A quick note this week: A friend of Stage 2 Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) just launched his 2nd annual State of B2B GTM survey.
Last year’s report went viral with new data on what channels are working (and not working), what GTM tech is on the rise, and how teams are bringing AI into GTM. The survey takes about 5-10 minutes.
DEAR STAGE 2: Every quarter, my head of sales comes to the board with a list of eight priorities, and every quarter we make progress on all of them and finish none of them. I know we need to focus, but everything on the list feels important. How do I decide what actually makes the cut, and how do I keep the team on it once we've picked? ~EVERYTHING IS A PRIORITY
DEAR EVERYTHING IS A PRIORITY: This week I’m joined by Chris Wheeler, Stage 2 LP and VP of Global Sales Development at GitHub, who runs an ~80-person team across five countries.
Chris and I immediately started talking about focus. He personally sets two priorities at a time, and asks his team to do the same. We’re all pulled in so many directions every day, and when “everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”. When you are trying to make real, meaningful changes you have to plan accordingly and dedicate real time and attention. Here’s how Chris uses this philosophy to run his team:
Set transformational goals
At any given time, maybe two to three things meaningfully move the needle in your business. Most leaders put their priorities in the board deck and then keep working on everything else anyway. Chris picks two and tells people to cross off everything else. Sure, that page on the website could look better, but…who cares?
Chris then asks every manager on his team for two (max three!) things they’re focused on each quarter. Hitting quota doesn’t count. Neither does culture. Quota and culture are what you’re living and breathing every day - they’re table stakes as a leader. “If you say, hey, my one big thing is I’m going to hit my quota, that’s not good enough. Think about transformation. Think about the big company impact.”
When the goal list is “$2M net new ARR” sitting next to “fix onboarding” and “launch the partner program.” The second two might be transformational, but they’re competing for the same attention as the number. Split the list. Run-rate items get managed while transformational items get a dedicated owner and a cadence, and they get talked about every week.
Work back from three years out
Where do the two things come from? Chris borrowed a line from Satya Nadella: think in decades, operate in days, weeks, and months. For a sales leader, ten years is too far. “I really started thinking three to five. What does this all look like? Then I back into the transformational moves I need to be focused on to achieve that future.”
Two examples of what came out of that:
His team moved from being paid on influenced pipeline to sourced pipeline. Sounds simple, but with dozens of SKUs and two licensing models it took six to twelve months and a lot of plumbing.
Speed to Lead: leads were taking twenty minutes, sometimes days, to reach Salesforce. Re-engineering the whole inbound flow got them to a 20-minute SLA.
These were both transformational projects that changed what the team could do next.
You don’t need Chris’s scale for this to work. A seed-stage version is one afternoon: what does the sales motion look like in three years, and what has to be true a year from now for that to happen? That’s your list!
Make progress visible consistently
Picking the right priorities is a start, but keeping those priorities top of mind requires discipline.
GitHub runs 3-5 revenue-wide strategic priorities with a readout to the revenue leadership team every two weeks, and Chris runs the same structure one layer down. The standard is simple: “It’s not acceptable to be blocked in any way.” Who owns the work, what’s the next milestone, what’s the blocker – is it a people problem or a prioritization problem or a technical one?
Two weeks with no movement is a hard thing to say in front of the group, which is…quite literally the point.
Between these meetings, there is a weekly async note they call Snippets: key decisions, key ships, interesting data points, escalations, celebrations. Managers send it up, Chris rolls it up to his SVP, and so on.
I love this format. Minimal meetings for visibility, regular async progress checkpoints for accountability. Steal this format!
Until next week!