CRO-Tales: The Unrelenting Agony of "Nice to Have"

I thought I’d take a break from talking about the rapidly changing landscape of fintech and hunker down on some good old fundamentals tied to my Go-to-Market (GTM) world. Particularly, getting revenue. Revenue has been THE metric in my world for almost 20 years. You can get all the other fancy, OKR-driven KPIs out there. Retention rates are great. NPS - wonderful. But when you’re a CRO and there’s a knock at the door at midnight, I’m betting the guy on the other side wants to talk about…yes, revenue. So I’m starting a short series of reflections on my decade plus as a Chief Revenue Officer for this next wave of newbies to chew on. Enjoy.

There are a lot of tough bumps to look out for in Sales. The agony of unexpected organization change inside a client right before contract finalization. The embarrassing occasions where you’re told to future-sell things not quite ready for release that drags on for months. Regulatory zigzags that shut down your industry. The painful announcement of a competitor beating you to market with your secret solution. Lot of things in Sales can slap you in the face and stun you for the moment.

But there’s something worse I think. A place where you don’t see the hit coming. The never ending series of false summits where you round a tree and, once again, see the mountain top is still a ways off. It’s that slow, miserable near-death of “Nice to Have.”

Many of you have been there. Your product is technically great. On several metrics it beats the incumbent or the top challenger. And when you talk with the market, they really like it. Heck, your investors certainly did - and they put a price tag on the near-certain future success of such a kick-ass feature. Tech publications may even want to know more about it.

There’s a problem, though. It never sells. Or it technically sells, but never generates that key metric: revenue.

You’re dancing on air. Everyone returns your calls. At least at the start. Your company’s name shows up on conversations on X, WhatsApp, and Telegram. But time bleeds on and the revenue…just…won’t….come.

You’re stuck in Nice to Have.

You certainly can solve a problem it seems. Several of your champions keep slapping you on the back at every conference. But dang, something came up. There’s a fire needing to be addressed at the moment. Or that dang CTO got more of the budget this year. Or don’t worry, next quarter for sure.

Out in the online reading audience, there’s a world of nodding heads reading this thinking, “Been there.” You’re in Nice to Have. And with the huge wave next generation AI or stablecoin-based services arising, there’s a lot of that out there. It's better, yet not selling like it should.

Like many multi-step programs to recovery, the first step is acknowledgment. The one-day-some-day mantra may be a good meditation chant but it’s horrible as a Sales pep talk. Those ever-elongating sales cycles are really telling you something. And while there may be times you’ve unfortunately discovered your place in the product-market-fit universe is a solid “eh”, luckily there are frequently things you can do to take a product up to the next level. So here are some things to focus on should you find yourself there:

Who’s Getting Fired/Promoted? - One of my first directives when judging a potential “nice to have” trap is asking my team: “Who is getting fired if they don’t take our solution?” Or said in a more positive tone “Who gets promoted if they do take us?”. Being cheaper, quicker, slimmer, more intuitive is all good as a new service. But it doesn’t indicate any sort of game changing moment that would make it part of anyone’s Qtr X achievements. If you’re living in a world of “slightly better”, you’re screwed. No product roadmap has room for slightly better. You’re either targeting the wrong persona or vertical or presenting it wrong (see below). No, you need to find where your product means life and death in the survival of that company and then deliver a differentiator that will make someone a hero, or give someone another year in their job. Where your “I” in a MEDDPICC process identified real pain and not an irritant. That’s where your service gets signed and prioritized for go-live. Until I’m mapped to someone’s future, I’m a sitting duck, waiting for the next fire drill to bump me again. Be sure to push your team to find those use cases and target personas and then pour on the gas. Enterprise sales folks, map that to the top executive in the same boat. Your ICP and persona exercises should ensure it ends with that match and leave the Nice to Have parts of the market behind.

Message the Mission - While step one of “who will get fired/promoted” is an essential mapping to success, there’s still the delivery. I’ve seen two classic faults in how services are presented. One is a typical start-up mistake of thinking what works for investors works for their clients base. Yes, you were smart enough to take out the TAM slide and 5 year growth plan from your deck, but you left the value proposition the same. You pitch YOUR market opportunity to investors, not the dream of your prospects. Often these modified investor decks leave too much unsaid from the customer perspective and your message comes out weak. Do the work of thinking of the customer first. Start with that and rebuild your message from the ground up.

The second mistake I see is the classic, tech-driven inside-out view. It’s all features and benefits. This much cheaper. Has this additional field(s). These great partners. Simpler APIs. Very good. Gold star for you. And you’re about to slip into “Nice to Have” even if you aren’t. The message has to get into the vernacular of the target personas day to day mentality. A needed customer retention benefit. A new market opportunity that expands their base. An ability to offer additional services they couldn’t do or justify before. The more you can weave a narrative that gets you closer to either fear (“You’re likely non-compliant if you’re not doing this”) or excitement (“This gives you what LatAm is looking for and no one is offering”), the better the message. It’s Marketing 101. There’s a key phrase you want the client to say after listening to your pitch that comes from the classic book “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss - “That’s right”. Speak their language, not yours.

Fit, Product, Fit. Good boy. - While the first two steps to getting out of Nice to Have are largely a CRO’s responsibility, there are even more impactful changes coming from a CRO’s work with the rest of the company. Particular the partnership between Sales and Product in ensuring customer feedback is elegantly collected and prioritized in the product roadmap. This works for both Product-led and Sales-led organizations. You both have to be aligned on the outcome of getting a prospect persona promoted with the use of your service as an outcome. Then together hear the blockers to your prospect’s selection of your solution. The more Product can be on prospect and client calls, either live or recorded, and hear the same thing sales is hearing, the better your chance of success. But once documented, the best organizations have great, open dialog between the GTM leader and Product leader to share perspectives on what particular items will help nudge a near-fit to a must-have. This is a rich topic that deserves two or three articles on its own but the core message is both organizations need to get to a shared vision on what makes a product indispensable and that has to be informed from the client’s mouth.

There are no silver bullets out there to avoid the Nice to Have trap but certainly there are steps a CRO can take to help his company forward. The first is acknowledgment of the problem. Then start the alignment process. Are we targeting those that really should care and dropping the zombies that waste your time? If so, are we telling them about our solution in ways they think about when they look at their goals for the quarter or year? Checked both boxes? Then be sure your pals in Product are in lock step with the above. If you know what you’re trying to achieve for your customers, through the actual voice of your customer, your product prioritization becomes that much more impactful. Avoid the Nice to Have trap that kills time and eventually your business. Getting to indispensable is a challenging but enriching journey to take - safe travels and enjoy the ride.