Re:How Zenefits' Big Bet on Sales Went Wrong
by 11thEarlOfMar on Wednesday March 02, 2016 @06:14PM
(#11213836)
Isn't this essentially the same circumstances that took Groupon off its horse?
It is not difficult to imagine that what starts as a commitment on a presentation to grow sales by X%, becomes mission impossible once the company does the arithmetic and sees that the only way to sell the $250,000,000 worth of services the commitment (and valuation) requires is to hire 100 sales persons per month for a year. Growing from a couple of dozen to 10x that in a year is really easy to f* up and the Groupon and Zenefit scenarios play out.
It is not difficult to imagine that what starts as a commitment on a presentation to grow sales by X%, becomes mission impossible once the company does the arithmetic and sees that the only way to sell the $250,000,000 worth of services the commitment (and valuation) requires is to hire 100 sales persons per month for a year. Growing from a couple of dozen to 10x that in a year is really easy to f* up and the Groupon and Zenefit scenarios play out.