Should a New Sales Leader Trust a Founder's Number?

Joubin Mirzadegan says a new sales leader who takes a founder's number without knowing the data will get fired in a quarter. Founders are default optimists, extremely exuberant, and do not know how to forecast a business. He thinks they are, for the most part, probably out pitching the dream to investors and need a big number to justify the valuation they want to raise.

On Tuesday he met an early-stage chief revenue officer who was three months in, or two months in, and expected to reach 10 million after starting the year at one. Asked how much pipeline existed today, the officer had no answer. Two reps had just been turned off and two more hired. The path to 10 million rested on a self-service product that had not been released and a million-dollar deal with an unnamed big tech company that had only had a first meeting.

Ten minutes into the meeting, the warning was to re-forecast what the business can actually do, leave out the product-led growth product that does not exist yet, work backwards from data gathered quickly, and put the pressure on the product team to fill the gap with the self-serve release. The product leader is not the one who gets fired first.