PE Sales Rigor | The Revenue Leadership Podcast

Kyle Norton had me on The Revenue Leadership Podcast for the book tour, and one of the first things I told him is that I think of private equity a bit like house flipping for tech companies -- you find a business with good bones, put real money into the sales and marketing engine, and hand it off to the next owner a few years later in better shape than you found it.

We got into why the average CRO tenure is about eighteen months, per a Harvard Business Review study I mentioned to Kyle, and my read is that most of it comes down to leading with hope instead of facts. I told him I'm maniacal about annual planning -- I won't sign off on a growth number until we can point to the exact levers getting us there: new logos, price increases, product launches, month by month, team by team. My PhD background keeps coming back to me here: the best predictor of future performance is past performance, so build the plan on what your team has actually done, not what you wish they'd do.

We also talked about moving away from the superhero era of a company, where one person can solve every problem in the room, toward something more rigorous, where every seller can point to exactly how their number ladders up to the plan. I shared a story about a team that came to me flagged as a "sales skill problem" -- turned out they were winning 36% of their deals, worldclass by any measure, and the actual issue was buried in a weak MQL-to-SQL conversion rate nobody had looked at closely.