Replay: Revenue Leaks — Why Your Funnel Isn’t the Problem

Thanks for joining. My name is Josh. I run the demand gen department here at N.Rich. And today I'm really excited to be joined by Brandi Starr, CXO at Tegrita and host of the Revenue Rehab podcast, and also George Storm who's our CRO here at N.Rich. Fortunate enough to work with George on a daily basis, which is great.

The reason why we're here today ultimately is to talk about if you've ever looked at your pipeline and thought the numbers look okay stage to stage, but something really isn't working, then this conversation is going to dive into that. Most teams diagnose revenue problems by looking at that conversion between stages, which is useful, but ultimately it only shows you where things slow down but not why. We're going to dig into that today, see what's happening inside those different stages, moments where revenue quietly leaks out before it ever shows up in your forecast. This isn't a lecture at all, it's just a conversation.

Before we do jump in, I'll just hand over to the guys to intro themselves in their own words. Brandi, do you want to go first?

Perfect. Yes, I am Brandi Starr, Chief Operating Officer at Tegrita. I have spent pretty much my entire career in marketing and seeing some of the misalignments that we're going to talk about. I am in Atlanta, Georgia, and really excited to talk to you all.

Really happy to have you here. And George, yourself?

That is me. I didn't really hear if you said you have your fortunate or unfortunate to work with me on a daily basis. It could be either or since we're representing the two sides ourselves, right? Chief Revenue Officer and you're heading marketing, so it has historically been a love-hate relationship between the two departments. Before we get into that — myself, I'm on the other side of the pond, both of the fact that I am in Stockholm, Sweden, in Europe, not in the US, but also 23 years. I'm pretty old, in sales instead of marketing. Now we're combining the two. That's all for me.

Great to have you here as well, George. I wouldn't say it's a love-hate relationship. Not now. But yeah, historically, of the departments.

What I want to start with really is what I talked about in that intro — that we talk about stage conversion and that's normally the main diagnostic. Why do you guys think that's become the default? Why is that the first thing that leaders tend to go to in terms of trying to understand how the revenue is operating and what's going on? Brandi, I don't know if you want to start.

I can start. I think people focus there because that's what's obvious. If we look at the journey, and I'll talk just about driving net new: you have all of the things that marketing does. You have the things that marketing does to get people to know that you exist, the things that once they know you exist that get them to want to talk to you. There's a point where they pass that off to the sales team. And then from there, sales has their defined stages in their CRM.

Looking at those stages and the conversion metrics of how they move through is the most obvious place to look. It becomes sort of the de facto starting point. And I don't necessarily know that anybody ever consciously said this is the way that we want to measure ourselves or this is the only way. To me, it's the thing that's just what's in front of you, so it becomes very natural.

And George, anything to add from the sales side on that?

Yeah, quite a few things actually. I want to second and build on what Brandi's saying. It is part industry standards, right? We're used to measuring that way. Boards consume information that way, management consumes information that way, that's how we present it. We're looking at conversion stages. From a mathematical perspective, it makes sense. Now, from an operational perspective, does it tell you a lot about what's going on in each stage, why they look the way they look? Not really.

And I think I don't want to be too contrarian, at least not maybe six minutes in is too early. It's also an easy out, right? I will talk on my side on sales — it's also an easy out. It's like, yeah, but we have problems MQL to SQL. I will point at marketing now and say that marketing is not giving great leads. I'm not gonna look at what happens in between, why that is, because that is a lot more complicated to unpack. It's a lot more data and it's unfortunately a lot more responsibility on each side, compared to just looking at the numbers connecting them.

Anything to follow up on? I definitely agree, and I very much am a contrarian on this topic. To me, it is the lazy way out. Most of the stage-to-stage things are team to team. If you look at the general public, your TAM, to being a potential in the database, you can point the finger at marketing. The MQL to SQL, you can point the finger at marketing. The SQL to opportunity, that's generally an SDR team or some internal MDR, whatever team you have qualifying things. Then you look at that opportunity to close, and it essentially is giving you the places to point the finger at. This is who's dropping the ball.

