Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

trust can be earned by following through on your words and actions being consistent with your narratives.

But as leaders, we need to offer up an honest accounting of our behavior.

Trust goes up when people see that we are self‐aware about our own shortcomings and areas for improvement.

An honest accounting of your failures will work much better than denying those failures and expe...

to truly inspire trust, underpromise and overdeliver.

through proper focus and execution, not hoping and praying, the valuation of the company could reach 10x in a matter of 12–18 months.

High‐trust workplace cultures tend to correlate with high‐performance organizations.

If people can trust that everyone's motivations are honorable, not political, it allows them to focus on the problems and challenges of the business without getting defensive.

declaring my own mistakes, I signaled to everyone that it was safe to admit their mistakes too, without fearing extreme consequences. No one gets everything right all the time. The faster we all face our demons and correct ourselves, the better off the business will be.

We tend to be “solution centric”—we spend most of our time discussing solutions rather than diagnosing problems.

if we are wrong in understanding the problem, our solutions won't work. For

M&A (mergers & acquisitions) are often a preferred method of breaking out of an undesirable dynamic, but it rarely works out that way because the analysis of the problem is ill‐fated.

Part of the problem is usually intellectual laziness.

Another cause of jumping to solutions is groupthink, which discourages new, creative, unexpected ways of thinking.

act more like doctors: slow down and critically examine situations and problems before settling on an explanation, never mind a solution.

This requires intellectual honesty—the ability to stay rational and set aside our biases and past experiences.

Once you start examining and pulling a problem apart, the perspective often changes the range of possibilities.

If you find out that you were wrong, correct it immediately.

Build a reputation as a rapid course corrector.

You don't need to be right all the time to succeed if you can admit quic...

Analysis sharpens perceptions that tend to get dull in the daily hustle and bustle.

Analysis first—especially when someone's future career is at stake.

If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services.

customer success is the business of the entire company, not merely one department. This means that when a problem arises, every department has a responsibility to fix it.

Customer grievances are best solved by establishing proper ownership, reducing internal complexity, and removing bureaucratic intermediaries.

tech support has to work with the engineering department whenever they exhaust the limits of their own abilities.

While technical support owns customer issues, sales own the customer relationship,

“There comes a time when the venture must pivot from conserving resources to applying them rapidly, as fast as you know how to do effectively—when that cross‐over time comes is not always obvious.”

Trying to staff a whole sales team prematurely is a very common managerial mistake. So is failing to figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers

In a business development situation,

every aspect is interpreted case by case, and we adapt to the circumstances at hand.

Selling, by contrast, is a systemic, highly stand...

You can't brute‐force a sales effort if the underlying conditions aren't in place yet.

A busy sales funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team,

Conversely, if you skimp on resources for lead generation, your sales reps will end up having only a couple of meetings a week.

High levels of activity are essential to boosting morale and driving results.

people who simply weren't closing deals or even building up their pipeline of prospects.

They were expected to somehow figure it out for themselves and magically deliver big numbers.

If there is one skill a sales manager must have, it is recruiting. It has to be done in‐house because recruiting is so core to successful sales management. Good sales managers are constantly hiring and firing, which helps them develop a clear sense of which candidates are likely to become gunslingers.

Nothing is more indicative and predictive of sales results than quota deployed on the street. Quota is the level of sales dollars assigned to deployed sales representatives.

In a static, low growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development.

Putting gasoline into a car's tank won't matter if the engine isn't working.

Likewise, you can hire all the salespeople in the world, but they won't pay off until you've figured out your product, your market, your demand and lead generation systems, and the kinds of selling motions that will convert prospects to customers.

you have a sales force that's stuck in the mud, don't just complain about the staff's failure to hit your targets and timeline. Ask lots o...

You can't simply take a “wait and see” posture while hoping the m...

You have to aggressively manage no...

do not add headcount to regions where things clearly are not figured out. That's hoping and praying, not sales management.

Set your people up for success, and watch them thrive.

The study found that when evaluating a young company, growth matters even more than profit margin or cost structure.

Relatively few make growth as big a priority as it should be. Quite a few even seem content to remain slow growers.