Is your sales organisation too efficient?

Yes you can be too efficient in Sales & Marketing...
 
Consider this: you have a 2x+ magic number, win rates >75% and a sales org. growing slower than the rest of your company. In another words for every $ invested in S&M you get 2$+ of Gross Profit, and you are crushing competition without massive resources.
 
How could that happen? great product, loved by a specific customer segment, and weak competition.
 
This suggests over-efficient GTM ops. and that it may be time to step on the gas and deliberately reduce efficiency to foster sustainable growth.
 
However, this can be a sign that you are targeting too small a niche of customers (segment, geo, etc…) and that your TAM might be restricted. This is a great strategy in the early days, but might slow you down as you scale. From experience, over-efficient orgs. are (a) unsophisticated, (b) unorganised and (c) lack experienced sales reps (tend to hire and train graduates, or systematically look for diamonds in the rough)
 
If you are in this situation and you are seeing your TAM getting narrower, consider the following (in no particular order):
- Explore new potential customer segments, new markets, and new geographies
- Step-up on marketing
- Push sales enablement
- Optimise team structure (e.g. ratio of AE/SDR)
- Recruit seasoned enterprise sales reps
 
What you should control while rolling out any new sales strategy:
- New bookings are growing in-line with historicals and proportionally to investment in S&M
- Magic number stays above 0.8x; win rates >50%; CAC doesn’t skyrocket
- only add reps when funnel is larger than you can chew on
- keep an eye on how conversion rates and sales cycle length evolved as well as NPS in new customer segments / new geo / new markets
 
This approach will help manage the balance between efficient growth and the need to scale sustainably.