How to Answer $1M Questions and Achieve Hypergrowth — Gong’s Three Pillars
This piece is from Devin Reed, Content Strategy Manager for Gong.
Every startup has a set of “million-dollar questions” — questions that will separate your business from your competitors and lead to significant growth and success.
Answer yours and you’ll win an unfair share of your market.
You’ll attract and retain the BEST talent.
You’ll shift into 6th gear and enjoy hypergrowth.
Heck, you may even ring the bell at NASDAQ.
Answering million-dollar questions is anything but easy. Most companies can’t do it — that’s why they fail.
Here’s the thing: most revenue teams don’t have the facts they need to answer those critical questions. They (sadly) rely on opinions. That’s why they come to the wrong conclusions and make the wrong decisions.
At Gong, we categorize every company’s million-dollar questions into one of three pillars: people success, deal success, and strategy success. And we believe the right data can answer every one of them to give you an exceptional jump on the competition.
People Success: It’s all about your team
$1M question: What separates your best sales rep from the rest of the team?
When you read that question, the all-star sales rep from your team leapt into focus.
If you ask them that million-dollar question, you’ll probably get a shrug followed by their perceived greatest strength.
Ask their manager, and you’ll get anecdotal responses like “She’s the first one in and the last one out”, or “He asks direct discovery questions”, or my favorite, “They just get it.”
They just get what?!
People success isn’t solely about building a team of top-shelf talent — that’s a given. People success is using data to pinpoint what your top reps do differently, then getting the rest of the team to adopt those sales motions.
It may look like your top reps are heads and tails above their peers, but the truth is, they’re just a bit better than their peers in a lot of areas. That slight edge compounds and gives them exceptionally higher numbers overall.
For example, a top rep who has a 10% lead in each of several areas — like the five in the graphic below — ends up with a 61% lead when their skills compound in a chain link system:
If you want your whole team to have this edge, you need to transform your sales managers into spectacular coaches who identify skill gaps in real time.
How do you achieve this?
Data. Sweet, sweet data.
It’s the best way to see where reps are lagging so you can coach them to success. Whether they’re struggling with talk tracks, talk-to-listen ratios, or pricing discussions — data can point the way to success.
As Mark Roberge put it at our recent #celebrate conference, “The frontline sales manager is not there to sell for the rep, they’re there to coach… and I think what we under-appreciate in sales is that you can literally quantify the success of coaching. It’s very simple.”
When your reps are equipped to sell masterfully, the revenue comes. That leads us to…
Deal Success: Know More, Win More
$1M question: Why do sure-thing deals slip into the next quarter?
This one is painful. It’s such a downer when you think a deal is locked in and it slips into the closed-lost category.
Most people would give anything to understand what stopped that deal from closing.Sometimes it’s one major error on your rep’s end. Other times, it’s a small series of glitches that add up to a lost deal. But if you rely on reps to figure out what went wrong, you have no way to verify that they’re right.
We all have gut instincts about why things go wrong, and that helps us learn to some extent. But we also have blind spots; things we don’t notice, even when they’re right in front of us.
So while your rep may believe they talked about value and not features, the actual conversation may tell another story. When you have data, you might find that they ‘feature dumped’ on a call, which makes your sales rates plummet:
Data, on the other hand, shows you the entire process, devoid of bias and opinion. It shows you exactly what happened. So you can see that the rep didn’t talk about value enough, and you can coach to it.
As a great reminder, Geoffrey Moore (of Crossing the Chasm fame) recently said at #celebrate, “You must adapt to [the buyer’s] persona in a sales situation.”
That’s exactly what a 360° view from Revenue Intelligence helps you do. It serves up AI-based suggestions that give you critical insights so you know exactly who you’re dealing with.
With data, you have the benefit of looking backward to prevent what went wrong from happening again, and looking forward to spot deals that are at risk to redirect their course. No more losing deals at the finish line, no more uncertainty in forecasting, no competitors swooping in on sure things. Just clear data and tailored strategies for every deal.
Your new game plan is to keep deals from stalling, so every deal is on a path to close.
Strategy Success
$1M question: Are you responding appropriately to your market?
Yes, change is constant, but in sales, it’s happening faster and faster.
New product strategies don’t have year-long or even months-long shelf lives anymore. Rollouts happen frequently at most companies (especially in SaaS), and that means constant playbook updates and new messaging rollouts.
For a successful campaign, you need to get both right — the messaging and the rollout. Botch either one and you’re toast.
How do you know you’re getting it right?
Once again, data saves the day.
Datalets you see all kinds of details managers couldn’t access in the ‘old days’. See how current clients and potential buyers react to pricing models, competitive talk tracks, and more. Then make minor (or major!) adjustments based on the evidence you’ve collected, and make messaging stick.
And during your next roll-out, don’t underestimate the value of upselling. It’s estimated that 70–80% of annual revenue comes from existing customers in renewals and upsells. Factor that into your roll-out strategy and watch how it goes.
When you have key insights, you can run toward what works and pivot away from whatever doesn’t. Even better, you see the data as soon as your roll-out begins. None of this waiting weeks or months to know how a campaign is going. That’s for dinosaurs.
Once you have the benefit of hearing the unfiltered voice of your market, you’ll be able to react in record time and keep launches on track. This gives you a massive advantage over the competition and helps remove risk from new product launches.
The key point here is to watch your data and react immediately.
Here’s How to Answer Your $1M Questions
By now, you get it. You need a data-backed approach to answer your million-dollar questions.
You need to track key metrics on a consistent and ongoing basis, use them to coach your team, and watch the results to see if they set you on the right course. AND you need to use data to control your pipeline and every deal.
Is your team struggling with questions from any of the three success pillars above?
We have a solution for that, and it’s called Revenue Intelligence.
Revenue Intelligence lets you base your decisions solely on reality instead of on opinions, anecdotes, or gut feelings.
Listen to some exceptional advice on our Revenue Intelligence Podcast and you’ll be ready to arm your team for hypergrowth. It has stories and tips from top revenue experts on how to answer million-dollar questions in all three success pillars.
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Devin Reed is a Content Strategy Manager for Gong. Find him on LinkedIn.
