Jason M. Lemkin explains the 90 day rule for new VPs: if they don't hit key milestones like hiring AEs, setting up marketing automation, or meeting top customers in their first quarter, they probably won't succeed. Miss the marks and backfill the role.
I want to talk for just a minute about a rule that will save you a lot of stress and headaches when you build out your first management team. It's the 90 day rule. And what's the 90 day rule? Well, it's that if a VP doesn't do something in the first 90 days, she or he probably never will. Let's take VP of Sales. If they don't hire any great AES in the first 90 days, whether it's pulling them from their last job or finding them on angel list, it doesn't matter if they don't do it in the first 90 days, they'll never find somebody great. If they only do outbound, but they don't like inbound or they only do inbound and they never get out of the office do outbound, they never will. At least they'll never do it well. Same with renewals. They don't want to handle renewals. They'll never do it. Sometimes folks only like to hunt big fish and they can't handle the thousands of small deals. Or sometimes folks that like to process thousands of small deals don't know what to do with big fish. But whatever you do the stuff you know how to do the first week, but you work on the rest the first 90 days. And if you don't do the stuff by then, at best it will barely get done or get done poorly. Same thing with marketing. Do they set up a marketing automation system and drip marketing right when they start? Do you have real MQLs within 2 weeks or 30 days? Do you have BDRs and SDRs qualifying them? Do you have more leads? And do you even talk about getting more leads if it doesn't happen in the first 90 days, this marketer will never get you more leads no matter what her experience. Is customer success in the first 90 days? Do they get on jets and meet with your top customers or is it all reactive? How many of your top customers has your first customer success leader gotten to know personally? How many badges did she get from going to their offices? What sort of NPS or net retention goals have been set? If these things haven't happened in the first 90 days, they're just never going to happen. It goes on and on. So what do you do? One thing you can do is get super frustrated when your VPs that you've worked so hard to hire don't meet your expectations. But what you really need to do is backfill and move on. Help hire someone else, a director or someone else to do the parts of the job they don't do. Maybe move it around, maybe move part of customer success to sales or vice versa. Or switch responsibilities, whatever it is, backfill them and assume that whatever they don't do in 90 days, they don't really have passion for and probably isn't going to be part of their end job specifically.
