Michael Cantrell

Are you meeting with contractors and agencies to help build your GTM org and found them lacking? My guess is you may be experiencing the following, if you identify, we can help. Is this you? You've met with contractors and agencies and you've heard the same song and dance, "we can help you 10x revenue, we can give full visibility into your sales and marketing performance and help you build upon those KPIs, we can change your GTM org overnight". But, they actually haven't asked you any discovery questions, they haven't taken the time to not just hear your asks and vision, but to double-click into your current "state of the union". In short, they've promised you results without giving you a clear vision of how they are going to do it. Here at Domestique we don't just care about signing new clients, we are passionate about partnering with clients where we can ensure success. If you're tired of the old way of doing things, give us the chance to show you how different we are. Promise even if we're not a fit, your time investment will be worthwhile. #fractionalrevops #mops #revenue #gtmops #we can do better

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Day -5, Customers - 4, ARR - $0 If you aren’t a force multiplier as an IC, you won’t be as a manager In some cases I have seen people make bigger impacts on culture as an IC peer vs team lead. IC’s can - set the standard - educate their peers - sympathize and empathize - problem solve by truly understanding the problem Impacting a culture can seem daunting, if you are struggling to get started, show up with relentless positivity and you will figure it out from there

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The Product Marketing Alliance just issued their 2024 State of #PMM report.... And one REALLY telling survey chart has to do with the PMM TechStack. Dominating the list are core tools (analytics, reporting, CRM, collaboration, market research etc.). These are *great* benchmarks to help younger PMM teams decide where their gaps lie. But what I find interesting is that there are also a number of Demand Generation items on the list (email marketing, video marketing). Shouldn't these be owned by other teams? Or, do they just naturally fall into PMM? https://lnkd.in/g6KAccB4

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Ignore the link-bait title, because this is a great article from Jason Lemkin characterizing what it’s like as a mid-sized or large SaaS companies right now, and some excellent advice on “what to do.”

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How can Revenue leaders prepare for the CEO's job? As someone who transitioned from the CRO to CEO role not too long ago, my journey in the new seat has been replete with "before-after" perspectives. A lot of what seemed obvious as a CRO makes no practical sense as a CEO and vice versa. It's been a process of deep self-discovery, daily learnings, and adjustments. Here are some learnings that have felt profound: 1. You've got to develop an organizational thesis that goes beyond revenue growth - Going from $20M to $100M ARR in 5 years isn't an organizational thesis. That thesis needs to live at the intersection of product vision, customer base, culture, and growth/profit, and something everyone can relate to. 2. P&L-based decision making requires a different set of muscles from topline-focused decision-making. There will be situations where the topline isn't even a consideration. Master the science & art of P&L!     3. The boring stuff is really important - Compliance, legal, and back-office isn't something a Revenue leader would think a lot about outside customer contracts. As a CEO, if that isn't sorted, you'll have sleepless nights.   4. Surrounding yourself with people with complementary skills is key to job effectiveness - Product, Engineering & back-office are three obvious domains where you want experts informing your decisions, AND you still need to learn the "first principles" guiding each function. 5. Just because you've sold tech does not mean you understand how tech is built and run - acknowledging and bridging the gap is critical to managing the R&D function. 6. Not every department moves at the same pace, and that's by design - High velocity & intensity may create momentum in one department and may have the exact opposite effect in another. 7. You've got to communicate something 7 times for it to truly land with the entire company across all departments - Yes, that's the number!     8. A high-octane, high-energy talk may motivate the sales team but may shut down another team. Finding the right tone & language is key to team motivation. 9. Your team may have closed 3 high ACV deals in a day, and you may still be having a tough day in the office. Remember, Sales is just one of the 7-8 functions you are now responsible for.     10. Don't ignore your craft—keep polishing it. If you crushed it as a CRO, those skills may come in more handy than ever before, especially now with a more well-rounded organizational perspective.     11. You are responsible for people's livelihoods, and the weight of that responsibility is something you've likely not experienced before. Ultimately it's about the people! The key to navigating the transition is finding your trusted confidant—that could be your PE/VC partner, a Board member, or someone on your leadership team. Someone who gets the big picture and your role in it all. Someone who will help you identify and fix your blind spots (you'll have plenty!).

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Great framework here for sales people. Seven simple steps to follow in a structured manner. Start with listen and understand!

