When Growth Slows, Is It Sales’ Fault or the Product’s Fault? The Answer Has Changed. | Saa Str
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When Growth Slows, Is It Sales’ Fault or the Product’s Fault? The Answer Has Changed.
by Jason Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, Saa Str. Ai
This has led to office fights, drama, accusations, finger pointing, and more since the dawn of B2B software.
Growth decelerates. The board asks tough questions. And then the blame game starts.
The VP of Sales says the product isn’t competitive enough
The VP of Product / CTO says sell what we’ve built, it’s what you asked for
The CEO fires the VP of Sales, hires a new one, and waits 6 months to see if it works.
I’ve seen this play out hundreds of times across the Saa Str portfolio and community.
And for most of B2B history, the answer was usually the same: it was a sales and marketing problem, at least post product-market fit. Get a better VP of Sales, tighten up the funnel, hire real closers, and growth re-accelerates.
I even lived it myself. I’ve written about how my VP of Sales doubled our revenue in 90 days at Echo Sign. And he did it without changing the product, the pricing, the competition, or the lead flow. He doubled Revenue Per Lead by upgrading the team with proven closers, re-routing leads away from underperformers, and killing pipeline as a vanity metric. Great management, not magic.
How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic.
How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic.
That story is still true. A great VPS or CRO absolutely can still double sales. If your reps are mediocre, your pipeline management is sloppy, and your best leads are going to your worst reps, a world-class sales leader will fix that fast.
But here’s what’s changed: the underlying assumption that made all of that work so reliably.
For most of B2B history, products were essentially static. You’d ship a major release every 12 to 24 months. You’d add features, fix tech debt, catch up to competitors, and every few years bolt on a new product line. But the core product experience? It barely moved. A customer evaluating your product in January would see roughly the same thing in December. And so the sales and marketing machine became the primary lever. Jam more folks into the funnel. Get more of them to buy. Optimize conversion at every stage. That was the playbook, and it worked, because the product was a constant.
In 2026, products are incredibly fluid. The pace of improvement, competition, and capability change is unlike anything we’ve seen in B2B. You cannot go 3 to 5 years between major releases anymore. You can barely go 3 to 5 months.
Look at the AI layer alone. Claude is literally 100x more capable than it was 12 months ago. If you’re building on top of AI infrastructure, your product can go from cutting-edge to outdated in a single quarter. And even if you’re not building “AI products” per se, your competitors probably are. They’re shipping faster. They’re adding agentic capabilities. They’re rethinking entire workflows, not just adding features.
This means the product itself has become the most volatile variable in the growth equation. It used to be the constant. Now it’s the thing most likely to be the root cause when growth slows.
The Old Playbook Still Works. It’s Just Not Enough.
Let me be clear: a great VP of Sales still matters enormously. Everything from that classic Saa Str post still holds. A great VPS will still walk in, upgrade the team fast, re-route leads to closers, kill vanity metrics, and get more revenue out of the same pipeline.
But they could do that because the product was a given. It was the same on Day 1 as it was on Day 90. The reps who couldn’t close weren’t failing because the product had degraded. They were failing because they weren’t good enough closers.
Today, when your VPS walks in the door, the product might already be less competitive than it was when the last VPS started. The win rates might be declining not because your reps forgot how to sell, but because two competitors shipped agentic features last quarter and you’re still demoing the same thing you had 8 months ago.
In a world where products are essentially static, a sales leader’s job is to maximize revenue from a fixed set of inputs. In a world where products change dramatically every few months, that same sales leader is trying to hit a moving target with moving ammunition.
So When Growth Slows in 2026, Ask the Product Question First
Here’s the diagnostic I’d run today, in this order:
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Has your product’s competitive position changed in the last 6 to 12 months? Not “are you still in market.” But are you as differentiated, as capable, as modern as you were a year ago? If two competitors shipped major AI-native features and you haven’t, that’s your answer. It’s not sales.
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Are your win rates declining against specific competitors? If you’re losing more head-to-head deals, and the losses are concentrated against 1 or 2 vendors who shipped big product updates, that’s a product problem wearing a sales mask.
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Is your product release velocity keeping pace with the market? If you’re still on a 12-month release cycle and your competitors are shipping weekly, your sales team is fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
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Is the problem truly sales execution? If your product is genuinely competitive, your win rates are stable, and your close rates per rep are just low, then yes, it’s a sales problem. Hire a great VPS. Let them upgrade the team. The classic playbook still works when the product holds up.
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Is your AI Agent the best one in the market? It really has to be today. Be honest.
If your product isn’t as competitive as it was 6 to 18 months ago, it probably won’t help.
The uncomfortable truth for a lot of founders right now is that the VP of Sales is an easy scapegoat. Firing them feels decisive. Hiring a new one feels hopeful. And sometimes it’s the right call.
But if the real issue is that your product fell behind while the market sprinted ahead, a new VP of Sales is just going to run into the same wall. Faster, maybe. More professionally, certainly. But the same wall.
The pace of change, improvement, and competition in B2B + AI is like nothing we’ve seen before. The companies that are growing fastest right now aren’t the ones with the best sales teams. They’re the ones whose products are evolving as fast as the market demands. And then they hire great sales leaders on top of that.
Product velocity is the new growth lever. Get that right, and a great VPS can work their magic. Get it wrong, and no amount of sales optimization will save you.
The Playbook to Blending Product-Led Growth with Sales-Led Growth: Teams, Tools, Processes with Amplitude's VP of APJ Mark Velthuis (Pod 641 + Video)
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Transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth and Scaling to $100M ARR With Apollo's CEO Tim Zheng
The Playbook to Blending Product-Led Growth with Sales-Led Growth: Teams, Tools, Processes with Amplitude's VP of APJ Mark Velthuis (Pod 641 + Video)
5 Lessons Learned When Scaling Product-Led Growth and Sales Motions Beyond $100M with Cloudinary VP of Developer Experience Sanjay Sarathy
Transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led Growth and Scaling to $100M ARR With Apollo's CEO Tim Zheng
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Key Takeaways
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AI VC AI Mentor: Digital Jason + Amelia AI Startup Benchmarking
-
AI Agent Playbook Free e Books
e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales e Book: Raising Capital e Book: The First $1m ARR -
University All Posts Podcasts The Top CROs VC Fundraising Top Videos Q&A Best of Saa Str #1 Bestselling Book Search Everything Join the Community
-
Free e Books
e Book: Hiring a Great VP of Sales e Book: Raising Capital e Book: The First $1m ARR -
AI Annual 2026 Events Overview Sponsors
Event Sponsorship Media Sponsorship
