I sit on the board
Is this growth repeatable, or do we depend on heroics?
The story you tell investors is only as true as the one your reps tell buyers.
What you are actually underwriting
Three questions, and none of them is answered by the number itself.
- Whether the revenue is transferable: does the plan survive the loss of the top two producers and the person who leads them.
- Whether the forecast is a readout of what buyers confirmed, or a negotiation between a CRO and their managers that you are being shown the result of.
- Whether the go to market is an asset a buyer would pay a multiple for, or a set of relationships that walk out of the building.
Where it usually breaks
Management will tell you which of these it is. The point of asking is that the three have different fixes and the wrong one costs a year.
Capital is being deployed against a market model nobody has signed
The model that came to you in the deck and the way sales territories are actually drawn describe two different companies. Every function has evidence for its own theory of why growth stalled and nobody has the whole picture, so the board gets a confident explanation each quarter and a different one the quarter after.
Ask for win rate in targeted segments against win rate everywhere else.
If the company cannot produce that split, it does not have a segmentation, it has a preference, and the next senior go to market hire will be made against a problem nobody has diagnosed.
The differentiation is real and it is not reaching the decision
The company has genuine differentiation. Ask what percentage of closed deals had a buyer confirm, in their own words, that they required the capability the company is differentiated on. The number is usually unknown, and where it is unknown you should expect discounting, because a differentiator the buyer never wrote into their own criteria is not a differentiator at the table.
That shows up in your file as pressure on average deal size and on gross margin, and it gets explained as a competitive market.
The number is carried by people rather than by a system
This is the one that decides the multiple. Look at the spread between top quartile and median. A wide, stable spread is not a story about great talent, it is a company that cannot explain what its best people do, which means it cannot hire against it, cannot train against it, cannot scale it into a second region and cannot sell it to an acquirer.
Add the standing question underneath it: is it someone's job to coach, or does someone sell and also happen to manage? Where the answer is the second one, every program the company has ever run has faded, and the next one will too.
Where people in your seat start
“There are sixty things on the go-to-market priority list and all of them are important.”
GTM Diagnosis and Focus →
Structured interviews across leadership and every go-to-market function, reduced to the few initiatives that move the needle. A day, a week or a month.
“Our investor model and our territory map describe two different companies.”
TAM and ICP →
One market model your finance team and your field both work from, a written call on the segments you are leaving, and an ideal customer profile tight enough to disqualify a live deal with.
“My managers were terrific sellers. Coaching is a different job and nobody taught them it.”
Leadership and Manager Coaching →
The questions a manager asks in every opportunity review, and the judgment to coach a deal rather than take it over.
What becomes true
Growth stops depending on heroics. What the top quartile does is written down, taught, coached and inspected, so the median moves and the company can hire against a standard rather than against a hope.
The forecast becomes a readout of what buyers confirmed rather than an internal negotiation, which is the difference between a board that is informed and a board that is surprised.
Key person dependency comes out of the company, including dependency on me. The coaching capability transfers to the company's own managers by design, which is exactly what diligence is looking for and exactly what an outside coach on a permanent retainer is evidence against.
The numbers
- 25 → 1
- 25 stakeholder interviews, 62 recommendations reduced to six initiatives and one needle moving project to spearhead growth
- 9
- named sellers whose behavior changed inside one coaching cycle
One engagement, from your seat
enVista had a generic offering in a diluted market, real growth ambitions, and no leadership agreement on where to concentrate. The market model that went to investors bore no relationship to how sales territories were drawn, which is the specific condition under which a board approves a plan that the field was never structured to deliver.
25 stakeholder interviews across leadership and every go to market function. A six part audit and a keep, start and stop synthesis, each finding carrying the evidence behind it. 62 raw recommendations distilled to six prioritized initiatives with owners. TAM, SAM and SOM segmentation built with the leadership team and then carried into the CFO's investor materials and into territory design, so the story told to investors and the way the company sells became one document instead of two.
Michelle Demarco, CFO, enVista
“My role in that was to help - my team would do the analytics as we went through what a TAM, SAM, SOM process looked like... getting down to the amount of clients we had the right to win. And then taking that to do our projections for a strategic plan, which we utilised in our transaction where we worked with J.P. Morgan to try to sell the company.”
What you are probably asking
We are about to hire a CRO. Should we wait?
Diagnose first. A senior go to market hire made against a problem nobody has named is the most expensive way to run the experiment, because it takes two quarters to make, two to fail and two to replace, and at the end you still do not know whether the problem was direction, message or execution. The diagnosis is weeks. It also gives the incoming leader a mandate written down before they arrive, which is the single thing that most improves their odds.
How is this different from the operating partner we already have?
An operating partner works at the top of the company. What this adds is that the same person goes from the board level strategy down to the specific words a seller says to a buyer and back up again, in the same engagement. What gets recommended at the top is tested against what actually happens in a live deal, so the recommendation is not a hypothesis you hand to management to interpret.
What comes out of it that can go in a file?
The findings with the evidence behind them, the initiatives with owners and sequence, and the segmentation the company and its CFO both work from. For the coaching work, documented behavior change against named individuals and the inspection questions their managers now run.
Everything above belongs to Sustain, which is behavior holding once nobody from outside is enforcing it. It is your portfolio company's goal. My expertise is in the helping.
The management team can describe the growth strategy in two minutes. Very few can tell you what a median seller says in the first ten minutes of a first meeting, and the distance between those two things is most of what you are underwriting.
If it would be more useful to see it than to discuss it, introduce me to a portfolio company and I will tell them which of these problems I think they have, and whether I am the right person for it.
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