Every few years, the SaaS industry collectively loses its mind and decides that sales is a magic wand. The logic—if you can call it that—goes like this: We have $10M in the bank, our board wants 100% growth, and our current reps are at 70% of quota. Ergo, if we double the headcount, we’ll double the revenue.
It’s a beautiful, linear, spreadsheet-friendly fantasy. It’s also a recipe for a massive burn rate and a demoralized sales force.
If you want to succeed in today’s economy, you have to stop hiring sales reps to create growth and start hiring them to support it. It sounds like a semantic nuance. It’s actually the difference between a scalable business and a “SaaS-hole” that burns $2 to make $1.
The Quota-Setting Trap
In the “Growth at All Costs” era, quotas were often derived through what I call “Reverse Engineering from the Series C.” The CEO needs to hit a number to justify the next valuation, so they divide that number by the number of chairs in the sales pit. Presto: a quota.
But a quota isn’t a goal; it’s a mathematical output of your unit economics. When you set quotas without considering average deal size (ACV), churn rates, or sales cycle length, you aren’t “challenging” your team—you’re gaslighting them. If your ACV is $20K and your sales cycle is six months, but you give a new rep a $1.2M annual quota, you have just asked them to close 60 deals in their first year while they are still learning where the coffee machine is.
When you set impossible quotas, you don’t get more revenue. You get “hope-based forecasting,” high turnover, and a culture of desperation.
The “Inbound” Identity Crisis
This desperation leads to the second great sin of modern GTM: the dilution of the term “inbound.”
To most marketing departments, an inbound lead is anyone who hasn’t actively blocked their email address. If someone attends a webinar or swipes their badge at a trade show (to win a Lego set), marketing calls that an “Inbound Lead” and throws it over the wall to a hungry SDR.
Let’s be clear: That isn’t an inbound lead. That’s a person with a pulse.
A true inbound lead is a prospect who raises their hand and says, “I have a problem, I think you might solve it, and I’d like to see a demo.” Anything else is just “digitally-assisted outbound.” When you confuse the two, you force your sales team into a cycle of aggressive persistence. You turn your A-players into telemarketers.
By distinguishing between “High Intent” (hand-raisers) and “Low Intent” (content-nibblers), you allow your sales team to operate with dignity. Sales should be the guide for a ready buyer, not a hunter chasing someone who once clicked a link on LinkedIn.
The Metric That Matters: Time to Loss
If you want to fix your sales efficiency, stop obsessing over “Time to Close” and start measuring “Time to Loss.”
In a high-functioning sales org, the fastest path to a “No” is almost as valuable as a “Yes.” The worst place for a deal to be is in the “Maybe” graveyard—that middle-of-the-funnel purgatory where deals go to die after six months of “just checking in” emails.
We need to empower reps to disqualify. If a lead doesn’t have the budget, the authority, or a burning pain point, kill it. Kill it fast. The faster a rep can disqualify a bad fit, the more cycles they can spend on high-intent opportunities. Most companies reward reps for “pipeline coverage,” which leads to bloated, fictional pipelines. We should be rewarding reps for pipeline hygiene. I’d rather have a rep with 2x coverage of real deals than a rep with 5x coverage of “hopes and dreams.”
The Well-Oiled Machine
The ultimate goal is a “well-oiled machine” where marketing and sales actually play the roles they were designed for.
Marketing’s job is to provide the education and inspiration. They should be making the market smart about the problem. Sales’ job is to provide guidance and a path to purchase. Marketing creates the “pull”; sales manages the “friction.”
When you try to skip the marketing step and just hire 50 more reps, you are trying to “push” a product into a market that doesn’t want it yet. That is expensive, exhausting, and eventually, the market pushes back.
The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Shift
We are moving from an era of “Reckless Speed” to an era of “Sustainable Growth.” In the old world, the Hare won because capital was free and growth covered all sins. In this economy, the tortoise wins—the company that prioritizes unit economics, brand reputation, and real value.
When the economy shifts, companies with inflated expectations and “Series B-driven quotas” crumble. Companies grounded in reality—those that hire reps to support the demand they’ve actually created—survive.
So, before you open those ten new headcount reqs for AEs, ask yourself: Have we actually generated enough hand-raisers to feed them? If the answer is “no,” take that money and go fix your marketing. Your sales team (and your LTV/CAC) will thank you.
