Dec 17, 2025
The Prep Bottleneck: Why Your Revenue Engine Moves Like a 1998 Dell with LimeWire Open
The Prep Bottleneck: Why Your Revenue Engine Moves Like a 1998 Dell with LimeWire Open
That's a grade-A millennial reference if I've ever made one…
There are two types of leaders in post-sale revenue:
Those who think they know how long their reps spend preparing for customer conversations.
Those who have actually asked.
Only one of them is hitting quota in 2026.
Let’s talk about the silent killer of expansion: Prep. Not a strategy. Not skill. Not “coverage.” Prep. It is the least glamorous, most expensive drag on your business. And… brace yourself… It’s much worse than you think.
Digital Archaeology vs. Actual Work
Ask a rep how long they spend prepping for a QBR, an upsell pitch, or even a “quick call.” They’ll tell you 45 minutes. They’re lying. Not because they want to, but because they’ve normalized the trauma.
Your team isn’t spending 45 minutes prepping. They’re spending 45 minutes per tab. And they have 19 tabs open. Salesforce, Zendesk, Product Usage, and an Excel sheet named FINAL_REAL_v3_2025.xlsx.
This isn't "strategic preparation." It’s digital archaeology. You are paying six-figure salaries for people to hunt for usage numbers like they’re looking for a lost city in the Amazon.
Experience is Not Leverage
Leaders love to say, "My team is experienced; they know where to look." Wrong. They just know where they look. Experience, in a broken system, is just a collection of coping mechanisms. Every rep is running their own version of The Amazing Race, trying to stitch together enough signal fragments to justify a pitch.
When your "operating model" relies on a rep's memory and their ability to navigate 14 logins, you don't have a business—you have a collection of craft artisans.
The Math That Hates You
Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math. Galloway style.
A rep with 50 accounts.
Each account has ~1 meaningful touchpoint per month.
Let's pretend prep is "only" 45 minutes.
50 accounts × 45 minutes = 37.5 hours of prep per month.
That’s nine full workdays of nothing but research and slide-building. That’s before they’ve talked to a customer, followed up, or breathed. Multiply that across your team and you’ll realize your "headcount problem" is actually just a math problem.
Expansion is a Timing Game (And You’re Late)
Expansion is a timing game disguised as a relationship game. Whoever sees the signal first wins. But when your team is stuck validating data and formatting slides, they aren’t early. They’re reactive.
Reactive means defensive. Defensive means discounting. Discounting means your CRO starts sending Slack messages at 9:17 p.m. on a Friday. Momentum dies in prep. Revenue follows.
The Three Taxes of Prep Drag:
Signal Discovery Drag: The time wasted finding something worth acting on.
Signal Validation Drag: The "Expansion DMV" where reps ask, "Is this usage spike real, or just a bug?"
Signal-to-Action Drag: The dead zone between "we should do something" and actually doing it. This is where most expansion dies.
The 2026 Shift: Stop Being Detectives
If your team is constantly prepping, it looks like work. It feels productive. It’s the corporate version of cardio: a lot of sweat, very little muscle.
Prep is the tax you pay for systems that can’t do their job. The winners in 2026 treat prep as a system failure, not a human obligation. They remove the bottleneck. They use Steerco to ensure:
Signals are surfaced automatically.
Insights are validated by the system.
Decks and briefs generate themselves.
Your reps shouldn’t be mining for signals. They should be acting on them.
Stop building slides. Start building relationships. Free your team from the prep trap with Steerco.