And it could be. But it's not like the way marketing or sales works is clean. It's not a relay race like you see in the Olympics where it's like I hand the baton, now it's all on you. There is a certain level of — we are all running this race together. The difference is someone is really the lead at that point, but we're still all running.

I equate it more to American football where somebody's got the ball, but the whole team is running with them. There are different scenarios — without being too literal about football — there's different points where the ball is passed and someone else now owns it. But there's no scenario where everyone else on the team just stopped and it's like, well, I did my part. Now it's on them.

I'm totally with you, George, and we don't need to wait to jump into contrarian because I think that's what's wrong with a lot of companies today — everyone wants to go with the status quo.

Yes, and to be transparent, part of what Josh was talking about, what he was asking us about — I reckon part of why we're only looking at this is because it's the safe way to sort of protect your position to a degree, to protect what your team is doing. But it's very hard to actually diagnose what's happening from a stage percentage or where things are going wrong or where they're leaking.

I think when we involve the word "just" in diagnostics is where it starts becoming sticky. Nothing in pipeline or funnel diagnostics is "just." If SQL to SQO is problematic, just look at the BDRs and just look at sales and just look at marketing — it doesn't work that way. I wish it did, but it really doesn't work.

I think that's really great insight, really, about how we think about this today and maybe the reasons why we think about it. But I guess for the webinar itself, we talk about revenue leaks. I guess what would be good for everybody on the call today — both of your perspectives — what does that actually mean in practice in terms of what is happening and what you guys see in the revenue operation? How do you define that leaking revenue, and what you're specifically looking for?

I can start. I really look at what I call micro conversions. We start with all of those stages that we talked about as kind of the first layer, because they do have value — it's not like looking at those doesn't bring some value. But then within each of those stages, really breaking down into truly the micro conversion level of what is everything that has to happen for the next thing to happen, and understanding where that breaks.

Just a really simple example: looking at going from SQL to opportunity. That can happen in a very small window depending on your sales cycle. It could be days or hours for some companies with a really accelerated sales cycle. But in there, marketing is going to pass something over to sales and say, hey, this person has some potential. They're showing buying behaviour that may indicate they're in the market.

That SDR — using the most common sales approaches — they've now got to reach out to that person. They may have to make multiple attempts in order to reach them. It may be email, phone, LinkedIn, etc. There is the step of once they've been passed over, can they actually get their ear in some way. And then if they can, can they get that initial discovery call scheduled? And then if they get it scheduled, does the prospect actually show up to the conversation? During that conversation, are you able to get the answers that you need to do that most base level of qualification, saying thumbs up, this is a real opportunity?

If the SDR is able to do that, can you get the buy-in from the prospect to move to the next step? Because it has to be mutual. You have to say, yep, we feel that we can help them solve whatever they're aiming to solve. But the buyer has to also say, yep, based on that conversation, I heard enough that I at least want to continue the conversation. All of those things are micro conversions. They could potentially all be owned by the SDR.

But if marketing's not doing any sort of segmentation and they're just sending stuff to everybody and sending over anybody with a pulse — guess what? People are not going to respond. You've got a breakdown in that. "I can't get anyone on the phone" — that points to a different issue. If the SDRs are doing great getting discovery meetings scheduled but then nobody shows up, that's a potentially different issue. If the call happens but everyone after is like, I don't want to move forward, I don't want to talk to you anymore, that's a potentially different issue.

Within all of those things, really looking at where is the breakdown happening — that's where you start to uncover: is this a process issue? Are we making it difficult for our buyer to buy? Is there a training issue? Do we have the wrong SDR? Are the things that are happening before that not meeting the need, not moving people to the right place? You really get to this granular level, and that's where you're able to see where are people falling out.

If everybody's falling out because they have calls and then they no longer want to talk to you, that's where your revenue is leaking. And you don't just have to fix the SQL to opportunity process. You got to figure out why after people talk to you, do they not want to talk to you anymore.

I can add quite a bit to that now. I will come to the defence of marketing instead and say that very often I see that there are signals coming in and there are accounts that are showing interest one way or another. Because the MQL to SQL is a very popular conversion point that sales likes to talk about a lot and point the finger at where things are breaking.

