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Aside: A thought on this project’s format At this point, I realize what I really want to do with this project. I want to create a revenue success and data playbook—something I can walk into a business with and get to work. To that end, I need to surface the “plays.” Don’t bury the lede as we say. I’ve added “The plays” section right after the name and quick synopsis of the chapter for orientation to call out the actionable bits I’m pulling from the chapter for revsuccess operators. “Notes” follow. Hell, a couple actions per chapter will potentially net us over a hundred actions to move our orgs forward. Worth it. When it’s all over, I’ll pull all the plays into a single post. Fun.
On to the working format …
Same Scenario, Different Rep
With the QBR setup complete, McMahon provides the summation of a busted forecasting process from McMahon. He lays out what I think are the key, core issues at play and that will be worked through in the remainder of the book. Of course we’ll also learn about and work through adjacent and enabling dysfunctions along the way.
The plays
- Create a glossary. Write down the definitions of key terms that are used in revenue conversations. These are the words that are used between sales, channels, marketing, and customer leaders and their teams as well as the CEO, CFO, and the board. Define ARR, bookings, one-time, MQL, SQL, your stages, deal reg, products, churn risk—literally all of it, any word you wouldn’t use at home or in your Tinder profile, make sure the defition is written down. Start a Google Doc or whatever collaborative writing tool you’re using and make sure everyone has access to it. Acknowledge that it’s a working doc, and depending on the your org’s stage of maturity, subject to change. (With increasing maturity, changes will be subject to increasing governance.) Better yet, compile your definitions in an Observable notebook. This can ensure that the data team can more easily surface definitions in their dashboards and reports, either as links or cue cards. Here’s a couple thoughts on why you should be using Observable.
- Develop inspection templates. Develop templates for reviewing any cyclical pieces of the business. The obvious one here is opportunity review, but there’s the campaigns/demand gen, pipeline, territories/accounts, customers/renewals, channel partners. Make sure these templates autopopulate with relevant metrics and data that will support conversations with insights. Make sure that these templates align directly to the agreed upon customer journey and how you quantify and qualify the health of these components. There are A LOT of tools to support reviewing these components of the business; anything that was a spreadsheet now has a SaaS replacement. But the most important piece is that there’s an alignment between the tooling and how you measure a comnponent’s health. With the book and the rest of this project, it will be all about MEDDPICC and opportunities, for example.
Notes
The two great failures of a sales org surface in the QBR: language and inspection. Neither the reps nor managers are using the same meanings of the words they use to describe deals. What’s meant by champion? By pain? By decision-maker? Lack of shared, aligned language undermines the shared, accurate state of a deal, of all deals. Qualification in this context does not the one-time qualification of whether or not it’s an opporunity. Qualification means the ever-changing state of the opportunity as deal dynamics unfold. One of my other favorite sales axioms: A deal’s not done until it’s done. Until it’s done, it’s constantly being qualified. With shitty qualification comes a shitty forecast, because the forecast is just the sum of the qualified deals–especially when you think of that qualification as weighting. Even if that deal is well prosecuted and qualified, without the shared language no one else really knows–and enterprise SaaS selling is a team sport
Managers and leaders don’t inspect in a consistent effective way. McMahon tells of manager inquiry intensity, as well as rep anxiety, waning throughout the QBR. Starts out hot, yields little, and starts to falter. This is the result of incoherent inspection, i.e., how are the questions asked linked to what they’re really looking to understand, namely how much is closing and if it’s not closing, how can it? Coherent inspection will illuminate the path, or lack thereof, to closing. That path may very well look like a map out of Pitfall with snakes, quicksand, and bottomless pits. But if you can see it, you can navigate it. Or bail—nothing is worse than putting time and effort on a deal that’s never going to happen.