Blog
B2B Sales
Practical takes on B2B sales, fractional CRO leadership and go-to-market, from 20-plus years carrying the number on five continents.
Costco loses money on gas on purpose. Here is the strategy.
THAT is the entire strategy. Across 747 stations, Costco makes a few cents per gallon. Regular gas stations make 25 to 35 cents. Lines wrap around their.
How to Define an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) That Actually Converts
Most companies think they have an ICP, but what they have is a vague description of whoever will buy. How to build a sharp ideal customer profile.
SentinelOne hit $1B in revenue, then laid off 300 people. Growth is not the goal.
SentinelOne passed $1 billion ARR and still cut 10% of its workforce. Growth does not fix an inefficient company, it makes the problem bigger.
I got added to a BDS boycott list. Here is why it helps my business.
A website dedicated to boycotting Israeli companies officially added both me and KSW Solutions to their database. They even gave me my own profile page. After.
"Little crappy ships." That is the nickname the US Navy gave the warships it spent up to $100 billion building.
The US Navy built a warship before deciding what it was for. Founders do the same when they hire, buy or build before naming the problem it solves.
Nike lost $200B making the mistake I see B2B founders make every quarter.
Stock down 75%. They are laying off 1,400 people. The mistake that broke them is one I see B2B founders making every quarter. Smaller scale, different.
Wix added $150M in revenue, then fired 1,000 people to afford it.
This week it is firing 1,000 people to afford it. Revenue up 14% to $541 million. A $34 million profit last year turned into a $57 million loss. Cash flow down.
I tracked 300 founders from my old sales calls. A quarter are already gone.
I went through 300 old sales calls and a quarter of the companies are gone. Most had good products. They left sales and go-to-market for later.
Target just had its best quarter in 4 years. The reason is positioning, not price.
Target grew 5.6%, its best result in four years, by going back to why people shop there. Most B2B growth problems are positioning problems too.
Most Companies Can't Afford a REALLY Good VP Sales
A really good VP Sales costs $250K to $350K a year before the team around them. Many startups take on that overhead too early, when a fractional model fits.
Eight years ago, telling CEOs not to build a sales team sounded insane.
Most growing companies cannot afford a real sales organization, and one bad VP Sales hire burns 6 to 12 months. Here is the model I built instead.
Monday added popup ads. Iran closed a strait. The same mistake about leverage.
Popup ads. Inside a paid product. Then, this morning, Bloomberg reported the UAE is fast-tracking a second pipeline to Fujairah. Doubling oil export capacity..
An Israeli SaaS company sold to the wrong market for 6 months. The reps knew.
$0 in deals. CEO was about to fire the whole sales team. The reps had been screaming the actual problem for months. Nobody listened. Here's what happened..
Why does this bus cost 15x more in Boston than in Beijing? It is not quality.
A bus costs about $80,000 in Beijing and up to $1.2 million in Boston. The gap is system tax, and most sales organizations are paying it too.
A $77K/month sales team hit ONLY 20% of the forecast. Here's what actually fixed it.
A founder hired me to figure out why his sales team was missing the forecast by 80%.
ZoomInfo went from $77 to $6 a share. How the king of B2B sales data collapsed.
A 92% wipeout on a company that was supposed to define the future of B2B sales! Here's how the most dominant sales data platform on the planet fell apart, and.
D-Fend did not pivot in 9 years. The world's pain finally caught up to its product.
D-Fend sold the same product for nine years until the market's pain caught up. Most stalled B2B companies have the opposite problem, a story gone stale.
The quickest way to become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire.
Ilan Ben-Dov built a $5.1 billion empire on debt and watched it wash away. The lesson for founders is that growth built without trust is a sandcastle.
Israel's GDP is outgrowing every G7 nation, in the middle of a war.
Israel's economy is growing 3.8% in wartime, ahead of every G7 nation. The sales lesson is that a system needing perfect conditions is broken.
The UAE quit OPEC overnight. This is exactly how systems break in B2B too.
Sales systems rarely fade slowly. They break the day one person is allowed to ignore the rules. Here is how to build one that survives exceptions.