Some Goodness

Host Richard Ellis interviews Darin Archer about why companies that reach $10–$30M can stall and how leaders should diagnose it. Darin stresses that while data and KPIs matter, they can mislead without context, so he triangulates insights from customers, partners, and especially junior reps who offer candid, unfiltered feedback. He looks for pipeline stage velocity anomalies and early- vs late-stage closed-loss patterns to pinpoint go-to-market, pricing, enablement, or product-market-fit issues, then “double-clicks” with qualitative input and competitive intelligence. Darin highlights modern call-recording/transcription and sentiment tools to test hypotheses like pricing objections at scale. He recommends engaging external experts when problems are suspected but unproven or when performance has materially deteriorated, and advises new leaders to avoid “burning the calendar” on tactics and focus on strategic alignment while bringing in execution horsepower.

Soundbites
"You had a great sales team and you didn't feed them right. The whole supply chain was broken."
"That list we got trained on for objection handling? None of those responses land. I tried it. Nothing lands."
"Senior leaders have to defend so much... you won't get that from a senior leader."
"You smell the smoke, but you don't see the smoke. And you definitely don't know if there's a fire."
"Don't burn the calendar. Every month you're not firing on all cylinders, you lose radical traction."
"It's a farce if you think you can do it yourself."
"When your prospect or your former customer takes a call from a third party, they're much more honest."
"That first wave of CRM was a digital notebook... that's a data set we've got to mine a lot more."
"Most enablement teams aren't staffed with that forensic scientist mindset."
"Respect the trade. You're asking these folks to do extraordinary things."

Darin's website: https://www.darinarcher.com
Richard’s business, Revenue Innovations: https://www.revenueinnovations.com