Why Did Vercel Change Sales So Early?

Jeanne Grosser changed Vercel's sales team four and a half months after she arrived, a little faster than she naturally would have, because at six months the company would have been in the middle of the third quarter and that would not have been workable. Quotas make go-to-market hard to change, since livelihood depends on hitting them, so a team cannot on a random Tuesday decide to change everything. The easiest time is the beginning of the year or the middle, when a plan can be closed out.

The executive team sat down, locked arms, and agreed the plan was right even though it ran a little faster than they all wanted. She warned the faster timing might cause some near-term downside, even a near-term trough, and they still believed in the upside. They took the bet so they would come out the other side positioned to accelerate.

She kept the number, and they ultimately got there. She exposed the risk at the beginning of the year and made a huge number of changes. Six months after many of the changes, she was not sleeping well again. A rollout cannot be perfectly operationalized. She had done what she could to make it as clean as possible, and she already knew a bunch of things were not done. Once it rolled out, she hit items she had not thought of.