Please Don’t Scare the Children: Thoughts on a Delicate Reason to Split Off the New Business Team
Salespeople run on emotion. Bruising renewal conversations can erode the conviction they need to win new business. A delicate reason to separate land from expand and renew—and why confronting the brutal facts doesn’t require everyone to take the same daily beating.
I'm not generally one to be paternalistic in how we treat our employees. My mantra's closer to: "We're all adults here, folks." But we're also all humans here, folks. In today's post, we'll have a delicate conversation about why you might want to split your new business sales team from your expansion and renewals teams.
I’m sure your company has spent plenty of time discussing who owns what across land, expand, and renew. You’ve probably approached it from first principles, learned from recent experience, and compared notes with peers about how they do things. But, in all this discussion, did you consider the emotional toll of account management on your new-business salespeople? Because if you haven’t, you should.
Consider this post from OnlyCFO:
Baby, it's cold out there in renewals-land, particularly in traditional SaaS applications. And our friend OnlyCFO did this to a vendor he liked. I'd hate to see what he does to those he doesn't.
Now imagine being the salesperson handling that conversation. At 10:00, they're preaching the product’s value to a hot prospect. At 11:00, an existing customer says they can replace the product with another vendor and some agents they’ll build themselves. At 1:00, a different customer tells them that they loved the product, but they're not renewing at all – for budget and value reasons. The seller's phone rings at 3:00 with a call from yet another account and they're afraid to answer it.
How stoked do you think they're going to be for their 4:00 call with a new prospect?
