed at which you can hire and potentially also, I think anticipate some of these changes on the team matters a great deal for the consistency in executing.
[00:19:21] Yeah.
[00:19:23] Toni: So I think there are a couple of different, you know, approaches to this. One is like, Hey, if you have like a high volume role or team, AEs, SDRs, and CSMs and support, I think it's. You can, you can start to predict and anticipate some of those things, right? So I basically had an understanding with my CFO to always be one head count above my allotment which then would level out usually, you know, a month later or so which was actually fine.
[00:19:48] So in the end, we basically kind of hit budget exactly, but we always had a little bit, you know more folks that we were able to hire. So I think there, there's some ways around this like that. And I think then the other piece is. I think the other piece is also just being mindful and helping your recruitment team and HR team to be fast and, and, and hiring those folks. And this is not a, let's stumble into a decision or something like this. This is simply also about if you want to get the best guys onto your team or ladies, it's, it's really important just to kind of get the right offer in front of them as fast as possible.
[00:20:23] Like there, there is a thing where people are just simply going with another offer, especially if they're great folks that might kind of create a situation where you miss the opportunity to even try and secure them because maybe HR kind of recruiting was kind of slow and actually executing this, right?
[00:20:39] So, and I think the With what people then are kind of forgetting what HR needs to understand and kind of those were things that I basically kind of sat down with them. It's like, hey, your inability to put those people into, you know, into the seats, it's costing me x hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per year.
[00:20:55] And, and they were suddenly realizing, oh, wait a minute, that that's insane, right? Kind of, they realized that this is a full impact, which, which I think, People should be just sitting down and doing this, you know, calculation on a, on a napkin, actually kind of every, every time there's a delayed hire, it's costing me X thousand of euros of MRR per month that, that we basically kind of you know, otherwise would be heading in, might be missing budget by, right?
[00:21:19] And one solution here was actually, because they were like, Hey, this is insane. Like we were strapped for resources and we're losing so much money because we're strapped for resources. What we then actually did is kind of, I, from my. Sales budget, hired a recruiter. So that person then could basically help, you know, fill those spots fast.
[00:21:37] All right. And you know, I get it. Not many people are in the situation right now where the kind of need to hire as quickly as possible, right? Kind of, that's probably not the reality out there, but those are those small gaps that you're creating kind of, they're not only creating issues in your like revenue planning and formula and whatever you have, they also creating issues with the rest of the team that's straining and overstretching.
[00:21:59] And basically kind of getting brittle because of it.
[00:22:01] Mikkel: It's actually also why I have a preference for working actually with external partners, because that gives you the upside of, you know what, they're not going to quit there. They might raise the prices and then you need to replace a certain vendor that you're working with, whatever on design or development or what have you, but there's so much flexibility in, in that sense.
[00:22:21] So execution wise, it's. It's almost less of a risk. But regardless, there is something around ensuring that the team you do have in place, that you have consistency there. And also, you know, just things like what do you call it? Succession planning that you have that stuff, succession, succession, succession, sorry, that you have that kind of buttoned up as well and have some structures in place.
[00:22:42] So you're not, you know, having to invent the wheel when shit hits the fan.
[00:22:46] Basically.
[00:22:46] Toni: And another thing in recruiting is also figuring out what you don't want to spend your money on for the recruit to learn. Right. So what, what does that mean? So let's just say you hire an AE. And you have 250, 000 deals, right? The ACV is 250K for whatever reason. Do you want that AE to learn how to close those deals while you're paying that AE?
[00:23:09] Meaning if that AE previously has closed. 25k deals, do you actually want to pay for that person to learn how to close the big stuff or do you not? Right? And that actually will help you in determining whom you want to, you know, hire for this position. And the list goes on. For an SDR, entry level, like, do you want that person on your dime to figure out if they like sales?
[00:23:32] Or do you not want to pay for that? Same in marketing, kind of, if you're in a very specialized space, do you want that marketeer to, on your dime, learn that super specialized, deep knowledge of your space in order then to help you or not, right? And, and, and the reason why this is important for velocity is basically, it's basically ramped to a degree, kind of how quickly can you get that person fully ramped up and knowledgeable for the job that they need to do?
[00:23:59] Mikkel: Yeah. No, I agree.
[00:24:01] And I think this, this also closely related basically to the next and, and last piece of, of speeding up, which is the capacity, right? I think this is something we, you at least focus a lot on when it's the sales team. It matters a great deal that you have the closing capacity to handle all those incoming meetings that are being booked, whether it's from inbound, outbound, doesn't really matter, but you need to have the capacity to to close them.
