THE IMPLICATION · SEAT BY SEAT
Every seat owns a number. All seven ride on the same conversations.
Start a conversationWhich one is you?
I run the company
The story you tell investors is only as true as the one your reps tell buyers.
You own Valuation. It rides on Growth the board can trust.
I lead revenue
Your forecast is a bet on rooms you are not in.
You own The number. It rides on Managers who coach the conversation, deal by deal.
I lead customer success and post-sale operations
You inherit every promise made in a room you were not in.
You own Retention. It rides on Keeping the promises sales made.
I lead product
The better product still loses to the better conversation.
You own The revenue the roadmap promised. It rides on A field that can sell what you built.
I lead marketing
Your message is only as good as the field's version of it.
You own Pipeline and conversion. It rides on The message surviving the first call.
I run finance
You cannot forecast heroes.
You own The numbers you report. It rides on Revenue that does not depend on heroes.
I founded the company
Every month the light bulb stays off is burn against a finite runway.
You own The product's survival. It rides on Buyers seeing their problem in it.
Every one of them rides oncompelling, consistent conversations.
Where the work fits
Situation and stage, not company size. Revenue was a proxy for this and a poor one.
A conversational, consultative revenue motion, or a company that has just discovered it needs one. Product led is not a disqualification. A product led motion that has reached the point where retention and expansion need people, relationships and a conversation has arrived exactly where this work starts.
A considered purchase with real decision criteria, where a buyer has to be convinced of what they require before they choose who provides it. A commodity purchase has no required capabilities conversation to have.
An executive willing to be in the room. Without executive alignment, enablement becomes performance art.
Where this does not work
Fit runs both ways, and saying so is more useful to you than another claim.
Product-market fit, pricing architecture, raw demand generation volume and capital structure sit outside what I can move in a growth engine. If that is what you have, I will say so in the first conversation rather than the third.
Where nobody's actual job is to coach, and people sell and also happen to manage, behavior does not hold after a program ends. That is worth naming before a statement of work rather than two quarters after one.
And a mission I care about, with people I like. That is a real qualifier rather than a soft one. The practice is deliberately not scaling, which is what makes it possible to mean.
You do not have to have picked a door. Thirty minutes, and I will ask you what your best rep says in the first ten minutes of a first meeting and what your median rep says.
That conversation usually settles which page you were looking for, and I will tell you which problem I think you have and whether I am the right person for it.
Start a conversation