“Solved platform churn by fixing quality issues in the onboarding funnel and managing 40 people”
Manual processes causing 40% vendor churn
Hire 20 more salespeople to accelerate vendor onboarding and compensate for churn
Churn wasn't a sales problem. 45% of lost vendors cited poor onboarding process. New vendors were joining fine; they just weren't staying.
Freeze sales hiring. Invest 3 months building quality infrastructure (automated verification + scoring system) before scaling acquisition. Fix retention first, growth second.
Constraints and decisions that shaped product
Instead of: Request 6-month engineering project for custom platform
Instead of: Continue hiring while building in parallel
Instead of: Fully automated system with no human intervention
Aligning stakeholders with competing priorities
Strongly opposed to sales hiring freeze - saw it as attack on his team
"Team's bonuses depend on new vendor numbers. You're asking me to tell them to stop working."
Reframed metrics: Showed that 60% of his team's work was re-acquiring churned vendors. Proposed temporary KPI shift to "net vendor growth" instead of "new vendors." Shared credit for retention improvements.
VP became biggest advocate. Presented the new approach to C-suite as "sales efficiency initiative." His team's actual earnings increased 20% due to retention bonuses.
Skeptical. Wanted growth numbers for investor update
"We have a board meeting in Q3. I need to show vendor growth, not explain why we paused."
Created "confidence interval" projections showing both scenarios: (A) continue current path → 15K net new vendors with 40% churn, (B) fix-then-scale → 8K vendors in Q2, but 30K by year-end with 95% retention. Showed B was better story for investors.
CEO approved the pause. Used the retention story as competitive moat narrative in investor presentation.
Wanted to build custom solution from scratch
"Salesforce is a hack. Give me 6 months and I'll build something scalable."
Agreed on principle, but proposed phased approach: "Let's validate the business logic with Salesforce first. If it works, you build the scalable version. If it doesn't, we only lost 4 weeks, not 6 months."
Salesforce solution worked so well that custom build was deprioritized. Engineering resources went to revenue-generating features instead.
Implemented Salesforce automation and Excel analytics to streamline vendor onboarding and quality management.
Quantified impact of the transformation
A failure that taught me more than success
Two weeks before peak season launch, discovered that duplicate detection logic was flagging legitimate multi-city vendors as duplicates
Logic used business name + phone number as unique identifier. Didn't account for vendors with branches in multiple cities using same contact.
200+ premium vendors temporarily suspended. Received escalation from CEO within 4 hours.
Immediately rolled back to manual review for flagged accounts. Worked weekend to add location-aware logic. Personally called top 50 affected vendors to apologize and offer compensation (featured listing for 1 month free).
Test edge cases with real power users before launch, not just sample data. The vendors who break your system are often your best customers with complex setups.
Building scalable systems from the ground up
No objective way to assess vendor quality - decisions were subjective and inconsistent
Created weighted scoring system combining 12 signals: response time, photo quality, pricing consistency, customer reviews, portfolio completeness, and 7 behavioral indicators from platform activity
Framework adopted by 3 other marketplace teams within the company.
Became the standard for all vendor tiers-Premium, Featured, Standard.
Reflection on what could have been done differently
Impact: First version of quality scoring rejected vendors that sales had personally recruited - created political tension
Include sales reps in scoring criteria definition from day 1, not after the system was built
Would have avoided 2 weeks of rework and preserved relationships
Impact: When I left, team struggled to adjust thresholds for new vendor categories
Create decision log explaining rationale for each threshold, not just the numbers
Knowledge transfer would have been seamless instead of requiring 3 weeks of reverse-engineering
Impact: Spreadsheets became fragile-broke when data formats changed
Invest extra week in data validation and error handling from the start
Would have prevented 2 production incidents that required weekend firefighting
2.5x ROI within 12 months
“The process transformation completely changed how we scale. We went from firefighting to strategic growth.”
“Initially I was skeptical about pausing acquisition. But seeing our retention numbers flip - that changed everything. My team actually started earning more because we weren't constantly backfilling churn.”
Fix retention before scaling acquisition - new customers into a broken system just creates more churn to replace
Stakeholder resistance often comes from misaligned incentives, not bad intent. Realign the incentives, and resistance becomes advocacy.
The "good enough" solution that ships beats the "perfect" solution that doesn't. Especially when you can iterate.
"No dedicated engineering resources" is a constraint, not a blocker. Creative use of existing tools often moves faster.
Interested in how I can help your team ship faster? I'd love to hear what you're working on.