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It's not often that within days of GA you have MILLIONS of enterprise employees using your new product, but that is the case with Visier Inc.'s new #GenAI product, Vee. Part of what makes this possible is Visier's canonical data model, which is home to the people insights of >50,000 customers. Part of what makes this possible is nearly 100% customer participation in anonymized data aggregation, which results in rich benchmarks seamlessly exposed in Vee ("compare my trailing twelve months attrition to my industry peers"). And perhaps its possible because Visier has become an employee "database of intentions", with hundreds of millions of prior queries guiding Vee to know what business answers are most relevant to surface. Thanks to our partners Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure for this infrastructure and expertise to bring Vee live at this scale. Available to purchase for all of Visier's enterprise customers and Visier's fantastic Embedded partners like Paycor. https://lnkd.in/ga_rDVTm

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I love contract data because I can answer urgent Friday afternoon questions without trashing my entire weekend reading documents. Ah, the Friday afternoon fire-drill. "Which of our 10,000 deals include clause X and how do they deviate from our standard wording? I need an answer first thing Monday morning, when I get back from the Hamptons. Thanks." Without data, your weekend plans are toast. This is reason 010 why #ilovecontractdata. Follow me to discover many more. #contracts #contractdata #legal #firedrill #crisis #mountainofpaperwork #contractintelligence #legaldata #contractanalysis #contractanalytics #contractai #datanerd #legaltech #legalops #data #ai

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Is your SaaS company a feature, product, or platform? I remember the first time one of Northpass' board members challenged me with this question. My gut response was: "Of course, we're a platform! We have so much functionality and serve many use cases, and we will conquer so much more! Eventually, developers will want to build on us!" Classic, right? But after humbling myself and objectively approaching the question, I decided we were a component of a much larger ecosystem. For us, that was customer success. That realization brought tremendous clarity to our product, marketing, sales, and exit strategies. This question is critical for founders approaching 20-30M in ARR. At this stage, your company is at the prime size for a strategic acquisition as a tuck-in feature or new product within an integrated suite. However, once you cross this ARR threshold, M&A interest can go dark until you scale to $100M ARR or more. The reality is that the buyer pool for companies with $10-30M ARR is significant but dramatically shrinks after that. So, if you decide to be a platform, you're signing up to go big, which means you're also signing up to go long. Embracing the feature/product path is not a demotion. It's a strategic move. I've been part of two startups where we recognized that we were ultimately add-ons to larger platforms and that awareness led to solid exits. Platform, product, or feature: the only proper way to answer this question is to be brutally honest and intentional. Play forward the various scenarios and consider all the implications. I found that once you decide, you and your leadership team will gain tremendous clarity, alignment, and motivation. It's exciting. What do you think? Are you building a feature, product, or platform? How does this perspective shape your strategy? #SaaS #Startups #founder #Entrepreneurship

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Check out LinkedIn's top customer support voice: Jon O'Bryan. He is probably one of most knowledgable person about customer support space and one of the reason users really love Atlas and we have near zero company churn (net negative agent churn). (but this is so annoying at times because I lost every single argument about any product decision because he can always cite 10 reasons why something needs to behave a certain way) #customersupport

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Here’s a frightening number for GTM folks: The cost of growth has increased 72%!  That’s according to David Spitz (of BenchSights) who monitors SaaS closely. This is why growth rates for recurring revenue businesses have been cut in half over the last 24 months from an average of 36% to 18%. So what’s the answer? Here's what I'm doing: 1. Create a GTM office and infrastructure that explicitly aligns Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product.  2. Create a regular weekly or bi-weekly meeting whose sole intention is aligning the GTM departments 3. Incentivize and compensate your GTM executives (eg CRO, CMO, CCO or VP Sales, Marketing, CS) the same way.  4. Dispense with quarterly commissions for CROs and create an annual bonus structure that aligns the GTM team primarily around retention. 5. Use Revenue Operations to create a single consistent data layer that each team leverages and ensure that each team does not have its own data set 6. Explicitly begin the alignment from the moment the prospect becomes aware of what you do and ensure messaging is tightly aligned against an agreed Ideal Customer Profile 7. Ensure that the months and quarters are celebrating Net Revenue Retention and Net Revenue Growth vs simply New ARR or New Revenue booked 8. Extend the understanding of the journey through 3 renewals and map key activities through at least 3 years of engagement with the customer ensuring you are delivering consistent value the entire time 9. Understand that the initial sale is in explicitly in the first ¼ to ⅓ of the relationship and treat it with that level of consideration.  It is not the end.  It is merely the beginning.  There should be at least 3 more annual sales to the same customer over the subsequent 3 years. The only way to grow in a capital constrained environment is to align around long-term value delivery for the customer.  This is the fundamental principle underpinning the GTM movement and the reason me, Sangram Vajre, 🐶 Jacco van der Kooij, and our teams created the GTM Consortium. If you want to join, apply here: https://gtmconsortium.com/

