They Don't Teach You This at Harvard Business School
They Don't Teach You This at Harvard Business School
The one topic that every leader, and especially a startup CFO, needs to understand
The formula behind Harvard Business School is simple:
Admit people who are already on a supercharged career trajectory.
Break down their egos so you can then fix the mental/character flaws that come with having early career success in corporate America, but hold you back later.
Round out their skill set so they know enough to ask good questions no matter what business context they walk into.
Create room for them to explore high-risk / high-reward career moves with the safety net of the HBS brand to fall back on.
Reap the benefits as these career moves pay off.
The linchpin of this formula is the so-called required curriculum behind step three above. A core set of approximately 300 cases that cover everything from how not to go to prison to how to run a factory floor efficiently.
It does not matter what you did before your MBA — you cannot test out of the ten courses that everyone must take in their first year. Half the class ends up being bored and suffering through half the cases. But that is the whole point: make no assumptions about what folks already know, make sure everyone has the same set of foundational knowledge, and close the gaps that inevitably arise when you skip career steps as a 20-something.
Here’s the thing: across this set of 300 foundational cases only one is focused on sales.
And it is almost comically awkward:
In this case, we talked about the challenges of door-to-door vacuum sales in a developing country 20 years ago. Complete with play-acting the roles of a housewife who has never owned a vacuum and a door-to-door salesman.
It was a fun exercise but nowhere near enough to understand sales to the same depth as marketing (which gets its own semester-long class).
Because CFOs and Investors either don’t know how to ask or don’t know how to add value the real ‘aha’ 💡 moments of your go-to-market motions often do not make it into board decks.
Below are 3 common fallacies that explain why leaders fail to treat Sales as a Strategic discipline and a partner to shape (vs. just execute on) the company’s direction.
Fallacy #1. Sales is not a “leadership“ discipline
Why this view is misguided:
Sales teams are bigger and have more layers. Looking at people across the company, you’ll find that front-line sales managers consistently lead more people than other folks at their seniority.
Sales as a career attracts a very diverse set of backgrounds. This calls for:
A lot more leadership: help everyone figure out their strengths, lean on their motivations, bring them along on the journey;
A lot less management: hire a “mini-me” and teach your team to do everything the way you did when you were in their shoes.
In reality, as startups scale, sales leadership becomes intertwined with the changes in the company’s culture. Three things drive that:
Sales start approaching 50% of headcount. This changes the culture.
Finance gets more involved in key decisions. Processes slow things down. This too changes the culture. Sales is the one team that intuitively understands the value of process (ability to scale) and its downsides (time kills deals).
Product focuses on more customer-driven incremental innovation vs. a big bets approach. Revenue impact becomes a more important prioritization driver. You need to hire a fundamentally different profile of product managers for this stage.
Fallacy #2. Sales is just persuasion + some cold calling
Why this view is misguided:
The problem with this view is that it equates all of sales with high-velocity transactional sales i.e. the door-to-door vacuum salesperson from the example earlier.
The reality is that to sell well you need to:
Be a project manager: aligning stakeholders externally;
Hold space for other people: walk everyone towards the future state your product will help solve for;
Excel as a cross-functional partner: bringing the voice of the customer back into the company, so that you can sell a better product next time.
(This 👆 is particularly true if you’re selling Enterprise Software.)
Fallacy #3. Leading sales is easy: just set up quotas and analyze your pipeline report
Why this view is misguided:
This is a classic finance-led view that, unfortunately, is also common among investors that equates Sales with RevOps and the reports that get pushed out.
Because CFOs/Investors either don’t know how to ask or don’t know how to add value the real ‘aha’ 💡 moments of your go-to-market motion often do not make it into board decks.
Just some of the insights this view is going to miss:
Where are the causality + incremental growth levers in your pipeline and funnel?
Many startups I talk to say “We know the metrics and benchmarks, but we don’t know how to change them other than by cascading higher goals to see what happens.”Are you even measuring the right metrics to influence behavior?
Even a “good” model usually scores B+ at reporting, C- at predicting, and F at explaining.Are you creating sustained customer value? Or is this a niche product that is hitting saturation? What does it take to hit an inflection point?
Every startup that hit raised their Series B and then stalled out is going through a version of this. Their board decks are full of numbers but lack a customer-centric view.
Sales is a must-have skill for startup CFOs. Just a few places where having empathy for sales leaders and asking informed questions helped me when I was a finance leader, chief of staff, and advisor to founders:
Product-market fit signals: understanding what’s real and scalable before we even know how to measure it quarter-over-quarter.
Pricing and packaging: probably the single most cross-functional set of decisions companies need to make every 18-36 months.
Fundraising narrative: past your Series B every single slide of your investor pitch deck must have a verifiable go-to-market proof point.
Where to go next:
If you are bored: read the HBS case about selling vacuums.
If you are looking to align your Financial Planning and Go-to-Market: download my (free) Strategic Planning Playbook.
If you need a little bit of extra support getting there: set up time to chat about my advisory or fractional offerings.