Hannah Ajikawo, founder and CEO at Revenue Funnel

Hannah Ajikawo is founder and CEO of Revenue Funnel, a consulting firm designed to help sales leaders hold more revenue inside their funnel.

LinkedIn shows your impressive career timeline. What highlights or challenges in your sales journey does LinkedIn not tell us?

It doesn’t tell you much about the ill-informed big bets I took with disruptive startups. It doesn’t tell you about the seven years of side-hustle consulting I did while in roles. It certainly doesn’t share the times when quota wasn’t hit. Highlights for me have been the first five years of my career and the last five years. During the first five years of my career, I learned strong sales fundamentals. These ranged from cold outreach skills to understanding the attitude and grit that’s needed to succeed over time. Over the last five years, I’ve become braver. I’ve embraced incredibly uncomfortable situations in order to drive my growth. I began to experiment more and break away from the traditional sales path.

What’s something you believed early in your career that you now think is wrong?

If you work hard in your role, you will feel fulfilled and reach success. That is simply not the case. How we define success changes so frequently. Ten years ago, success for me meant hitting quota. Today, success for me means delivering outcomes for clients, while also paying my bills, having a nice family holiday, spending quality time with my son and watching him overachieve, and having a warm and welcoming home.

What do you think is the most significant barrier to female leadership in sales? What advice would you give to women climbing the ladder?

Many female leaders do not ask for the role because society, the actual work institution and our own limiting beliefs tell us that we do not belong there. I think it was Earl Nightingale that said something along the lines of, “the greatest barrier to success is conformity.” In my experience, people sometimes conform to others' low expectations for us — which is not much at times. I’d tell those who identify as women to be positively discordant. Sometimes, go against the grain. Do the things that people least expect. Ask for the raise, the promotion, the additional benefits and responsibilities, and do it boldly!

What skills are necessary at the sales leadership level to work and perform under so much pressure?

Above all, a leader should be consistently invested in becoming more trustworthy and adaptable. As someone who is supposed to set the vision, clear the path and inspire others to go forth and be great together, that becomes increasingly difficult if those you lead do not trust you. When you check a lot of the information out there on trust it boils down to two things: your character and your competence. I’ve been very intentional over the last few years about these things to improve my ability to build and maintain trust.

In addition to trustworthiness, the other quality of a strong leader is adaptability. I was listening to a recent podcast featuring Maëlle Gavet, the CEO of Techstars, in which she talks about the concept of a War CEO and Peace CEO. For me, this was such a beautiful description that encapsulated so many different leadership styles. Now, I do not know if she is the initial source of this idea of leadership but it’s where I heard it first - go Maëlle! She said that a War CEO is comfortable with uncertainty — they are able to switch between offensive and defensive constantly, handle risk well and make decisions based on partial information. A Peace CEO operates with more structure and maintains the status quo. For sales leadership, you should be able to balance both. 

What are your top tips for making the sales planning process less painful? What are the biggest pitfalls with planning and lessons you have learned over the years?

Planning never starts early enough. Start getting your existing data in order earlier. The earlier you have your sources together, the easier it will be at a later date to build your plan and constructively challenge your peers on how the overall plan comes together. Now set the big audacious goal.

Take the top-down plan and check it against the bottom-up reality — the things that are happening on the ground. You have to take the broader market, including competition and industry trends, into account. Then get crystal clear on your GTM strategy: a cohesive plan should be based on consensus around who you need (people), what you need (tech) and how you will do it (process)? There are four ways I see planning go wrong: 

1. There is a 100% focus on capacity. For some companies, one extra head equals another $1 million in revenue. There’s absolutely no consideration for what’s happening on the ground and no recognition of how much it costs to hire and train new talent.
2. Sales planning is done without considering inside sales planning or marketing, so it’s disjointed from Day One.
3. Teams don’t plan on how they will impact leading indicators such as pipeline velocity, pipeline growth, ramp time for reps, CAC (customer acquisition cost), TTV (time to value) and LTV (lifetime value).
4. Plans are built siloed by design — there may be executive goal alignment, but the execution happens incoherently.

When you plan for only the lagging indicators (for instance, revenue booked), you often shift gears part way through the year because it takes too long to measure if something is actually working or not. 

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