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I still remember stepping into a senior commercial role and feeling the pressure almost immediately. You arrive with plenty of confidence, otherwise you probably would not have taken the job, but it feels very different when the target is now attached to your name and everyone is looking to you for direction.
The board wants to see momentum. The CEO wants reassurance. Marketing wants to know whether the leads they are generating are good enough. RevOps wants better processes and cleaner data. The sales team wants clarity, but not necessarily another new leader arriving with a grand plan that changes everything before they have understood what is already happening.
That is the difficult balance in the first 90 days. You need to show progress quickly, but if you move too fast in the wrong direction, you can easily create more noise than improvement.
Looking back, I think one of the mistakes I made early on was trying to prove myself through activity. More meetings, more reporting, more campaigns, more pressure on the team and more conversations about pipeline. It all felt useful at the time, but useful activity and meaningful progress are not always the same thing.
If I had that time again, I would spend less time trying to show I had all the answers, and more time finding out where the real problems were.
The temptation in a new role is to start with the plan. I understand why, because people expect one. They want to know what will change, where growth will come from, and how quickly results can improve.
The problem is that most plans are only as good as the diagnosis behind them. If you do not properly understand why the business is winning, losing, converting or stalling, you can end up fixing the wrong thing very efficiently.
A proper win and loss review is a good place to start, and by proper, I do not mean glancing at closed lost reasons in the CRM and assuming they are accurate. I mean looking at recent opportunities and speaking to the people involved, including sales, marketing, RevOps, customers and, where possible, prospects who did not buy.
The questions do not need to be complicated, but they do need to be honest:
That last one matters more than most people admit. In many businesses, the CRM is not deliberately wrong, but it is often incomplete, inconsistent, or slightly optimistic. Deals stay open too long, next steps are vague, lead sources are unclear and lost reasons become a bit of a dumping ground.
You do not need to fix all of that in week one, but you do need to know it exists. Once you understand the truth, you can make better decisions and you earn more credibility with the people around you.
One of the biggest mistakes I have made in the past is assuming that pipeline problems are always lead generation problems.
Sometimes they are. Some businesses simply do not have enough opportunities entering the funnel, and in those cases, new demand matters. But quite often, especially in businesses with some marketing activity already in place, the bigger issue is not that there are no leads. It is that too many of the right ones are being missed, mishandled or followed up too slowly.
Before asking for more activity, I would want to know what is happening to the demand already being created:
This is where small changes can make a noticeable difference. A good enquiry followed up after two days is not the same as a good enquiry followed up in two hours. A prospect who has downloaded a relevant guide, visited pricing pages and attended a webinar should not be treated the same as someone who opened one email six months ago.
It sounds obvious, but plenty of companies still treat leads as if they are all equal. They are not.
A lot of internal friction comes from different teams looking at the same problem from different angles.
Sales says the leads are not good enough. Marketing says sales are not following up. RevOps says the data is too messy to prove either point. The board just sees a target being missed and wants to know what is being done about it.
In my experience, the way through that is not another debate about who is right. It is to get everyone looking at the same journey, using the same definitions and agreeing what good actually looks like.
That does not mean building an overcomplicated process. In fact, the simpler the better. Start with a few practical questions:
This is where RevOps should be close to the conversation, not brought in afterwards to tidy things up. They will usually know where the process breaks, which fields nobody trusts, where handovers are weak and where teams have created workarounds because the system does not match how people actually work.
The goal is not to create perfect reporting. The goal is to create reporting that people trust enough to act on.
In the first 90 days, there is a temptation to make big changes because big changes look decisive. Sometimes that is needed, but often the better move is to find the small leaks that are quietly costing revenue.
Most conversion problems are not dramatic. They are usually made up of lots of small gaps that have become normal:
None of these things feel like a major strategic issue on its own, but together they create a revenue problem. They also frustrate the team because people are working hard, but the results do not reflect the effort going in.
That is why I would always map the buyer journey as it really is, not as it appears in a slide deck. Where does a lead come from? Who sees it? What happens next? How quickly does someone act? What gets logged? What gets forgotten? Where do good opportunities slow down?
Once you can see those gaps, you can make changes that are specific enough to matter.
Another thing I would pay more attention to is capacity. Not just headcount, but real capacity.
Most teams are already stretched before a new commercial leader arrives. Then, almost overnight, they are asked to improve reporting, clean the CRM, increase activity, follow up faster, create better campaigns, sharpen qualification and hit a bigger number.
That might be what the business needs, but it does not mean the team can absorb it all.
There is a difference between setting higher standards and pretending people have unlimited bandwidth. If the sales team is already under pressure, asking them to become brilliant at outbound, inbound follow-up, CRM discipline, proposal management and account development all at once may not be realistic. If marketing is a small team, asking them to generate more leads and improve lead quality at the same time may need more support than anyone has admitted.
This is where leaders need to make choices. Some activity should stop. Some processes should be simplified. Some priorities should be pushed back. Some gaps might need short-term external support, whether that is data, campaign execution, SDR capacity, lead qualification or event follow-up.
The important point is not whether something is done internally or externally. The important point is whether the plan has enough capacity behind it to actually happen.
The first 90 days are not long enough to fix everything, but they are long enough to show that things are becoming clearer and more controlled.
I would avoid trying to launch too many initiatives at once. Instead, I would pick two or three visible improvements that matter commercially and can be measured properly.
For example:
These are not flashy changes, but they give the business confidence. They show that you are not just adding pressure, you are bringing focus. They also help the team see progress, which matters when people are already carrying the weight of missed targets or inconsistent performance.
When you step into a senior commercial role, it is easy to feel that you need to arrive with all the answers. I am not sure that is true.
The better leaders I have worked with tend to ask better questions first. They want to understand where revenue is really coming from, where good opportunities are being lost, which leads deserve more attention, which numbers can be trusted and which processes are making life harder than they need to be.
That is what I wish I had focused on earlier in my career. Not trying to fix everything at once, but finding the points where better focus, faster follow-up and cleaner alignment could make the biggest difference.
The first 90 days set the tone. If you can bring the truth to the surface, get the team aligned around the right numbers and stop good opportunities slipping through the cracks, you will have made a strong start.
Not because everything is solved, but because people can finally see what needs to happen next.
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