FOR B2B FOUNDERS WHOSE GROWTH HAS STALLED SOMEWHERE BETWEEN $1M AND $15M
Growth Stalls for Four Reasons. Most Companies Fix the Wrong One First.
Positioning, messaging, prospecting, sales. In that order.
Almost everything sold to a company your size fixes prospecting or sales. That's starting at the wrong end, which is why you can keep spending and stay exactly where you started: stalled.
I've worked in this order in every revenue role since 1999. Revenue grew in every leadership role I've held, somewhere between 107% and 600%. Here's why spending more in the wrong order doesn't restart growth, what each of the four decides, and a check for each one you can run this week, without calling me.
Bought Out of Order, More Leads and More Reps Don't Restart Growth
When growth stalls, the CEOs I talk to usually reach for one of two answers. Both make sense.
"We need more leads." So the money goes to an agency, an SDR or two, more ads. All of it puts your story in front of more people, faster. If your positioning is wrong, you've paid to tell more of the wrong people.
"We need more reps." It's the obvious move, especially after a raise. If your messaging was never settled, every new rep tells your story a different way, and buyers meet a different company on every call.
Other times the money goes to a website rebuilt before anyone agreed who it's for, or a new CRM bought to manage a pipeline that was never full. Whoever you hired usually did exactly what you hired them to do.
I call that an out-of-order fix: paying for a later fix while an earlier one is still broken. The money leaks, and you can't see where.
I fix revenue with the RevenueEngine™: four fixes, always in the same order (positioning, messaging, prospecting, sales), so every dollar goes to the fix that comes next and nothing gets built on one that's broken.
It's the order I've worked in at companies that did more than $1B in revenue while I led their revenue teams.
Fix 1 · Positioning
What it decides: who you're for, what you're really up against, and why you win.
Your competitor list is the small part. The bigger part is what your buyer does instead of buying from you, including nothing at all, and what that costs them. And the reasons you win that survive a buyer pushing back, which "great service" never does.
What it costs to skip: every message after it is aimed at the wrong person. That's not a delay, it's a bill. You pay for the campaign, you pay for the rep's quarter, and then you pay again to redo the work once you find out.
The check you can run this week: ask three people inside your company what you do for customers, and make one of them someone who never talks to a customer. Then ask three customers what you do for them.
If those six answers aren't one answer, positioning is open, and nothing below this line is your real problem yet.
One thing to brace for. Where your customers and your team disagree, your customers are closer to the truth. They're the ones who paid.
Fix 2 · Messaging
What it decides: how what you do gets said, in your buyer's words, with everyone in the building telling the same story.
The site, the deck, the rep on a call, the follow-up email. Same story, same order, same words for the same things. Plus what your champion carries into the rooms you'll never be in, because once a buyer is weighing several suppliers, your rep gets about 5% of their buying time.
What it costs to skip: your site, your deck and your reps each sell a different company. Marketing produces material sales won't use, sales invents its own, and both sides are certain the other one is the problem. Most of the leak in a stalled company is here, and it's the cheapest one to fix once fix one is settled.
The check you can run this week: open your website, your pitch deck, and the last email a rep sent a cold prospect.
If they don't say the thing your customers just told you they get from you, that's a messaging problem.
Fix 3 · Prospecting
What it decides: how your story reaches people who don't know you exist yet: which motion, which channels, which signals are worth a human's time, and how fast somebody moves when one shows up.
What it costs to skip: Invisibility. You're still living on referrals and word of mouth at a size that's outgrown them, and it works, right up until the month it doesn't.
Then you hire reps to fix it, and they miss. There was nothing to hand them. You were the playbook.
The check you can run this week: open your pipeline and split every open deal by where it came from: inbound, outbound, a partner or referral, or you. Then work out what share the biggest one is.
If any one source brings in more than half your pipeline, that source drying up stalls you, whatever this quarter's number looks like. And if it takes you more than ten minutes to produce that split, you've found a second problem: nobody's measuring where your pipeline comes from.
Founder-led and referral pipeline running at 30–45% is normal between $1M and $10M. It stops being normal on the way to eight figures, where outbound should be carrying 30–40% of it. If you've grown and the mix hasn't, you're a bigger company running a smaller company's engine.
Fix 4 · Sales
What it decides: how every deal gets worked, in one process instead of one per rep. What each stage means, what has to be true before a deal advances, and what counts as a qualified account in the first place.