There is a question that has a lot of components in there. When it comes to, for instance, you mentioned Brandi, the BDRs reaching out — what amount of effort are we putting in? What is the expectation from the previous stage and the previous person holding the ball that you mentioned, to have done up to that point?

Very often there is this expectancy from sales that people are ready to buy already, they're ready to move forward, they're ready to talk. In which scenario, to be honest, if marketing was able to do all that, then operationally from a management perspective we would be better off cutting sales resources and adding money into marketing spend. If that was the world we lived in, then what is the point? If at sales we are to be order takers, basically. "We want to buy. Here is an address to send a DocuSign to. Thank you very much." In no world does it work like that.

When it comes to doing activities, we very often focus on amount of activities or binary metrics — have we reached the person? One point that people miss is how fast did we reach out after we got something in the previous stage. How much follow-up did we do? How many channels did we use? Do we actually put SLA-level effort into getting to that next stage? And that goes throughout all stages, not only MQL to SQL. That goes across the board.

I've heard in so many pipeline reviews talking about, yeah, we're leaking revenue because our win rate is too low. Then you have a slew of excuses — because the product is not right, we're missing this feature, because the pricing is too high, because the competition is too strong. And then there is a slew of alleviating factors. But it rarely connects if you break it down enough.

Josh, I know you're moderating, but I will interrupt now and say from a marketing perspective, do you think I'm on the right track when it comes to what sales expects?

That is exactly it. It's about collaboration ultimately. We have to have a shared agreement and shared ownership of how we're going to operationalise the way that we work together. It's not just about the traditional marketing brings the leads and throws them over the fence to sales and then sales are just doing the last mile. It's about, from the outset, marketing and sales being in lockstep — these are the accounts that we want to focus on, this is how we're going to market to them, this is the SLA in terms of when we see that engagement and interactions with these accounts.

We can map them to the different stages, whatever stages we want to map them to. It doesn't mean anything unless there is that agreement between what marketing is going to do and what sales are going to do, and how we're going to communicate about that as well. I think you're absolutely right, both of you, in terms of how you talk about that.

One thing that came into my head when you were both talking really is — you mentioned around the speed to action in terms of when that revenue is leaking, the default is often plug that gap as quickly as possible. One thing that I see all the time on LinkedIn is people who are now turning to AI agents to solve that problem. Just be interested really, off script a little bit, but how you guys both see that at the minute — in terms of these people who are selling their AI dream of there's an agent, it can look at your funnel, it can diagnose issues, it can go and talk to people and solve that problem for you. Sounds like a dream, but what do you guys think?

I can tell you I have the biggest eye roll right now. Do I believe AI can help in some really significant ways? Yes. Do I believe most companies today are using it in a way that is helpful and not harmful? No. Because right now, from my perspective, there is this perception that you can rip out whole teams and insert AI and it's going to magically solve your problem.

The problem is you're trying to insert AI to solve this massive problem that you really haven't defined. Because companies — to your point, Josh, where you talk about there's places where AI can be used to dig through your data, dig through your systems, and actually surface "here's what might be the problem" — what we're talking about today in terms of the micro conversions and being able to spot those things, AI can do that way faster because it can absorb the massive amounts of data that exist in your marketing and sales systems, to really be able to say here's what's happening, here's this pattern that no human has time to analyse that you may want to look at. That does happen.

George, you talked about the speed of response. That's a place where I have seen AI help really effectively. I've seen a number of tools where when someone is actively ready to buy, AI can jump in and not only connect the right salesperson but also get a meeting scheduled on the calendar so that's happening really fast. Depending on the size of the company, in some cases that discovery meeting can happen same day — very similar to what we see in healthcare where with telemedicine I can log into my telemed app and be on with a doctor in 20 minutes or less. AI is able to help salespeople do that same sort of thing.

When companies actually are really looking at what is the place or where is the place that we are leaking revenue, those are the companies that are able to effectively use AI, because they're looking at AI can help me solve this one thing. Not AI is going to come in and do this magic and we're going to get rid of our whole marketing team.

