When evaluating people, pay close attention to minor behaviors. A small act, whether cutting corners or showing kindness, is not an isolated incident but an indicator of a person's fundamental character that can be reliably extrapolated to high-stakes situations.
High-growth leaders often sacrifice self-care, thinking they're helping the team. This burnout degrades their patience, creativity, and decision-making. True leadership requires the discipline to protect personal time, as the team depends on a leader operating at their best.
To scale, MongoDB built a sophisticated "Pipeline Generation Recipe" that took a day and a half to train. It combined technical tactics (like reverse IP lookups) with persona-based messaging for developers, ops, and LoB owners. This transformed the sales motion from passive to active demand creation.
An MOR is a system for ensuring strategic work gets done. By proactively blocking time for priorities like recruiting and data analysis, leaders protect that time from being consumed by inbound requests. An assistant can move these blocks, but not delete them, ensuring priorities are always addressed.
Veteran CRO Carlos Delatorre prioritizes opportunities with complex products requiring a sophisticated sales motion. This environment allows him to leverage his expertise in building teams that can translate technical features into business value, create demand, and navigate internal customer politics, thereby making the market bigger.
A common mistake for new managers is to do their reps' jobs for them, especially in tough deals. This approach, born from insecurity or a desire to prove worth, prevents the team from developing self-sufficiency and ultimately fails to scale. The manager's true job is to build skills and muscle in their reps.
Instead of ad-hoc reporting, a disciplined approach involves a comprehensive monthly metrics package prepared by RevOps. This "fact pack" enables leaders to dedicate focused time at the start of each month to analyze performance, uncover insights from combined metrics, and proactively investigate anomalies rather than reacting to problems later.
Failing to hire senior leaders 6-9 months ahead of need creates a leadership capacity gap in hyper-growth. This forces last-minute, high-effort plays to barely make the number, when a well-staffed team would have exceeded it. Plan for the long lead time of finding and ramping senior talent.
A complex sale requires more than product knowledge. Elite salespeople must master three distinct layers: translating technical features into business outcomes, tailoring the value proposition to resonate with different internal roles (e.g., security, ops, LoB), and navigating the political power structures within the customer's organization.
While expansion revenue is efficient, it's finite and can dry up suddenly. Sales leaders must treat new logo acquisition as a critical insurance policy. Prioritizing new logos—especially those with clear future expansion paths—ensures sustainable growth even after the existing customer base is saturated, protecting the business and your role.