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The runway has gotten shorter for many product teams. We need to be specific about the value the product creates for customers: Specifically how rev, cost, and/or efficiency will be improved. The entire team needs to align to C-level stakeholders in customer organizations. If only GTM teams think about this, it's too late. In discovery, when figuring out specific outcomes and problems to tackle, also understand the value created for customers. Include GTM, write a PRFAQ if it helps. If you had to pick just 1 persona to align with and rally around, pick the customer CFO. Use plain language and be specific, internally and externally for consistency. Internally, leverage your CFO as a proxy to help validate. #productmanagement

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Hey #ceo friends, did you see what Jason M. Lemkin, our prophet and savior of #SaaS, wrote yesterday? ❗❗❗ "Is SaaS Dead?" https://lnkd.in/gePPRtgz Jiminy Crickets! I'm really grateful he wrote it. It's grim... but he's right. It needed to be called out. I now realize everyone is feeling, thinking, or asking this question. And I'm grateful because I thought it was something about me that was attracting these negative vibes. Let me give my answer. SaaS is not even close to being dead. SaaS is running at $200B / year. It's definitely in pain, but pain means you're still alive. But I think the real question, is your team dead? I mean in their hearts. A dead team creates a dead company. Demoralization is real. Loss of belief is real. People are insecure in themselves. People are quick to blame teammates, leadership, the board, investors, the customers, the product. Teams have stopped talking to each other. It's hard to sell if you don't believe in the product. It's hard to build great products if you don't believe you have great customers worth serving. It's hard to hire A players if you believe you'll be outshone and replaced. (This is a huge problem right now.) This loss of faith is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customers smell it. I can't end there. I'm a keener. I want to overcome this. Some basic ideas: 1. Happy, paying customers inspire belief. Send a daily newsletter to all hands with testimonials, Or a daily video in Slack from a happy customer. 2. Reward actions to get moving. Is your team taking shots on goal? Are you learning from each shot? That's what you can control today. Make sure people are rewarded (even if it's just praise) for actions, not only outcomes. 3. Teams matter. In business, we're all on this pirate ship together, and it's always sinking. If one person is blocking another, we will all drown together. Leadership has to teach the team how to manage internal conflicts towards taking action. 4. Elevate believers. What you tolerate and what you elevate define your culture. We all know you need to say goodbye to the one cynical person that is killing your culture. But the converse is also true. One true believer can lift an entire company. Give them a bigger megaphone. 5. Believe. If you stopped believing, I really really get it. But is it true? If you need a pep talk, I'm here for you.

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The sneakiest problem when designing territories is... Not account data. Not parent/child hierarchies. Not noisy sales teams. It’s trying to make changes without any disruption. Many RevOps teams are asked to make sweeping changes to territories and books of business. New strategies, new markets, and new team dynamics necessitate changes, just like with any GTM motion. But leadership often invokes one caveat without fully understanding the implications: "Make the changes in the least disruptive way possible." Limiting disruption makes total sense. If a rep has worked toward developing a territory, undoing some of that work represents a cost. Disruption is especially bad when working with existing customers. You don’t want to keep changing the account rep and give a bad customer experience. But many fail to consider that making changes and limiting disruption are competing forces, leading to frustration during design efforts: “Why wasn’t the impact of this change considered?” “Why wasn’t this change made?” One of our clients, who excels in change management, does these things upstream to prevent this conflict before it happens: 1. Decide what’s on the table early (What are we actually willing to change? Segments? Geos? Nothing?) 2. Confirm decision-making authority (Who can decide which changes are needed? Who do we need to be along for the ride?) 3. Lock accounts (What cannot be moved? 100%) These tactics help to gauge the true appetite for change before the modeling begins. Has anyone else ever been asked to make sweeping changes while changing nothing? How did you handle it?

