The Ledger
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McCall: Early-stage founders should spend 1% on strategy, 99% executing
“Strategy's important, but you should spend like one percent of your time on the strategy, pick it, and then spend 99% of your time trying to execute.”
McCall: Big enterprise logos do not give startups revenue valuation multipliers
“There's no bonus points for hard-earned revenue. You know, you don't get extra, you know, multipliers on your revenue if you get the big logo or something.”
McCall: Startups with 40-50% quota attainment have flawed targets or hiring
“So yeah, I think, you know, some of these companies today where, you know, 40, 50% of the team's hitting quota, I think they're probably doing themselves a disservice. Either their quotas are too high or, you know, they're hiring profiles off.”
McCall: Markets do not care about a company's early cost of sales
“When you're a public company and, you know, you've gone out and you've conquered your market. Nobody looks back and says, you know, gosh, you know, six years ago, your cost of sales was really terrible. Nobody cares about that.”
McCall: Category creators need a lighthouse sales strategy with marquee logos
“I think that concept of like the lighthouse being more in industries that require, you know, regulation, a lot of social proof and so forth. And those tend to be companies that are going after like a category creation, right? It doesn't exist today. So therefo…”
McCall: Land grab AI startups target existing workflows with established budget
“The sort of land grab you know, less social proof, but those tend to be, especially in the AI world today, those are companies that are maybe replacing or improving workflows that already exist and there's existing budget.”
McCall: ELD mandate forced trucking industry to create budget for new entrants
“But if you were a new entrant into the market, like we were at Sansara, it really helped because basically the entire industry all of a sudden had to find budget to go out and buy these things.”
McCall: Maximize deal volume once contract values meet unit economics hurdles
“You want to make sure that the ACV that you're going after, it has to top the hurdle, right? In, in other words, you look at your unit economics and is it healthy or not? You don't want to be taking deals that are, you know, negative to your unit economics. Bu…”
McCall: AI proofs of concept risk turning into open-ended science projects
“What you have to stay away from, and I think one of the real dangers today is these things turn into like science projects. I'm going to deploy this. Well, can it do this? Can it do this? Can you show me this? Can you show me this? And of course things are adv…”
McCall: Large enterprise companies eventually deploy both landgrab and lighthouse strategies
“I don't know too many very large successful companies that at some point in time haven't deployed both strategies. You might start off with land grab, but then you mature and you have a lighthouse strategy or you start a lighthouse and then you get big enough …”
McCall: Lighthouse sales requires seasoned reps while land grabs suit hungry juniors
“You know, generally you want more seasoned you know, enterprise sellers that, you know, know how to work within those accounts. They understand the sales cycles. They understand the sort of procurement cycles in, in more of a land grab strategy where you're ju…”
McCall: Startups wait too long to make their first sales operations hire
“I would say sales operations is, is probably one that I see companies waiting a little too long on. And I am not a proponent. I don't think you need to, you know, stand up a gigantic revenue operations organization. It can be literally like one person, but you…”
McCall: Winning a state's largest school district unlocks regional education sales
“If anybody's ever sold to school districts, like, they all talk to each other, they all know each other. You want to find the biggest school districts in each state, and if you can take that down, every school district underneath them says, oh, what did that o…”
McCall: Lighthouse strategy transitions from building social proof to references
“If you start with a lighthouse strategy, you've built the social proof, you've gotten these big names, then what you want to do is you want to run the category underneath it, right? If I've gotten the top five financial companies in the world, I want to run do…”