And that's where I see companies failing — because it's this pipe dream that AI is that place that it could be everything. I don't think the humans are at a place to understand how AI could help with everything, which is why AI can't help with everything. There's what they call the human in the loop. There's a lot of places where we don't have enough human in the loop in order for AI to be effective.

George, what are your thoughts?

I agree with you to a large extent. And the fun thing is that there are two sort of contradicting circumstances here. One is that we keep saying that AI will replace outreach teams or will replace BDRs, and at the same time you see job ads from OpenAI hiring BDRs because they want to do outreach themselves.

But at the same time, to tie into the previous topic, we're saying we have a problem of even diagnosing where the leak is or where the problem is. Sending a technician to fix something in your house where we don't know where the sound is coming from — it's going to be a lot harder to do. You're giving a task that you can't complete. You don't know how to diagnose and you don't know how to fix. Implementing a layer of tech on top of that — in most scenarios I've seen — causes more harm to the pipeline.

I think AI can be a great data aggregation layer. To Brandi's point, it can surface patterns to you, it can analyse heaps of data that you would never have time to do. But the interpretation is contextual to your business. Fortunately or unfortunately, that's what our roles are — we need to be able to interpret what the data is telling us in the context of what business and what motions we're running. Otherwise, what are we doing here?

It's quite fun actually. George, obviously we've recently gained access to an AI tool that's helping us to do that, and it's really, from a marketing perspective at least, being able to understand the pipeline data and chat with that data rather than just seeing it in spreadsheets — it's really helping, at least from my point of view, being able to think about the challenges that we have and where we can come up with solutions from a marketing and sales perspective to solve those problems.

We have a question in the chat, which I'll open up to you guys. Somebody says: "It sounds like the core problem is everyone feels there's a problem, but no one can diagnose specifically what is going wrong. How do you typically start this process, not just from a technical analysis, but also how do you get various teams involved and aligned?" By the time the topic's brought up, I guess everyone is starting to feel a little bit anxious about it. That's a question that we've had. I don't know which one of you guys wants to start off with that.

I was excited to see that question because it is a great one. Obviously pulling some data and understanding some of those micro conversion metrics is a key starting point. But beyond that, once you have some data, you have to really approach the conversation as us — as a company or as a go-to-market team — against the problem.

What happens a lot today is something that George mentioned earlier, where it's like sales is saying, hey marketing, you're giving us crap leads, do better. Or your AE team is like, hey SDR, you're not giving me enough, do better. It becomes this finger pointing. But when you're able to look at where the breakdown happens, you're able to figure out how do we collectively tackle this.

Giving an example that I saw a couple of years ago with a client: they had their numbers, not to the total micro conversion level, but better than just stage to stage. What they saw was post-demo, there were a lot of opportunities that were either stalling or completely getting ghosted. The natural thing is sales point at product and pricing, and leaders point at the salesperson not doing their job. But when everybody says, here's the problem, we're seeing this drop-off, collectively as a go-to-market team, what can everyone do?

Marketing, what's something you can do to help influence this? And they may say we can add more nurture campaigns here, or we can do this there. SDRs, this is way past you in terms of what you own, but what can you do to influence this? Product, is there anything you're hearing in the marketplace that may help us to overcome this? And when we look at it, everybody plays a role in solving wherever it's broken. It's not that anybody's not doing their job. It's not a "you" problem, it's a "we" problem. This is a thing that is happening, the data is showing us that it's a thing that is happening, nobody can deny it.

Nobody has to take accountability — because people hate the A word — that it's their fault. But instead, we're going to figure out what can we each do. And then as leaders, we're going to keep a light focused on that one number. If we were moving 10% from demo to whatever the next stage is — say demo to pricing conversation — if it's 10%, how do we get to 11? We're not going to try to move from 10 to 20. How do we get to 11? And then if we get to 11, how do we get to 12?

What ends up happening when you focus all that effort — you don't move from 10 to 11. You move from 10 to 20, because everybody's focused on how do we just get a little bit better. Everyone focusing on that little bit better becomes incrementally better because we're all focused. And then we can all high five because guess what, we solved this problem together. And now we can look at — it almost becomes gamified where it's like, what other metric in here isn't working? Now let's tackle that one.

