6 months ago we started talking to a company about how we can transform their pipeline and revenue situation. We went through how we can increase their revenue by 30% and reduce their sales cycle by 20%, which is pretty compelling I know.
We detailed the data below where, each SDR can, on average get 10 meetings a week, where with cold outreach they will get, on average a 9% acceptance rate and a 33.6% agreement from that cold outreach to a next action. All the data is detailed below. Again, this is transformational in terms of sales and marketing.
All good stuff ... but
But they decided against that, they decided to cut 10% of the staff, cut the marketing budget, while keeping the target that sales needs to achieve the same. In summary, they decided to reduce the amount of people and resources that can make the number, but maintain the number.
Clearly they hadn't had a good quarter, so we stayed in touch with them for another quarter. Again the same offer was made. We can dig you out of this hole, here's the data that proves we can do that, we can sort your pipeline problem and get you back on the road to growth.
At the end of that that quarter, they cut more staff and marketing budget, the sales target remains the same.
I think you can see a pattern forming. Not listening, when help arrives and deciding that cutting, will somehow will get them back to where they need to be. We will stay in touch with them for another quarter, but I think you can see where this is going.
There is an old saying "when in a hole, stop digging".
How are you going to get better, without taking the medicine.
Albert Einstein: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
"Companies who reacted very negatively to recessions remained flat while those companies that doubled down and took advantage of competitor moves to drive growth, actually had outsized growth coming out of the recession" - Rishi Dave, Partner at Bain & Company
"You cannot overtake 15 cars when it's sunny… but you can when it's raining" -Ayrton Senna