[00:24:23] Otherwise you'll lose money, right? You'll, you'll lose money. But in the same turn, you also need to consider what is the capacity of all the other teams that aren't account executives, right? I think the product team has a pretty good understanding of what is our capacity in the sense of. What can we actually build in the next cycle?
[00:24:42] Right. They, they have that but not because otherwise they get, they will basically get screwed having to backpedal all the time on not being able to release. But I think on a, on a, even a marketing perspective, it seems like quite often we make the mistake of planning too many projects, still forcing them through and not also not stopping and saying, Hey, how can we free up time?
[00:25:03] on this person so they can double down on an area they're doing really well at, that they're really excelling at, right? So I think just one, one stupid example is you have an account exec team, they spend, let's just say 20 percent of their time entering data into some system. If you could reduce that to 10%, that's kind of significant all of a sudden, right?
[00:25:23] And I think that's the mindset you have, you need to have as well, right?
[00:25:27] Toni: I think my experience is that people rarely think about capacity in the right way. I think people are pretty stupid about this actually. And I think most product teams have this on their apps as they have the experimentation,
[00:25:40] Mikkel: always admire product.
[00:25:41] Always.
[00:25:41] Toni: I mean, to a degree we, we actually do, right. And and you know, some of them obviously use you know, Agile and whatever kind of frameworks around this.
[00:25:50] And what, what I, and you and I actually used to do was implementing some of those Agile frameworks also into revenue operations, into marketing, into some degree into CS leadership, doesn't really work with sales. But basically kind of using some of those ways of organizing the work in a little bit of a better way, right?
[00:26:08] Kind of creating, hey, this is what we want to do and, you know, based on the past, what we have achieved, actually, this could work out. And, and the reason why people don't actually, you know, do any of these things is I, I feel they don't think about capacity in the right way. They don't think about it in the right way for AEs also.
[00:26:25] Like, this is the same for account executives. Capacity for them is like quota.
[00:26:29] But, but what does that actually mean? Well, it actually means like, well, you need to have, you know, you need to work so many deals and because some of them convert and for this ACV and and how much time do you actually spend per deal?
[00:26:41] And then how much time do you spend per loss deal? And that time then at the end needs to sum up to. probably 30 hours a week or maybe 25 hours a week because you also need to, you know, take into consideration vacation sickness, going to the bathroom, lunch, internal meetings, internal meetings, internal meetings.
[00:27:00] And people are not, not thinking about it like this. They're thinking about a way to abstract right in terms of quota. But once you break it down into much more practical terms in terms of jobs or things that need to be done then you can actually start applying it to other roles as well. Revenue Operations, CES Marketing, and so forth.
[00:27:18] And then you get to actually a true understanding of what capacity actually looks like for your team. Which can be revealing can be revealing in a way of like, Oh, wait a minute yes, they have 250k quota. But actually they have quite some free time and I could give them more opportunities, actually they could do more, or you come to the opposite conclusions, like actually kind of, that's not going to work out with our conversion rates, et cetera.
[00:27:41] Right. But that bottom up way of thinking of capacity, you can roll this across the whole organization actually.
[00:27:47] And, and I think if you then optimize for that, what's going to happen while you will see, you need to cut internal meetings, right? One of my kind of favorites is like. Do you really need a one on one for one hour every week?
[00:28:00] Could it be half an hour every week? Could it be an hour every other week? Could it be an hour every month? Like, do you actually need those one on one hour time? And there's some like crazy examples of the CEO of Nvidia or CEO of Revolut. Basically, they have like 30 reports, direct reports. They don't have any one on ones with them.
[00:28:17] I mean, they interface with those folks quite frequently in those different meetings and but they don't do any one on one management time. I think There are some reasons why that works for them and maybe they just, you know, want to be cool and you know, I don't know what, but there's probably some truth here also to be had for, for how you manage your team and how much time you put on top for them to do stuff internally, right?
[00:28:40] So it's really a choice for you to try and strip some of that stuff away and then, you know, tightly manage that that time is not being used to chill, but to actually do some focused work on what they need to do.
[00:28:54] Mikkel: I think it's also like we had this calendar exercise with reps to see how busy they are, right? I think if you're in marketing revenue operation, whatever department really, I would encourage you to try and open the calendar of a few of the team members and see how many meeting blocks are there.