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Always fun to publish a practice case and then see that EXACT story in the headlines. If you’re prepping for consulting interviews right now, try our new practice case on GM’s transition to EVs (PDF is attached). Once you’re done you can “check your work” by reading recent articles on how GM is actually navigating the headwinds (I linked to a recent one in the comments). #consulting #interviewprep

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20 business days left in the quarter. I survived 40 consecutive quarters running the revenue team for a VC-backed SaaS company. Most quarters we hit our number. Sometimes we missed. Here’s what I did at the start of every month to make sure I hit my number: 1. Review the stack rank for the sales team Go rep-by-rep through the team and see who is performing to plan. Schedule a 1:1 meeting in the first week of the month with each rep that is below 80% to plan. The purpose of this meeting is to diagnose why they are missing their number and to create an execution plan to coach them to 100% 2. Go through every close-lost deal from the previous month. This is time-consuming, but necessary. Try to understand where the team is losing deals. Specifically keep an eye out for a drop in the demo-close rate. This is easiest to fix in short order. If there competition creeping in, you will know by looking at the opps and listening to calls. 3. Go deal by deal through the existing pipeline to see which opps have a chance to close in the next 20 business days. Look at deals that have a close date in July. You may be able to pull some of these into the month. You have to create your own, independent assessment of your team’s pipeline. Don’t rely on the stage probabilities. That’s a fools errand. You have to get granular in the pipeline. 4. Pull the team together on Monday to review the previous month’s performance. In the meeting, make a BIG DEAL about every person who hit plan or who was pacing to 100% of plan. I can’t scream this loud enough. You have to manufacture moments with your team. Celebrate the bright spots, the team will remember. And they will do more of the things that achieve this recognition. —— Running a sales team is hard work. There’s no shortcut, you have to get into the details of the team and the pipeline. 20 days left to hit your number. Let’s go make it happen!

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I believe the inability to prove ROI is the single biggest blocker right now in getting a sale across the line. And there's now evidence to prove this... TrustRadius just released their 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, which found that 71% of buyers end up purchasing the top option on their short list (ie the list they made before they started doing real research and talking to vendors and peers). Additionally, 47% of enterprise buyers said they wished it was easier to calculate ROI. What these two stats together mean to me: - In this turbulent market where budgets are tight, buyers are understandingly very risk averse - and so they are choosing solutions that are well known (and likely more established and "safer" vendors that their boss/CFO knows), and the sales process isn't really changing their opinion. - Emerging vendors aren't doing a good job with the content and sales process to change any buyer's minds, and prove that they have something better than the incumbent worth taking a slight risk on. One big part of this is not being able to show relevant, specific, evidence and success stories that they've delivered success in a similar industry, company size, region, use-case, etc. - Competitive enablement needs to be much more of a focus. While one finding of this report is investing in Brand is important so you make the top of the shortlist -- if you're an emerging vendor - you're not going to outspend the incumbent on Brand - so while important, it's not really an actionable strategy for a lot of smaller companies. What is actionable is harnessing the voice of your happy customers, to get super granular and authentic proof from customers that did switch from these incumbents. Evidence that talks about why you're better/different, what it's like to switch/migrate etc. - Buyers don't believe your (or your Forrester TEI's) 438% ROI claim. It's too broad, it's unbelievable, it's unsubstantiated, and not specific to your exact business and use-case. We need to break the ROI/value argument up into more realistic and believable sub-components (eg hours saved per week, improvements in win rates, FTE salary deferred, etc) that build into a more credible ROI/value narrative. Also - we can't just make sh*t up and pull numbers out of thin air, and pointing to one hand-curated reference customer isn't sufficient evidence, it's anecdotal at best, and a biased sample at worst. Showing more broad-based, relevant, statistically significant samplings of customer success will earn more trust that you've delivered ROI across lots of customers, not just one. Anyway check out the report (link in comments) - there's some great insights in there that should make you rethink how you sell and market.

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I'm not sure most people have wrapped their head around the impact AGI is going to have on insurance billing. All the crazy complex rules they design to make getting paid difficult are simple for LLMs to pick apart. I imagine their strategy for gatekeeping reimbursement etc. will need to shift. If you are doing any research in this space or are building this now let's connect, I find this topic incredibly interesting. #AGI #ArtificialIntelligence #InsuranceBilling #InsurTech #MachineLearning #AI #HealthcareBilling #TechInnovation #FutureOfInsurance #DataScience #Reimbursement #HealthcareTech #BillingSolutions #AIResearch #TechTrends #Innovation #StartupCommunity #Entrepreneurship

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This is some of the best advice for job seekers I've ever seen. Geared toward #SaaS, but relevant to most industries. Study this! #hiring #jobsearch #jobseeker #jobseeking #career

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