Ben Tagoe and Ed Marsh Will Share Tips on using Quality of Sales to Buy Smarter, Grow Faster and Exit Stronger - June 18th, 11:30et LinkedIn Live
BOSTON, MA - June 5th, 2024
High rates, lots of eager money chasing deals, and increasing prices are challenging private equity managers. The playbook of operational efficiency improvements is less effective. The other lever, revenue growth, is the least predictable. The margin for error is shrinking just as investment thesis realization now hinges on the most subjective of criteria—the sales team’s ability to execute.
“Quality of Sales” solves for this, as Ed Marsh and Ben Tagoe will explore in an important LinkedIn live event on June 18th at 11:30AM ET. (Registration required.)
Recent Bain research predicts that revenue growth and margin expansion will determine 65% of PE value creation for exits by 2025 - a 48% increase over the relative contribution of those two factors for exits in ‘16-21.
But how often are sales teams delivering? Most sales teams struggle with implementing price increases and closing more deals with new logos. Traditional Quality of Earnings (QoE) due diligence only indirectly infers the sales team’s ability through pipeline review and renewal rates.
Ed Marsh, founder of Ed Marsh Consulting, says “Retrospective QoE due diligence is no longer adequate for investors’ high-stakes decisions that hinge on sales team execution. I’m really excited that Ben will bring his PE experience to this QoS briefing.”
Quality of Sales delivers highly accurate quantitative and qualitative insights into a sales team’s ability to execute key elements of an investment thesis including market share expansion, price increase implementation and opportunity creation. It also looks at specific factors that impact deal qualification and forecast accuracy
Research shows that 40% or more of sales reps are chronically missing quota in today’s market, and that 40% of forecast deals end in no decision. Those weaknesses carry large direct, and enormous opportunity cost implications for financial investors.
Ben Tagoe, CEO of PE-backed Objective Management Group continues, “Quality of Sales provides sponsors with diagnostics about a company’s pipeline health, insights into root causes of sales underperformance, and tools to consistently hire superb sales talent.”
The LinkedIn live info session will be held on June 18th, at 11:30AM ET (attendees must preregister here) and will cover the following aspects of Quality of Sales:
- Sales Team Evaluation - deep dive insights into aggregate and individual strengths and opportunities. This includes sales leadership, management, and individual contributors in all sales roles. Investors will clearly understand the potential of the team to execute on the investment thesis, as well as required personnel and organizational changes and training requirements, including a reasonable timeline.
- Identify root causes of underperforming portfolio companies - as holding periods lapse, frustrating sales symptoms come into focus. But addresing symptoms doesn’t deliver results. Just as in operations the key is to understand root causes. Quality of Sales delivers that detail.
- Improved sales hiring - Hiring is a crap shoot. Even successful sales leaders from elsewhere in the portolio may not replicate success as markets, sellers, and buyers change quickly. The direct and opportunity costs of average hires is huge. Quality of Sales enables confidence in consistently hiring 2nd and 3rd standard deviation talent.
The Quality of Sales event will be broadcast live on LinkedIn on June 18th at 11:30AM ET. Register here to save your seat and gain critical insights into how you can quantitatively improve results.
Buy smarter. Grow faster. Exit strong.
A new private equity environment demands more accurate and insightful solutions to support your investments. Quality of Sales delivers empirical, predictively accurate insights.
About Ed Marsh: Ed is the founder of Ed Marsh Consulting, a firm that works with privately held middle-market firms on revenue growth. Ed’s a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and a former Ranger Qualified Airborne Infantry officer. He has extensive international experience and was the Export Advisor to American Express. He holds a Private Directors Association certificate in Private Equity Portfolio Company Governance and is Directorship® Certified by the National Association of Corporate Directors.
About Ben Tagoe: Benjamin Tagoe is the CEO of Objective Management Group, the pioneer and industry leader in sales team evaluations and sales candidate assessments. He’s a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. Ben’s finance and investing career has focused on strategy and the use of data to drive better decisions. From Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, through his time as SVP at VantageScore Solutions, and Fairfield Enterprises (a single company fund), using data to drive better decision-making has been Ben’s passion - a passion that he brings to OMG and helping companies improve sales.
