The vantage point: why revenue initiatives fail to stack.

Nicolas Dejehansart
Jan 21
4 min read

" Hiring, tech and training can all be good. The problem is what happens in between. "

Nicolas Dejehansart

Founder Caerus

You can hire recruiters, invest in CRM and other technology, and roll out a sales methodology. You still end up disappointed and the burden stays with you.

Not because your internal resources or partners cannot deliver.

Most revenue initiatives underdeliver because the work required to make them succeed demands three things at the same time:

Real depth in the specific domain.
Enough breadth to connect that domain to the rest of the commercial system.
The ability to implement in a way that actually sticks, with high adoption.

In many organisations, those three rarely come together.

So you buy “parts”. The parts may be decent. But the outcome does not compound.

I kept running into this in roles where I was brought in to lift commercial performance while the business had to keep moving. Sometimes with direct leadership ownership. Sometimes as the commercial excellence lead, expected to turn board-level priorities into execution that sticks across sales leadership, the field, and the operating model.

The frustration was that I could not genuinely free up my time and my managers’ time. I had to compensate and correct, because key pieces were either not done at the level required, or they were done in isolation, or they were implemented in a way that did not hold.

That creates delay. Delay costs money.

This is the uncomfortable reality of a crowded, AI-enabled market: confidence can mask shallow capability, and tough circumstances invite quick fixes. The work can look fine on the surface, yet deliver limited impact, often discovered only after time and budget have been spent.

What it looks like in practice

Hiring

Many recruiters are good at search. That helps.The risk in commercial hiring sits elsewhere: assessing real sales and leadership talent, challenging profiles, predicting performance in a specific context, and detecting weak signals early.

Internally, the situation is often similar. Sales leaders are expected to hire while carrying a number. Many have limited assessment training for commercial roles. Time is scarce. So hiring becomes a compromise.

And the cost of a wrong hire is not only the salary. It is lost growth, lost time, and loss of confidence.

CRM, RevOps and AI

Many commercial tech projects start with stakeholder wishes, the integrator translates it into a build, and the system goes live. That can look organised, yet still deliver limited leverage.

Because the problem is rarely the tool. The issue is that stakeholders describe symptoms through the lens of today’s reality, and today’s reality is often messy for deeper reasons. It is the operating logic around the tool: definitions, standards, governance, operating cadences, deal discipline, pipeline hygiene, and the behaviours the system is supposed to drive.

When that foundation is weak, technology often digitises confusion. You get more data, not better decisions, nor significantly better execution. Dashboards and automated workflows exist, but execution does not improve.

People blame adoption or discipline, but the deeper issue is that the design was never anchored in how performance is actually produced.

Methodologies, training, enablement

I strongly believe in a number of proven sales methodologies. Used well, they create structure, common language, and better execution.

The problem is not the frameworks. The problem is how they are chosen, adapted, and implemented.

Implementation often fails for predictable reasons: the approach is applied too rigidly, too slowly, or without enough adaptation to the reality of the field. And in a crowded market, there is also a hard truth: many “experts” have not been close enough to real selling conditions for years, so their instincts are out of date.

Even excellent training fades when the environment does not reinforce it: coaching discipline, deal governance, pipeline standards, messaging quality, technology set-up, incentives, and operating cadence.

Sales management and firefighting

Yes, sales organisations have urgent issues. But constant firefighting is not “normal”. It is a symptom of a commercial system that is not stable enough.

When managers spend most of their time reacting, they do not have the space to implement structural improvements. And when structural improvements are not implemented, the firefighting never stops.

That loop is one of the biggest silent drags on performance.

The cost is not the invoice

The visible cost is the budget spent on parts.

The real cost is that improvements stay marginal, temporary, or isolated.

Quota attainment remains stubborn. Win rate improves slightly then stalls. Deal size lifts slightly then plateaus. Sales velocity does not structurally shift. Retention stays fragile. Meanwhile change fatigue builds, credibility drops, and every next initiative requires more energy for less return.

Transformations stretch longer than they should. They consume more internal resources. They take selling time away from selling. The organisation pays in money, in lost revenue, and in momentum.

This is where leaders develop a very rational fear: spending again on something that looks right, but does not pay back.

What I built because I could not buy it

Caerus exists because I kept looking for a partner that could help me move faster without lowering quality.

Not a vendor delivering a piece. Not a “guru” selling a framework. And not a generic interim profile that keeps the machine running.

A partner that brings the missing combination for compounding impact:

deep commercial excellence expertise
enough breadth to connect talent, execution, enablement, and systems
implementation capability that drives high adoption and durable anchoring
and the discipline to work incrementally: first time right, then build, then reinforce

Leaders should not have to compensate for avoidable gaps, pay for initiatives that do not compound, or lose months because work was done in isolation or landed poorly.

The goal is simple: make commercial investments stack, instead of evaporate.

If this feels familiar

If you have invested in talent, enablement, technology, or sales training and still feel that performance depends on heroics and constant push, it is rarely an effort problem.

It is usually a system problem, and it is fixable.

If you want to sanity check where the constraint sits and what would create the fastest measurable uplift, reach out via the contact page. I will come back with a short set of targeted questions.