Because if we all start looking at the places where those micro conversions aren't working, and we all tackle it as us as a go-to-market team against the problem, and we focus on just moving those things 1% — when you do the math of what comes into the top to the revenue that comes out the bottom, it becomes huge. And then there's no "I didn't do my job" and we all feel good. It takes away the anxiety. We're not in this alone. It's not one person's job on the line. We're all moving in one accord. And it makes such a huge difference.

Really nice, really nice question. And thanks for the input, Brandi. This is an exciting one, I have to say.

If we take a step back, where I think a lot of us are failing initially is it starts with the diagnostics. When we look at it: we're leaking money, we're not reaching targets. What's happening? And then usually the solution happens a bit backwards, where we say it's this conversion or it's that conversion, or sales or marketing or product or pricing, whatever.

First of all, starting by saying that one of my old managers used to say that whenever you point a finger at a person, you're pointing three fingers at yourself, every time you do that motion. This is an alignment piece in its own. But to be honest, since I know this is in most scenarios — especially in big organisations — sort of a pipe dream to get everyone under the same umbrella, I want to talk about a bit more practical topic.

And I'm glad that Brandi mentioned math because it makes my soul happy. Because the equation, if you break it down — what generates new revenue? You have meetings that are coming in, you have starting to contact people, then some of these people you book meetings with, you convert them to opportunities, you close some of them, and then the last multiplier is how much you sell. Traditionally, we have MQL or MQA to SQL, SQL to SQO, SQO to won, times ACV — average contract value. The math is not more complex than that, unfortunately. I'm not going to lie.

When we look at leaks, we can look at each number and say, what can we tangibly touch? Not where the problem is initially. To your point, Brandi: what from this math, what growth lever — because each of these numbers are growth levers — we have two solid numbers. One is touch points in the beginning, the other solid number is how much we sell for. The rest is percentage conversions.

Where are we leaking? Where does the equation break? The math that I do very often with customers is let's start with the end goal. Where do we need to be? And start diagnosing the math step by step. If I want to end up with 20 million, what do I need to get to that level? What my historical data is saying — it's saying that I'm selling for 100,000 per deal. How many deals do I need? To create that many deals, it goes down to the first input, right?

If I look at my math, where is it breaking? Am I selling for enough money to make that number? Or am I — this is why I usually, at least when I do that math, I start from ACV. What are we selling for? If we're selling for too little, if we're discounting a lot, if we're underselling ourselves, we will run out of companies to bring in. The tail of the math will never make sense if we're selling something at 50% discount or 20% discount because we had very strong competition and we needed to close the deal in the quarter. The math will never make sense. It's an impossibility.

If we're getting stuff from marketing and we're registering the deal as "ghosted" — because I love that I see that in CRMs — in our industry, that is registered as a reason for losing a deal: "ghosted." Which is not the reason — it's us failing to engage that person and then they stop talking to us.

If we are not able to convert enough from what marketing is giving us, if the conversion is 0.5% because we're doing cold outreach, again the first number won't make sense. We will need hundreds of thousands of companies.

Going point by point in the math, saying what have I done last year, which parts of this equation broke — and you can look at it in a formula format, point by point. And then once you diagnose the number — and whoever in the chat wants to talk about this more, reach out to me on LinkedIn, we can have a chat about how to put this together. Because I love Excel.

Once you diagnose the number, to Brandi's point, then you go: who is attached to this number? Because even if we say X department owns that number, all departments influence that number. If we're looking at ACV, how does marketing impact ACV? Awesome example. If there is room to fluctuate — for the companies where there is room, right? If you're selling something at a fixed price, then it's immaterial. For most of us it isn't.

How does marketing impact ACV? ACV is usually a number that marketing doesn't get attributed — ACV is not traditionally impacted by marketing according to public perception. Marketing can influence ACV, for instance, with building trust in the earlier stages of the customer's journey. If the customer trusts your company, if they know your company, if you have engaged people from enough levels — the CFO level is usually the person holding the purse. Have you built trust enough early in the journey? Or are you just saying, "the sales should just push them for more money"? Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. If they don't trust you, why would they invest more?

