A Survivor's Guide to Our Sales Chaos

Dear Taylor,

Welcome to your new office in Denver! As I pack up my desk and hand over the keys to our enterprise sales team, I wanted to leave you with a few honest thoughts about what you're walking into.

You needn't have worried about the aggressive sales hiring plan that HR put on your desk last month. Half of those candidates are going to ghost us before the final interview anyway, so don't waste your precious energy.

More importantly, you ought to have known about the hidden discount creep rotting our software division. I was supposed to stop the endless end-of-quarter discounts back in October, but frankly, our weak pricing approach made it impossible.

We've totally trained customers to wait until the final hours of the quarter. Reps keep giving away margin because they can't handle a bit of tension, and now our list price integrity is an absolute joke.

Your ramp curve is going to be brutal if you don't fix the channel mix immediately. The partners are discounting our products behind our backs, leading to severe price erosion across the entire Western region.

Let's talk about what could have been handled differently. I could have enforced strict walk-away discipline last summer, but I let short-termism win every single time the executives panicked about monthly recurring revenue.

Remember to map out your priorities before the board meeting next Tuesday. They'll ask about time to productivity, and you'll need to pretend you have a brilliant strategy to fix the margin leakage.

Guardrails were supposed to protect us from this mess, but nobody actually respected them. Tyler, your new VP of Business Development, loves making side deals that completely bypass our pricing reset guidelines.

Every time we tried to establish some basic price discipline, someone would complain about losing market share. It's a classic false economy that will eventually come back to haunt the entire executive team.

Yet, through all this madness, three surprising accounts never once asked for a discount. Acme Corp, Apex Logistics, and Beacon Financial all paid full list price because they valued our service quality.

Why didn't they ask? Because our sales motion for those accounts was built entirely on proving high ROI from day one, not begging them to sign with cheap tricks. Good luck!

Read again and choose the right answer

What does Olivia say about the sales hiring plan?

• Taylor should hire all the candidates immediately.
• Many candidates will likely ghost the company.
• HR has already filled every open position.

What problem does Olivia admit she failed to solve?

• Endless end-of-quarter discounting and price erosion.
• Finding a suitable office space in Denver.
• Organizing the upcoming board meeting.

Who is Tyler according to the letter?

• The CEO who fired Olivia.
• The new VP of Business Development who makes side deals.
• A client who never asked for a discount.

Which three companies never asked for a discount?

• Acme Corp, Apex Logistics, and Beacon Financial.
• Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
• Taylor, Tyler, and Olivia.

Sources: photo by Kampus Production on Pexels