My Dad Sold Bras
Supporting a family with a great address book | GTM or GTFO
My Dad Ran a Bra Business Out of an Address Book.
My dad sold bras. He ran his whole business out of a beat up leather address book he kept in his jacket pocket. Elastic band around it, splitting at the spine, every name written in pen. Most of the entries had two or three numbers scratched in on top of each other, because people move, and when someone changed companies he drew a line through the old one and wrote the new one beside it.
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Sunday nights at the kitchen table, game on the tube, he’d sit there and update the book.
I thought it was a weird little habit. But that was the business. That book was EVERYTHING.
He could get anyone on the phone. First try. Because everything in that book was accurate and true.
I think about that book constantly now, because I spend my life inside CRMs with 40,000 contacts in them. Gorgeous dashboards, everything green.
But, nobody has crossed out a single name in three years. Everybody in that building is paid to build business and to do that they need to add a record. But nobody cares about tomorrow, nobody cares about accuracy.
I once sat in a meeting where the leader spent 40 minutes in a QBR taking a rep apart over his connect rate. 2% (worst on the team by far)
VP has the slide up and the reo is going grey. The room already had judged him. Clearly not hungry enough. Hates the phone. Won’t make it to Q4
At the break I pulled 50 of his accounts and ran them. 24 of the mobiles were dead. As in, the person attached to that number left the company in 2018.
He’d been calling ghosts all quarter and he just kept dialing. The VP was 1 meeting away from putting a performance plan on the rep. The performance plan should have been on the VP for not being aware of and fixing a data problem
Every tool did exactly what we told it to do. The sequences fired, the dashboard stayed green, the scoring model was thrilled. The machine works perfectly BUT it has no idea what’s true. My father would have found that hilarious for about four seconds, and then he would have asked why anybody was paying for it.
So now nobody gets to talk to me about activity until they can answer one question:
What % of our named accounts can we reach a live decision maker this morning.
If your rep can only truly reach half the accounts they carry, that quota you built was bullsh!t from day one.
How do you expect your reps to get results if they can’t even reach their prospects?
Every revenue org on earth tracks pipeline coverage. 3x, 4x, whatever the number is this quarter, and everyone can quote it. I have met leaders who can give me that figure to two decimal places but have never once checked whether the humans inside that pipeline still exist.
Run the math on your own team for a second. Say a rep carries 100 named accounts and coverage on that book is 55%. That rep’s real addressable market is 55 accounts. You set their quota against 100, you built the capacity model against 100, you told the board the number based on 100 and then you wonder whats going on when the results look great for 55 accounts and crap for 100.
Time to look in the mirror boss.
Run an audit. It takes an afternoon and you should run it before you touch anything else in the plan. Pull the real named account list, the hundred or two hundred companies where a deal is genuinely possible. Run them against current sources and look for two things on each target contact, a verified mobile and a verified email. Then divide verified contacts by named accounts, write that percentage on the whiteboard.
Most teams I do this with come back somewhere between 40% and 60% on the first run.
Set a floor and go fix it.
My floor is 85% verified on the top 100 before we run a single play against them. My go to tool is FullEnrich to do what my Dad used to do with a pen.
It’s not a relationship if you can’t get them on the phone easily, and if you can’t do that, your chance of them being a customer is slim to none.
The boring work is the work. My father knew that in 1985 and did the work with a notebook and pen. The notebook and pen are gone but the need remains and the tools are even better.
A book is only worth what’s true in it.
GTM is your only moat. Get it right. Or GTFO.
P.S my Dad still tells my kids stories from his time selling bras and even though they are now 18-25 they still giggle like little kids.
Why GTM or GTFO Exists: The GTM is bar is low - big talkers, best practices and bullshit. Being elite is your moat. Do the work that matters and get sh!t done.
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