Sam Jacobs’ Post

5 reasons to do M&A as the acquirer: 1. They have a product that is already on your roadmap and would take you too long to build 2. They have customers in a segment you haven't penetrated (eg they are in enterprise and you're stuck in SMB or vice versa) 3. They have talent you need in your organization 4. They're just too cheap and you have a strong balance sheet But the 5th was a surprise. And it's specific to a very unique kind of business. 💡 As Bob Moore shared on Topline this week: 5. If you're in a networks-effect business (like account mapping) it makes sense to acquire your direct competitor to ensure your "view of the world" is comprehensive. Imagine trying to use LinkedIn if there was a direct competitor the other half of the world was on. What a nightmare. You'd be endlessly switching between two platforms. That's what it was like to be Crossbeam competing with Reveal and that's why the merger made so much sense. Bob explained this nuance in his first interview since the merger on this week's episode of Topline. It's an incredible and candid conversation discussing how both Crossbeam and Reveal are "COVID companies" that have joined forces to create the world's dominant partnerships platform. (Link to this episode in the comments. Topline is rapidly becoming the very best in B2B market commentary and analysis. This week is no exception.) PS As luck would have it, I'll be at Crossbeam's ELG Con tomorrow to discuss all this and more right before the Pavilion GTM EMEA conference the 2nd part of the week.

Maybe going to Harvard or Wharton will help you become an effective operating executive today... but I seriously doubt it. Here's why: P.S. Thanks Peter Conforti for having me on the podcast and putting together this very cool video. You can list to our full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/e4axHcRT

Every decision you make as an executive should do 1 of 3 things: 1. Drive top-line revenue growth. 2. Improve margin and efficiency. 3. Reduce churn and increase the Lifetime Value of the customer. That's it. Every decision. Every person you hire. Every process you create. They can do one of those 3 things tomorrow or they can do them in 6 or 12 months (like investments in brand). But if you're doing something and can't quite tie it back to 1 of those 3 things. Consider not doing it.

In a world of constrained capital, companies can't do everything nor be everything to all people. That's a VERY HARD lesson for executives to learn when they're scaling. We need to maintain our strategic focus. We need to choose a small number of things and be great at them. One of the great fallacies I've seen from executives and companies is the idea that to grow they need to start doing something differently than the thing they're currently doing. They need to offer more experiences, more products, etc. In fact, one of the critical mistakes I see companies make as they're scaling is looking to go multi-product or multi-geography too early. They open an office in Europe before they've exploited the office in the US. They open an office in APAC when they can't even get someone on the phone. At this stage, it's important to stay focused and learn to say no. Companies assume that it's easy to do small things. It's easy to build a product and just say... "It's just going to run in the background. We're not going to invest a lot in it." But any product, any source of revenue, any person in charge of that source of revenue becomes like a snowball rolling down a hill. They become a center of gravity. Every new department wants more resources. Every time you charge somebody money, that money can develop into an amount of money that is just big enough that you can't afford to lose it, but not big enough that it can become the main driver of your growth. And all of those resources, all of those priorities, sap your strategic focus. They take you away from the ONE BIG THING that you can do. And that's because most people underestimate the power of doing 2-3 things incredibly well, as opposed to doing 50 things mediocrely. That's why I constantly try to encourage companies to narrow their focus. That's what we're trying to do at Pavilion every day. We're trying to narrow the member journey, narrow the set of experiences we offer, but make those experiences better and better as opposed to trying to do more things and not be great at them. That's a mistake we've made before. And not one we will make again.

🇺🇸 Happy Birthday, America 🇺🇸 You are: - The greatest experiment in human freedom and innovation in our species' history - Incredibly flawed with vast room for improvement - Still the premier place to start a company or conceive a new idea - Rife with tragic missteps and mistakes - Brimming with redemption and hope - Grappling with massive demographic challenges - Facing immense spending challenges far beyond what any sane society would tolerate - Strange, weird, and idiosyncratic in all the most beautiful and wondrous ways - As much an idea as a physical place - Deeply hypocritical but who isn't? - One of the few places that understands doing more is likely the best path to salvation than doing less - My home no matter where I am I grew up all over the globe. Really. I've been all over the planet. I'm grateful for all of the citizens of the world. I'm grateful for humanity and all we achieve together. And I'm grateful today as every day for the unique, amazing and wonderful place that, despite its many flaws and shortcomings, still serves as a beacon for all of us as to what's possible, what we might be, what we might dream. 🇺🇸

One of the things I struggled to truly process as a CRO: When you work for the CEO, it’s their company. My challenge as an employee was constantly thinking I was better than or smarter than the CEO but never doing anything about it (like starting my own business). As an employee, you work in service to the vision of the CEO. Period. Full stop. If you think your CEO is an idiot, or a buffoon, or simply incompetent, that's fair. But staying in that situation and rolling your eyes the whole time is a symptom of YOUR dysfunction not theirs. If you think they’re terrible at their job, get to work helping them improve, with compassion and consideration. Or quit. But stomping your feet and complaining only creates a culture of toxicity that infects the organization and keeps it from achieving its fullest potential.

