Great plan, lousy execution
Not everything is going to go the way you want.
It’s definitely happened to me.
Back in the day, at a previous company, we had a great revenue plan.
Our goal? We wanted to go mid-market.
So we created our operating model.
We factored in the right amount of reps and hires we needed, our expected amount of employee turnover, how many opportunities we needed, and what kind of projects and campaigns we had to run to get there.
We planned everything down to the millimeter.
We understood the importance of timing, and we could work on cutting down our CAC without affecting something down the line in our revenue engine.
Without being too full of myself, I think it was a great plan.
End of story, right? Yeah, not really.
In our case, the product was delayed and ultimately wasn’t ready for our mid-market ICP.
We booked plenty of meetings, but nothing closed.
Our reps ended up just giving up.
It was a total failure.
Looking back now, I would have done things a lot differently.
First, we should have listened to more of our sales calls (and sales reps) to understand why we weren't making progress.
If we did, then we would have seen the problem in our product-segment fit much sooner.
Those insights could have put us in a better position to either pull the plug on the project or switch to another target buyer faster.
That would have let us either grow faster or save a significant amount of resources.
But ultimately, the reason why we went mid-market came from a lot of us executives “wanting to” grow the company fast.
While we did pay attention to the risks, we ended up skipping over them, “group-thinking” them away, or simply cherry-picking our way to the answer we wanted.
That's a habit I still see too many executives doing.
It ended up working out for our company in the end, but not without a lot of work.
But the point of this story is that just because you avoided all the planning mistakes you could, it doesn’t mean your job is done.
Planning is only 20% of the whole journey.
The other 80% is execution. And that always comes with an inherent risk.