Before you scale the wrong thing
"We're at $4.5M. We want to hit $12M next year. Do we have the right team to get us there?"
This is how a founder started off a call with me recently.
On the surface, things looked fine. The sales team was closing deals. Revenue was growing. People were busy.
But when I started digging in, things began to feel off.
Every deal looked different. Some were two-call closes. Some took six months. The reps were all talking about their deals in completely different ways. They had different ideas of what "qualified" meant. Different ideas of what was helping them close deals and not.
They weren't functioning as a team.
They were functioning as a collection of individuals who happened to be selling the same product.
It was a yoga class, not a sports team.
In a yoga class, everyone shows up in the same room. The instructor says some things. Each person does their own version of the poses. Some people are great, some people are struggling, but nobody's working together. You show up the way you know how to show up and what you can do depends only on you.
On a sports team, everyone is running the same plays. They know where each other will be. They've practiced together. They have a shared foundation and what they can do depends on everyone.
Most startup sales teams are yoga classes.
The deals are closing, but nobody can explain exactly why. Each rep has their own approach. Some are winning on systems, some on relationships, some on sheer effort.
And the founder looks at the revenue number and thinks: we have a sales system.
You don't. You have a collection of heroic individual efforts.
Heroic efforts don't scale.
When you try to grow a yoga class (add more reps, go after bigger deals, expand into new segments) the whole thing falls apart. Because there's nothing to replicate. Each person was doing their own thing, and now you need five more people to do... what exactly?
This is how founders scale the wrong thing. They see revenue and assume there's a system underneath it. Then they hire, and the new people can't perform, and everyone blames the new hires.
But the new hires aren't the problem. The lack of a system is the problem.
What does a system look like?
Weā€™re not going to be able to cover all of that here but I will tell you this:
If you want to build something repeatable, your team needs access to the same tools, and they all need to know how to use them.
You need frameworks.
A shared language for qualification.
A consistent way to run discovery.
A shared understanding of what a good opportunity looks like and what it takes to close it.
A sales toolbox that your entire team is proficient in, that everyone agrees is useful, and that everyone understands how to apply.
Yoga class -> sports team.
Try This Week:
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Look at your last 5 closed deals. How much do they have in common with each other? Could you go repeat each one right now?
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Ask each of your reps to describe what it takes to close a deal. Do the answers match?
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Audit 2 sales calls from every person on your team. How much overlap is there in what they're saying and how they're running the call?
If the answers are "not much," "no," and "very little" ā€” you don't have a system yet.
Responses