SaaS is going to die. Unless we do something to save it. One of the things we can do is train the next generation of GTM leaders. We can help them: - Understand Profitable Efficient Growth (PEG) so they don't blow up the balance sheet when they get promoted - Give them the basics of P&L fluency and help them understand unit economics so they can invest profitably and drive scalable growth - Teach them to build revenue models that are not built on hiring plans so they don't think adding more AEs will always be the answer - Help them create a systematic process for recruiting and building great teams - Teach them about executive alignment and the merits of their First Team - Provide them with ongoing peer support and mentoring - Educate them with thousands of playbooks, workbooks, and templates  - Prepare them to step into the Senior Director, VP, and C-suite armed with the knowledge they need to succeed - Teach them how a Board works and how to navigate a Board successfully But most importantly, we can connect them to each other.  We can create a community of like-minded peers, dedicated to solving difficult GTM challenges in real time and all believing in a world that is non-zero sum.  We can use local experiences and events to bring these principles to life and to forge powerful connections that will last for the duration of their career. And we can teach them to lean in, to offer assistance, to be part of the solution, to embody these principles so they can continue to pay it forward. They can become the next generation of best-in-class GTM leaders. Pavilion created the Associate Membership precisely for this reason. To build the next generation. And today, we announced we’re incorporating Associates directly into our 50+ regional chapters all over the world.  Associates will now have access to: Local peer groups for ongoing support and assistance Access to local mentors for guidance and coaching Associate-only events for networking and professional development Cross Executive/Associate events for talent development All of these things coupled with our new course, the GTM Leadership Accelerator School, will be explicitly designed to take people up to the Director level at leading B2B tech businesses and prepare them for the next step in their career journey. Associates are the future of GTM and I’m proud we’ve redesigned the program to explicitly focus on this type of professional development. We’re only looking for people willing to lean in, contribute to the community, with a growth mindset.  People that are hungry to develop and willing to put in the effort. If that sounds like you, comment “GROWTH” in the comments and someone from my team will follow up with you. Let’s go!

In 2024, most reps aren't hitting quota (up to 69% according to some data). If you're an individual seller, here's what you need to do to hit your goals: First off, you have to understand the bar for excellence has been raised. This is not a world where average is going to be sufficient. What does that mean? Yes, you have more tools at your disposal today, particularly through AI... that can give you more information, more personalization, more research and data on your prospects than ever before. But only the reps that religiously adhere to a systematic process (whether MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, whatever your methodology might be) are the ones who will succeed. In a world of abundance, there was opportunity for sellers to not follow the process, and still have an opportunity to make money. But that time is no longer. And in this world, where opportunities are few and far between, you need to make the most of every single opportunity, which means following the same process every single time. That's why at Pavilion the #1 thing we recommend frontline managers and sales executives do first, is install some kind of methodology. It doesn't have to be MEDDIC. It doesn't have to be MEDDPICC. It doesn't have to be SPICED (though that's a good one). But you need a standardized methodology. It's the only way to ensure your team is doing it the same way every time. If you have that confidence, you have the opportunity to succeed.

Asking your board is the WRONG way to answer the question, "What should I do next?" Here's the right way: Ask your customers. Then check with your Board to make sure it won’t get you fired. When in doubt, ask your customers.

When you're trying to build a company, one of the biggest challenges is institutionalizing knowledge and process. What does that mean? If you are having to constantly relearn the same lesson over and over again, you are wasting time, energy, and resources. If you have to rediscover the answer to a question because the person that originally answered it left the organization (and you didn't write it down), you are wasting time, energy, and resources. If there's no central mechanism for taking what you're learned from the outside world and distilling it down into processes, you are wasting time, energy, and resources. Personally, I've experienced this frequently. I know there's a question we've already answered. But we have to reinvent the answer. There's a process that I thought we'd already perfected. There's a series of activities that I thought a team was already doing. And it turns out that they stopped doing them when one person left. When I see companies that are able to scale past $100M, one of the hallmarks is investments in infrastructure that document, archive and artifact process that enables the organization to scale. The companies that are making it up as they go, not intentionally, but because they don't have a mechanism for making sure they remember what they've already learned, are the companies that struggle. Those are the companies that hit a growth point and then stall because they have organizational debt (similar to what engineers would call technical debt). Because they haven't figured out how to consolidate it into a simple set of rules and processes that enable them to grow.