Stop Making these Mistakes if you Want to Grow Revenue.
Last week I published a video with 4 things I see companies doing, and today I’m bringing you 3 more.
If you want to see and share them all, the entire segment is available as an exclusive YouTube video now.
Keep in mind that you are not alone if you are doing any of these things. Plenty of folks (including me) have fallen for these in the past, and hopefully, this email will help you avoid them in the future.
Hiring AEs ≄ revenue growth
This can be a tough one to get over because it was probably true fairly early in your company.
You had plenty of leads and opportunities coming your way, and you basically needed salespeople to take care of them.
But as you grow, the real limitation to you getting more customers is not having more people helping you with the conversions or processing them from one step to another.
The real problem is getting more leads and opportunities.
And usually, AEs are pretty bad at that. Asking them to self-prospect is probably not going to work out in many cases. Therefore just adding more of them doesn’t give you more revenue.
Instead, make sure that you have enough AEs to really work through the opportunities that you’re creating and channel your energy early in the funnel (e.g. SDRs, marketing, partnerships, PLG) to drive more leads and opportunities their way.
Constantly debating and changing metric definitions
This pops up in a number of ways, but I often see it when it comes to MQL definitions.
This is something that Marketing Ops or VP of marketing often engage in.
The reason that folks do is that you have a new tactic and you want to figure out a way to figure out how you can define that tactic into your MQL target.
That ends up not being really helpful because pushing that stuff through doesn’t usually end up in more revenue. It’s more busy work.
You’ll hear stuff like, hey let’s add webinars to this. Let’s add white paper downloads. They opened my email five times.
The problem is this is not stuff that shows true intent and will probably cause problems with your sales team.
Instead, lock in on one definition that has staying power.
I would usually go for true hand raisers versus non-hand raisers. Hand raisers are MQLs, and everything else is just a marketing lead.
Sticking to the plan you gave the VC even if it’s not working
It’s a fallacy that you believe that the plan that you presented to that VC firm when you raised money is the plan you have to execute 1 to 1.
You might have doubts about it now. You may feel like you’ve oversold it a bit. It happens to us all.
You also probably have learned something new in the process that gives you a level of pause about the plan now.
If you’re still using that old plan, you risk shoving it down the throats of your organization, burning through a bunch of money and you’ll be in a much worse position 4 quarters from now.
Instead, have that conversation with the VC in the quarter, revise the plan, create something that you and the leadership team believe in and go execute that instead.
Now, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s one that we’ve had fun collecting after talking to hundreds of companies at Growblocks.
If you’re experiencing any of these or have anything to add, email me! I would love to hear about them.
Want more?This post was originally written as part of Toni’s regular Revenue Letter. If you want to be one of the first to receive content like this straight in your inbox, sign up here.