[00:29:11] How many, how much idle time is there? Meaning a short time between meetings because you won't get any work done. If you have half an hour between meetings. You know what? It's going to end up being meetings anyway most likely in that time, right? And then how much free time for actual, for real work is there, right?
[00:29:28] And I think in many companies, you will be shocked. You will be shocked at how little time there is to do real work. And then it becomes very clear that a way to increase capacity is to kill some of those meetings. Now That might mean you need to stop certain initiatives. So back to some of the tests you might be running or what even initiatives you've run forever that aren't yielding any real in, you know, outcomes, maybe consider killing them because they're, you're basically drag on the team at the end of the day.
[00:29:57] Right. And I think that's where you, you gotta go back and maybe listen to some of the episodes where we talk about the formula one example of just consistently improving the speed at which you can perform the pit stop.
[00:30:09] Toni: And I think one, one nuance also to just think about is, I mean, I'm really terrible at this myself is there's a real cost to ramp up.
[00:30:20] Like if, if I have an hour between meetings and I have a big task I need to do, I don't know, build a pitch deck
[00:30:25] or
[00:30:25] something like that, I'm, I'm going to look at this gap and be like, you know what, I'm I'm not even gonna start.
[00:30:31] I'm sorry. It's like, before I get into it, it's gonna, it's gonna take me 30 45 minutes to really get into it. And then I have an effective work term of 15 minutes before I need to do something else. And maybe I need to even prep for the other thing. So, so that hour between us kind of lost, it's kind of over.
[00:30:48] So, you know, once you start thinking about ramp up and, and and ramp down basically between tasks and between meetings, then actually the next thing should be like, okay, so those meetings that we're having, they should be at the beginning or the end of the day and help those folks that really need to focus on things like you know, someone writing a blog post or someone writing code or, you know, basically kind of deeper work you know, help them schedule their day in the most optimal way so they don't, they don't have these ramp up, ramp down issues actually.
[00:31:18] And I would even say, even, even if someone is aware of that, I would even say that probably wouldn't voice to a superior being like, Hey, you know you know, don't schedule me for 2 p. m. because that's going to fuck up three hours of my day. Schedule me for 9 a. m. You should, you, you as a boss, you as a manager, should actually encourage people to try and find ways to move meetings to the edges or kind of have them in blocks in order to minimize this ramping up, ramping down time.
[00:31:46] Mikkel: No, I agree. I think the other interesting thing this makes me think of is also what you choose. To do with the time, right, which is also a lot to do with capacity. And you kind of, so think about a superhero. You get to have one superpower. I think I heard this from Michael Siebel at Y Combinator. You get to have one superpower, one thing you can do really, really well.
[00:32:09] You don't get to have like 10 superpowers. It's like you, that just doesn't happen. Right. And I think it's the same same point here. When you look at the team, especially this goes for, I think, marketing or revenue operations, you're going to have folks who are really strong at one or two things, at driving one or two outcomes.
[00:32:28] And you want to make sure that they have the capacity to focus on that. You want to make sure that they're not necessarily. diluting that attention with other things where they don't have the skill set, right? So I think there is something, there's a lot of optimization that can happen on just looking at what are people actually spending their time on and are we directing the resources in the go to market in the right way to obtain velocity.
[00:32:49] Toni: And at the end of the day, right, kind of, if you do this really well, you're kind of going to be considered a good leader, good manager. People are going to be happy. They're going to be productive. You might need fewer people to do the same stuff. You might have Same resource, getting more output done.
[00:33:02] There's a lot more ways to improve your output and be more efficient than ai, right? Kind of. Yes. Michel and I have been talking a lot about ai. I think a lot of people are picking up on this, obviously. But the, the good old traditional stuff shouldn't, shouldn't fall away, kind of. That's probably still, you know, a massive efficiency win for you.
[00:33:21] If you execute well on these things and then obviously the AI stuff will follow.
[00:33:24] Mikkel: Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think that's true. So let's see. I mean we created the maybe part of shaping the term go to market engineer and now we're doing the go to market velocity. Let's see what it could be next time. Go to market plank. Let's see. It's going to be fun.
[00:33:39] Toni: Let's do that. Thank you everyone for listening. If you haven't subscribed yet, kind of hit that button. By the way, it's for free. I'm not sure if you knew that. And if you want to share that with some of your friends, please absolutely do. You're helping to grow the show. Thanks a lot everyone and have a good one.
[00:33:53] Bye bye.
[00:33:53] Mikkel: Bye..