3 minutes

What are the big players doing differently?

Over the last few weeks, I have talked to a dozen RevOps leaders in companies that are well beyond the $100M ARR mark and are still growing 20-50%.

I know for certain that you know every single logo and have probably bought / used at least half of them.

Since all of them are either public already or are about to be – I can’t disclose the actual logos.

What I wanted to figure out is what these companies do differently. If anything.

Of course, they have fantastic products, brands, and people. But that insight alone is just not that helpful.

So I discussed with them how they are managing to hit their revenue targets again and again and again.

And to be clear, growing 40% at 300M ARR means you are minting a unicorn every year. So this is not a “business as usual” kind of scenario. This is break-neck stuff.

The conversion quickly gravitated towards the ability to “execute like clockwork”.

Okay, cool. Heard that before though. What does this really mean?

“Well, you need to compare all your metrics to the plan you set out to do.”

So is this the budget?

“No, the budget is really not that useful day-to-day, instead we also create a:

  • Revenue plan
  • Data model
  • Plan of record
  • Operating model
  • etc.“

To execute like clockwork, they argued, you need a thing – and everyone called it something different.

Here are now 2 Learnings of how they use it to hit targets

Learning 1: Speed matters A LOT.

Instead of a monthly or quarterly cadence. These folks discuss actuals vs plan weekly.

Rolling it all up to weekly reports to the C-Level (again, we are talking Public Co C-Level here)

Each metric has a traffic light. Each issue is sorted by potential Revenue impact. Nothing that is red or yellow gets put forward without a clear action plan to either investigate or fix.

Again: WEEKLY.

At first I thought, sure, BigCo-Overkill. But then it kind of hit me.

What “we” see in the ad-hoc analysis of the post-mortem in the QBR.

“They” see that “post-mortem” happening live every Monday morning.

This gives them 52 opportunities to identify and fix issues, instead of 4.

Learning 2: They look everywhere to fix revenue impact.

When they do screw up and a gap is widening beyond a “fix”.

They assess the damage. Quantify it with a revenue impact.

And then. They look at every part of the business to find that dollar amount as a sum.

E.g. Sales is behind on hiring and is creating a 10M gap. They admit they can realistically only close 4M of that gap.

The other 6M is crowd-sourced in the organization. This also means budgets and costs are fluid. Flowing to the teams that can pick up some of that gap.

The only thing that isn’t fluid is the revenue target.

In the end, it’s not like these teams don’t make mistakes or screw up. They are just so much better & faster in identifying them and getting creative about finding a solution.