SaaS sales turnaround & full-funnel diagnosis

Conductor: Following the funnel to the real constraint

Conductor, based in New York City, makes a SaaS platform for marketing teams that want more organic web traffic and less dependence on paid media. Underneath, it was a big-data product that pulled together search data from Google and other sources. In 2014, with about 200 employees, the company brought me in as VP of Worldwide Sales. Sales growth had slowed, and the existing sales leader was moving over to run customer success. I liked the challenge, and I liked how data-driven the company was. Across departments, we tracked more than 90 business metrics.

Listen first, then diagnose

My mandate covered the direct sales team, the sales process, conversion mechanics and customer segmentation. There was real pressure to fix the velocity of the business right away. I spent my first 90 days learning and listening, then moved quickly into diagnosis.

Rebuild the selling engine

We set up three selling teams fed by a large BDR team. With a strong sales operations team, we instrumented every stage of the sales process so we could measure every step of the conversion funnel. I worked closely with our CMO on segmentation, aligned the selling teams to those segments, and launched a basic account-based marketing program for the new enterprise team. With marketing and product management, we built a new pricing and packaging strategy.

Study every loss

My sales leaders and I took the sales process apart. Our best players coached on each deal, and we tracked every loss in detail. I studied our demos and found them far too complex. As we met several times to simplify them, product gaps started to show. The loss data confirmed it: we were losing more than half of our head-to-head deals to our larger competitor.

Measure the whole business, not just sales

I then worked with customer success to understand what they were seeing and how renewals were handled. They were fighting the same problem from the other end: the renewals team was keeping only about half of the customers we won. With the CMO, I went deep into the segmentation data and our total addressable market. Then I analyzed the whole business: lead generation, MQLs and SQLs, every stage through close, and on into customer success and renewals.

We were losing about half of our competitive deals before close, then losing close to half of the customers we did win at renewal. A problem showing up at both ends of the funnel is not a sales problem. The answer was clear. Sales, marketing and customer success were the strongest parts of the business. The constraint was the product. Customers wanted actionable insights, and our professional services team was working overtime to fill in what the product couldn't yet deliver. We were filling the front of the funnel with well-qualified buyers based on what we believed the product could do, then losing them to a competitor that could deliver it. And at our current metrics, the addressable market wasn't large enough to support the plan.

A hard call

After many internal meetings, it was clear that fixing this meant a product rebuild of about two years, with sales flat to down in the meantime. My diagnostic work also surfaced other problems that I judged to be serious risks to the business itself. That made me re-evaluate whether this was the best use of my skills and whether it could meet my own goals, and I decided to pursue a different path.

The lesson: look past the sales team

A strong sales team losing most of its competitive deals is telling you something about the product.

Slowing sales usually leads a company to replace the sales leader. Sometimes that is the right call. Often the sales numbers are only where a deeper problem shows up first. Since Conductor, I trace the funnel end to end, from first touch to renewal, before I decide what to change. And when the data points at product or market, I say so, even when the expected answer is "fix sales."

What happened next

Conductor did rebuild its product. WeWork acquired the company in 2018, and its CEO and COO bought it back in December 2019. Today Conductor has more than 500 employees.