People not in their seats now won't help this year's revenue

Why you need to think of hiring as the pipeline in front of the pipeline

Whoever isn’t in their seat right now will have little to no impact on revenue for 2023.

So, so, so many teams forget about this.

It makes total sense right?

If you start hiring today, you might have someone starting in a month.

You add a ramp-up of 3-9 months depending on the role.

And then you have your sales cycles of 2-6 months. 

However you try and accelerate these things, none of this will move the needle this year. 

The way I once described it to my CEO was this: 

You need to think of hiring as the pipeline in front of the pipeline. 

Talent needs time to be discovered and developed before it can contribute. 

It’s literally the same process as with customers. 

Both need time. 

This suddenly changed the conversation about the urgency of hiring and the resources we were willing to spend on it. 

We even started using CAC budget to fund HR people. 

We needed to make sure we had proper support for the “pipeline before the pipeline” in place. 

And yes, smarty boy Toni tells you to do a better job planning for next year. 

But what about this year? 

Its June. So you still have some time. 

My recommendation would be to laser focus on Opportunity creation (or “deals” for my Hubspot friends).

The reason is a bit too many opps will never be an issue for your existing AE team. 

They might need to stretch, and yes they will drop some opps they otherwise wouldn't have. 

But in the end, it will be a net positive. 

And if you had a lot of money (or hopes) riding on hires that land now until later in the year, you could discuss halting them and using that budget for things that have a more immediate impact. 

Yes, this will come at the expense of next year. But that is … well a next-year-problem. (I literally refer to them as “future-Toni-Problems” aka not my problems.)

And then spend your budget on the channels that could possibly get you more Opps. Marketing, Outbound, Customers or Partners. 

That’s the only way. 

Everything else is magic. 

And we don't like banking on magic.