When the Root Cause Is You

Sales came up red again.

Third quarter in a row. Same measurables, same place on the scorecard.

From everything we've looked at this morning, sales looks like the limiting factor. Is that the number one issue facing the business today?

The CFO answered before anyone else could. If we don't get our arms around sales, nothing else matters. The Rocks we set today all depend on this.

Would it be a terrible idea to IDS this before we set a single Rock?

The room agreed fast.

The head of sales was also the founder of the company.

Ninety Days of Good Excuses

Calls down. Conversion soft. A CRM Rock that never moved and a sales initiative nobody had touched.

Every week there was an explanation. Seasonality. The market. A slow stretch nobody could name. The explanations were plausible, and every week the meeting moved on to something else.

The team could see what was underneath it. They had been able to see it for months.

They respected him too much to say it.

He had built this company himself. He was magnetic with clients. He personally owned sixty percent of revenue, and every person in that room had watched him do it. Telling a man like that he is the problem is not a thing people do.

So for ninety days, nobody did.

What Was Actually True

We put lagging sales on the board. Before we started digging, I asked what the real problem was.

They worked the sentence until it said what was true. The sales function was not operating as it should. The measurables had been off for ninety days, the team was explaining them instead of digging into them, and the Rocks meant to fix it had not moved.

Nobody had written that down before. Written down, it was harder to move past.

Then we asked why, and kept asking.

Why were the measurables off. The reps were not making enough calls. Why. Nobody was managing them week to week. Why. The person who owned that seat was sitting in six other seats.

The company had grown past the version of itself he built. The sales function needed structure now. The team needed managing. He was stretched too thin to go deep anywhere, and the hunger that built the place was not showing up in the numbers.

Everyone in the room already knew this.

Somebody Said It

The COO looked at the founder.

I think the root cause is you. You're stretched. Tired. Spinning. I'm not sure you want this seat. It requires developing the team, transferring what's in your head, holding people accountable instead of being frustrated with them. Until we solve that, none of the rest of this moves.

The founder went defensive. When the issue has your name on it and your whole team is watching, the first response is rarely graceful.

He pushed back on the numbers first. Then on the timing. Then he stopped.

Nobody rescued him. Nobody backed off it either. They sat in it until it passed.

Ninety days of protecting him had cost the company a quarter.

What He Actually Wanted

Once the defensiveness cleared, the room could explore.

What did he want. What was he good at. What was he avoiding.

It came out quickly. He wanted to be in front of major clients, not managing reps. He knew the sales process lived in his gut and did not scale. He also knew he had no appetite for codifying it, training people on it, and doing the patient work of building a sales organization. He got impatient with all of it.

That is a seat problem, and seat problems have answers.

They needed a sales leader who could build the process, manage the team, and hold it accountable. They needed the founder reporting into that person on the sales function. Eventually they needed eighty percent of revenue closing without him in the room. The founder did not have to change who he was.

That was bigger than a to-do, so they zoomed out and changed the annual goal. The new goal was to redesign the sales function entirely, ending with the founder in the Visionary seat.

Two Rocks came out of it, both aimed at understanding the gap between the sales function they had and the one the company had outgrown it for.

They solved it for now. The commitment was to understand the gap before redesigning around it.

The founder left more energized than his team had seen him in two years. The thing they had spent ninety days protecting was a seat he did not want.

Somebody on your team can see it right now. How much has their respect already cost you?