Fantastic article. As someone who has worked in growth for over a decade and run my own growth agency for 5 years, the question of whether someone has an acquisition problem or sales problem comes up a lot. Two thoughts I wanted to share:
#1 - I love your checklist, but I think it would be helpful to have clear, objective benchmarks for each item on your list. You do this for some points (e.g. "My closing rate from sales meetings is <30%") but don't do this for others (e.g. "People often do not show up for the calls/demos they booked"). From my experience working closely with startups, many founder's expectations are out of wack, so keeping things vague can lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, I found running paid ads for startups that at best, about 80% of people who filled out a form online would show up for the demo. I could see some founders over-index on the 20% who didn't show up if they didn't have some solid benchmarks.
#2 - Maybe it's a bit too in the weeds for this article, but do you think that acquisition and sales problems can be intertwined at times instead of either/or? For example, I've worked with clients on paid ads who whose targeting and messaging was off-base. It would sometimes allow them to still drive a lot of meetings (e.g. because the prospect thought the product was different than it actually was), but the mis-alignment would lead to poor sales calls and ghosting afterwards. It's easy to assume that the sales call was the issue when it was actually a top of funnel problem instead.
I love this!!!! Thanks so much for taking the time to write this super insightful comment. Can you help me out to make v02 of this self evaluation? Please send me an email grow at majavoje dot com and let's fix it together!
Hi Maja,
Fantastic article. As someone who has worked in growth for over a decade and run my own growth agency for 5 years, the question of whether someone has an acquisition problem or sales problem comes up a lot. Two thoughts I wanted to share:
#1 - I love your checklist, but I think it would be helpful to have clear, objective benchmarks for each item on your list. You do this for some points (e.g. "My closing rate from sales meetings is <30%") but don't do this for others (e.g. "People often do not show up for the calls/demos they booked"). From my experience working closely with startups, many founder's expectations are out of wack, so keeping things vague can lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, I found running paid ads for startups that at best, about 80% of people who filled out a form online would show up for the demo. I could see some founders over-index on the 20% who didn't show up if they didn't have some solid benchmarks.
#2 - Maybe it's a bit too in the weeds for this article, but do you think that acquisition and sales problems can be intertwined at times instead of either/or? For example, I've worked with clients on paid ads who whose targeting and messaging was off-base. It would sometimes allow them to still drive a lot of meetings (e.g. because the prospect thought the product was different than it actually was), but the mis-alignment would lead to poor sales calls and ghosting afterwards. It's easy to assume that the sales call was the issue when it was actually a top of funnel problem instead.
I love this!!!! Thanks so much for taking the time to write this super insightful comment. Can you help me out to make v02 of this self evaluation? Please send me an email grow at majavoje dot com and let's fix it together!
I would love to do that! I'll follow-up on this today or tmrw. Appreciate the chance to collaborate here :)
I just emailed you w/my thoughts for a v02 of the self evaluation. Let me know your thoughts.