And the same goes in all stages. Somebody, yes, owns the number, but we all affect all of these numbers. The same with early conversions — if sales is not providing the right guidance for ICP accounts, if they're not providing marketing with what are they hearing, is the messaging resonating, is it not resonating, which parts are resonating — and we're just blindly throwing the ball back like, "do better." "Do better" doesn't mean anything. "Do better" is just complaining.

To finish the question — very long answer to a medium-sized question. Diagnose which number is breaking, see who owns it, be transparent with yourself. And from there, exactly what Brandi said: sit down. What can I do? And from there, hold yourselves accountable. We agreed we're going to impact ACV together. One month later — what did we do? What did we commit? Who committed? Who delivered? Who fell off? Why did they fall off? Nothing works without follow-up. Start from the number, go to impact analysis, and do a follow-up. That's my two cents.

I just want to add a point to that because I wholeheartedly agree. Something that you said — there's a nuance in here that I think a lot of people miss. There's a level of creativity and deeper level of thinking. Every department needs to think about how they impact something.

The marketing influence on ACV is a great example of that. Because to your point, marketing starts thinking exactly what you said — we've got to build more trust, we've got to make sure. And those are the places where it's like, yes, and this is where this is a great place to get creative. We know the CFO holds the purse strings. How can marketing get ahead of that? What can marketing do? Because the CFO is not naturally in your database engaging with your webinars and downloading your content.

And often marketers will assume, well, I can't do anything about that. And I can think — this is like 15 years ago — one of my most successful campaigns was I was cross-selling into ERP customers. I had content that I developed for every person in the buying committee. Were they in my nurture campaigns? Not at all. Procurement's not in there. CFO's not in there. But for that champion who is trying to push things forward — the person you're going to talk to — it's one of those "here, slide this across to your IT team who is going to scrutinise the security. Here's all the answers to the questions they're going to ask. When we get there, they're already comfortable." Give this to your CFO because this is all the positioning of how it ties to what they've got to report to the CEO and the board.

It was an example of getting creative. I don't have these people. I as the marketer don't have access to these people, they're not talking to me, they're not in my database. Doesn't mean I can't influence it. And that is a place — and I'm using the marketing example because that's my background — but for every single team, to do exactly what George said, you've got to — and I hate the phrase "think outside the box" because it's so overused — but you really do have to get creative. Assume that there is more you can do to influence every single part. If you take that mindset of there's always more I can do, that means no matter what you're already doing, you're going to push yourself into figuring out what is that more.

And that again goes back to how we are all collectively moving the needle. George, you hit on another thing that's really important, which is those feedback loops. We can't just assume that information only flows one way. It's gotta also flow — if the SDRs are seeing like, hey, when you're giving me somebody and they've done X, Y, and Z, that makes my job so much easier. Or when we get here in the sales process, this is a big objection that we're hearing, how can we get ahead of it? That feedback loop — the information has to flow both ways, which allows every person to do better, to have a better understanding, to focus more on the customer. All of the things.

I love that point, Brandi, about the influencer approach. I've been recently working on an in-pipe campaign which does exactly that — about how we can arm our champion with what they need to engage those personas. Ultimately, nobody's ever been sat there on a discovery call and suddenly the CTO is sat there in front of them as well. They're coming in later in the stage.

We've got about 15 minutes left, guys, so I just wanted to do some rapid-fire questions if that's okay. The first one kind of ties back to both of your previous points. We've talked a lot about where things break and how to diagnose where it's broken and what you should do in that process. A lot of our audience is probably a mix of mid-market, growing up-market, and there'll be some enterprise in there as well in terms of the ACVs that they're selling.

I'm just curious from your perspective: do you think there's a fundamental difference in the process of how you diagnose and fix this, depending on the deal size, other than scale? Is there a different way of approaching it?