Each stage is a step the buyer took, recorded in the CRM, so the forecast adds up what buyers did.
What it costs to skip: you build a machine for deals that were never coming. Worse, you can't tell whether the process is broken or the pipeline is, because both look identical from the outside.
The check you can run this week: ask someone on your executive team, someone in marketing, and someone in sales what counts as a qualified opportunity.
Three different answers means three teams filling the same pipeline to three different standards, and a forecast built on all of it.
Nobody Below You Owns the Order
The four fixes run in one order, but your org chart splits them between marketing and sales. Marketing owns positioning and messaging, sales owns the sales process, and prospecting sits with both.
Marketing is supposed to deliver leads. Sales is supposed to find its own. So two teams work prospecting different ways, on separate budgets, each with its own idea of a good lead, and neither gets as far as one owner would.
Those two teams report up lines that don't meet until they reach you. When the pipeline is thin, marketing says it delivered the leads and sales says they were worthless. The only person who sees the whole order is you, and you already have a job.
When the order breaks between the two teams, hire me as your Fractional CRO: both report to me, I report to you, and the order has one owner below you.
Five Revenue Roles, One Order, and Revenue Up in Every One
Five revenue roles: global sales director, employee five at a startup that went on to become a unicorn, EVP and then VP of sales and marketing at two more startups, and chief revenue officer with the quarterly board meetings mine.
Since 2020 I've worked in the same order as a fractional CMO and a fractional CRO.
The work kept forcing this order on me.
Put a sales process on top of four different stories and you get four stories with stages attached. Build an outbound motion on a message nobody agrees on and you've found a faster way to be ignored. I learned both of those with a number on my head.
Not every company needed every fix. Every fix needed the right order.
The order never changes, so the only question is which fix is broken first in your company. I can answer that in a week, before you've paid me anything.
27+ years carrying quota. Never missed. The Full Record →
Who Does the Fixing: Me, as Your Fractional CMO, VP of Sales or CRO, or Your Team
Either I do the fixing, in a role over the team that needs it, or your team does it with my advice.
If you want me to do the fixing
Marketing, sales, or both. The question is which team reports to me.
Fractional CMO. I run marketing. Your sales leader keeps sales and keeps reporting to you: the structure you have now, with someone senior running marketing. $10,000 to $18,000 a month, remote. Fractional CMO →
Fractional VP of Sales. I run your sales team. Your head of marketing keeps marketing and keeps reporting to you. I ask for a marketing pipeline review, run like the sales one; that doesn't change who runs marketing. $10,000 to $18,000 a month, remote. Fractional VP of Sales →
Fractional CRO. Your VP of Marketing and your VP of Sales both report to me, your head of customer success reports to me or runs to my plan, and I report to you.
The revenue number is mine through renewal and expansion, with nowhere left to pass the buck. $20,000 to $32,000 a month, remote. Fractional CRO →
Fractional CMO
Fractional VP of Sales
Fractional CRO
Read the table by where your growth breaks. If it's inside marketing, the CMO role is enough. If it's inside sales, the VP of Sales role is.
If it's between them, it's the Fractional CRO: a role on one side can't own the fix.
Month to month, paid in advance, no notice period. Every price, side by side: Pricing →
If your team does the fixing
You keep running it. You ask what to do next, and I tell you what, in what order and why. Nothing reports to me and no number is mine. $6,000 to $8,000 a month, remote. Advisory →
And one thing this order can't fix. If you're still finding out whether the market wants what you've built, fix one isn't available to you yet. At that stage your assumptions are the company, and this work tests assumptions.
Funding doesn't decide it. A seed company whose customers keep buying is in. A Series A company still searching isn't.
You Don't Have to Guess Which One Is Broken
It's called WeekZero™. Other firms charge to find what's broken. The closest published price is a demand agency's six-week revenue assessment: $35,000. Mine takes a week, and it's free.
The checks on this page get you close. A week in your actual numbers gets you the answer.
I spend that week on your numbers and in conversations with you, the people who run your marketing and sales, and your customers: deals you won and lost, and prospects who bought and who didn't.
Then an hour with you: which fix is broken first, the order I'd work in, and which role you need, if any. You keep the plan whether you hire me or not.
Free: a week of analysis, a one-hour report-out, and an action plan you keep. I take one a week, because each one is a week of my time. NDA on request.
I work with B2B companies between $1M and $15M whose customers already love them.