I would say foundationally it's the same. If we look at the big steps of what needs to happen, it's the same across the board in my opinion. Where I see the nuance is going to come into the "what you do" — what potential solutions, how people can influence — because deal size plays a role. Your average deal cycle, how much competition is in your marketplace, is it a thing that your buyer needs or is it more of a luxury for them — there's a lot of variables that are gonna change a lot of things.

But in terms of the process, I think George laid it out: you gotta look at the numbers, figure out where the problem exists, figure out how do we collectively move that number, think critically about how we do that, stay laser focused on that number, and create those feedback loops. Those are your high-level steps.

I can continue from here. And to warn you, Josh, I don't think that either of us can do actual rapid fire. We can do fire, I don't know if it's going to be rapid.

To disagree with Brandi here for the first time: I think that high-ACV or enterprise sales motions are actually fundamentally different from each other. Yes, I agree that the equation stays the same, the numbers stay the same, the levers stay the same. But contrary to lower or medium ACV motions, it changes — the baseline narrative changes from value first to risk first.

The higher we go in the investment scale, the higher risk aversion and the importance of trust gets. Can I get the person — let's say that I'm selling HR software — can I get a person to invest 10K a year with me without the board or the CFO being involved? Potentially, because my HR director has their own budget, they build a system, pretty fast cycle. They went on relationships, they went on some LinkedIn ad. Fantastic.

Am I investing half a million? The equation changes dramatically. We have this term we use: winning the day-one battle. If the investment is big enough, if the service or software or whatever it is that you're selling is business-critical enough, it's a board or management-level decision that ties into certain objectives to make a decision.

Your buying committee needs to know of you. You need to influence a lot more people. Unfortunately, if you're not in their vicinity when they start looking at this, if you don't end up in the top-three or top-five list — even if you book them, even if you create an opportunity — I hate to tell you, you're most likely being used as a benchmark to push other people to give them a better price. Let's be honest — we've all been in these RFQs. You're the fourth player. What they do is they get you to drop price to go to the selected vendor and say, "But George is giving me 50% less, give me more."

Enterprise buyers buy — the tiering goes risk first, trust, value. Unfortunately, the people involved have a lot more to lose. Because if I bring a half-a-million investment that flops, next year I'm going to be probably looking for another job. It's a lot of risk.

And to Brandi's point before, about influencing several people — if you've never heard of a company before and they slide a proposal for $100,000 across your table, I haven't heard of that company, I don't know what the company is, what it does, who they work with, nothing of the sort — I will either flat-out reject it or I will scrutinise it to a point where I will drag the sales cycle for another six months. Or they will flat-out just give up on the deal and look elsewhere.

I think the motions are fundamentally different, both on marketing and on the sales side. And again, this is not rapid whatsoever.

That makes sense. From my point of view, George, in terms of how you described it — my experience from being in ABM for the last five years is the elephant in the room here: is everybody on the same path and the same journey of how you're actually going to market? Because I think quite often what I've experienced when I've worked with different companies who are trying to sell into that enterprise motion is there's a disconnect between the understanding that sales are doing that enterprise risk-based motion, but I've seen marketing teams who are approaching it from the value-based motion. And there's just a void of content and enablement and the ability to tell that story — to me, that's where I've seen it fall down so often in the past.

Just to share — sorry to interrupt you. I know we have 10 minutes, but I want to offer a very quick anecdote from my own career. When I was building my first enterprise team — that was, I don't know, I think 10 years ago now — I remember doing a presentation for my management team at the time. What I was trying to explain was I had this picture in one of my slides and I was saying that we're trying to run a Formula One race and we're on a tricycle.

We can't do this like this. We have a PLG motion that somebody bumps into the website, converts into a meeting, books something for 3K, and we're off to the races. We don't have the content, we don't have the competence, we don't have the process to address these guys because it's a whole different ballgame. I'm doing way too many sports references for my liking today, but it is what it is.

That's fine, it's a good point. The last question I want to wrap up with really is — obviously we're coming towards the end of the week now. There's probably some executives out there that are sat at their desk thinking, we're coming up towards the end of Q1, they may feel that there's something not quite right with their pipeline, they may feel that there's some revenue leaks there.

And over the weekend, they are kind of thinking about what do they need to do, how can they change it, how can they come to work on Monday morning and say this is what we're going to do to fix this. What advice would you give them if they called you over the weekend and said, how do I fix this problem? Where do I go with it? What do I need to start measuring and how do I know what the right thing is to fix?

If they call me over the weekend, I would kindly ask them to call me on Monday. To the actual answer now: I would answer with a question first of all and say it depends what you want to fix. If you want to fix your Q1, you need to look at a different number. If you want to fix your H2, you need to look at a different number.

If you're looking to fix Q1 now, and we are on the 12th of March, I'd probably wish you good luck. But you need to look at the things you can affect. What can you affect on the 12th? On the sales side — unless your sales cycle is two weeks — you can affect how much discount you give or not give to affect your ACV. You can affect how you multi-thread, get executive sponsorship involved to push deals forward.

If you're planning for Q2, again depending on the sales cycle, you need to look a lot earlier. But again, breaking down the numbers one by one. Ideally, my big piece or my more long-term piece of advice is to look at these things on an ongoing basis and look at them way before they become a problem. It's never too late to fix your revenue model.

Even if everything is going well, you don't need to — if you get stuck in a firefighting mode, you will never fix them. It's the historical problem with training: we're doing too well, we can't train. Or we're doing too bad, we need to sell, we can't train. It's never a good time to sit and look at spreadsheets and fix numbers because no one, besides probably me, likes doing that.

But even if it's too late and you're missing the quarter, it's still worth it. Analyse. Look at your entire machinery and the math and figure out what do you want to impact, and work from there.

Thinking about it, I realise my response will be less tactical, more emotional. I would say: don't panic. Rash, sweeping changes — because the way you phrased the question, Josh — when someone's calling, especially if they're calling on the weekend, I'm with you, George.

But in that instance, quite often it's panic that has set in. And we are two weeks from the end of the quarter. Panic coupled with time often leads people to trying to make some sweeping changes that just create the illusion of "I'm doing something significant." And those rash decisions and big changes often make the problem worse down the line. It will seemingly solve something right now or give the appearance of a solution, but long term it will make a bigger issue.

I think all the advice that George is giving is great. And I would say the first step is calm down, think clearly, and then do all the things that George said. Because you're right — there are things that will help. And if you're calm, you can also think ahead to what short-term decisions could mean long term.

One I see often is "we got to get these deals closed this quarter," so that's where they interject discounts to make people sign faster. Which yes, that can get those deals closed. But if you can't sustain that discount in year two and their price is going to double, you run the risk then of churn, which is just kicking the can down the road. Or you run all these other risks.

That's why you have to, really, as a leader, the most important thing is approaching things with a level head. And thinking about how does this decision today impact the company down the road. In some cases, you may want to make that decision and consciously decide to cross that bridge when you get there. But that's a very different thing than "I did this thing" and then you have this later "oh shit" moment because hindsight is 20/20. We don't want that — we want foresight to be 20/20 as well.

When you said "calm down and do what George says," I just had a vision of maybe we should get some merch printed with that on it.

Please, I want the t-shirt.

I'll do this. This is brilliant.

We don't have any more questions in the chat, so I think we can wrap it up there. Before we do go — how can people find you and what can they talk to you about? Brandi?

For me, LinkedIn and Substack are the two main places. Very active on LinkedIn — when you search Brandi Starr, I'm usually one of the first to come up. And then I also have the Brandi Starr Substack. I share all sorts of things, whether it's lessons learned from clients, articles and things that you should be paying attention to, other people's content, et cetera. Would always love to hear from anyone — definitely let me know that you saw me here, and happy to continue the conversation with any of the attendees.

Pretty similar, I don't have a Substack, but LinkedIn. Happy to chat, especially if it has to do with math. I'm more than happy to engage, potentially even during the weekend if it's data-heavy enough. But that's about it.

That's exactly what I was going to say — as long as it's about math, George will reply to you. Thanks so much for your time today, guys. It was a really great conversation. Anybody who's been on live will receive a recording follow-up, and anybody who's not been able to make it, they'll get it as well. Thanks for being here, and take care.

Thank you all.

Thank you.