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At a glance
- The memo is three words: “Stop selling that.” The hardest GTM call most post-Series A founders make in year two is not who to hire. It is what to stop selling.
- Every funded tech company has a product line, a segment, or a price tier that converts but does not scale. The revenue is real, the team is fluent at selling it, and the margin math no longer works.
- The memo runs three sentences and carries the CEO’s signature. The longer the memo, the slower the kill, and the more capital leaves before the GTM motion finds its real shape.
What is the three-word memo?
The memo is “Stop selling that.” Three words, sent internally, signed by the CEO.
The full version runs three sentences, because the three words need specifics attached: the line item being killed, the date the team stops quoting it, the date the team stops servicing it (a different and later date), and the comp adjustment for the reps who lose the deal flow. That is the whole document. No appendix, no transition framework, no slide.
The memo exists because every funded tech company in the $1M to $8M ARR band accumulates at least one offer that converts but does not scale. A services-heavy tier. A legacy segment from the pre-pivot days. A price point that wins deals because it underprices the cost to serve. The unit economics are bad, the implementation is custom, the customer success cost eats the margin. But the revenue is real, the logos are real, and the sales team is fluent at selling it. So it survives quarter after quarter, and the GTM motion stays shaped around an offer the company should have retired a year ago.
Killing it is the call. The memo is the instrument.
Why does the line survive so long?
Because three of the Six Traps defend it at once. Sunk Cost defends the money already spent building the offer: the engineering quarters, the enablement, the collateral. Loss Aversion defends the revenue: giving up a real $40K of MRR hurts roughly twice as much as recovering the margin feels good, so the room keeps finding reasons to wait. Status Quo defends the calendar: the kill is always scheduled for next quarter, when the pipeline will supposedly be strong enough to absorb it.
None of those defenses show up in the metrics review. They show up as a 30-slide GTM deck that ends with “optimize the motion” instead of “retire the offer.”
There is no shame in the line existing. It usually made sense when it launched; it closed early logos, funded the team, proved the market. The decisions weren’t wrong. They were right for a context that no longer exists. The question is not how the company got here. The question is what the next 90 days of selling effort should point at.
Why do three words force the call a 30-slide review avoids?
A 30-slide GTM review distributes the decision until nobody owns it. Slide 14 shows the segment economics, slide 22 proposes a pricing test, slide 29 recommends “continued monitoring,” and the room leaves with a workstream instead of a decision. The deck format itself is the escape hatch: any analysis large enough can always justify one more quarter of data.
Three words admit no hedge. “Stop selling that” is either signed or it is not. There is no version of the memo that means “mostly stop” or “stop pending further review.” The brevity is the discipline. A memo with a date is a decision; a deck with a recommendation is a discussion.
The signature matters as much as the length. When the kill comes from a VP of Sales, it reads as a territory dispute and gets relitigated within the month. When it comes from the CEO, in writing, with dates and a comp adjustment attached, it is the company’s position. The reps do not have to wonder whether defending the old line is still rewarded, because the memo answered that in sentence three.
How do you run the exercise?
Five steps, two weeks, no new tooling.
- Build the per-offer view. Pull revenue by product line, segment, and price tier, then attach the fully loaded cost to serve each one: implementation hours, support volume, customer success time, infrastructure. Most companies have never seen this view, because the chart of accounts was not built to produce it.
- Name the line that converts but does not scale. It is usually obvious once the cost to serve is attached. Look for the offer with real win rates and thin or negative margin after delivery cost, the one with a custom implementation behind every close.
- Write the three sentences. Sentence one names the line item and the date the team stops quoting it. Sentence two names the date the team stops servicing existing customers on it, which is later, because customers exit on a schedule and reps exit on a different one. Sentence three names the comp adjustment for the reps who lose the deal flow, so the kill does not quietly tax the people executing it.
- The CEO signs it and sends it. Not the VP of Sales, not the CFO, not a working group. The memo is short enough that there is nowhere for the accountability to hide, which is the point.
- Hold the dates and reset the pipeline targets the same week. The quota and pipeline math must be rebuilt around the remaining offers immediately, or the old line crawls back into the forecast within a quarter.
What happened when the memo was used?
A late Series A vertical SaaS company we worked with, just under $4M ARR and 20 months past its raise, carried a services-heavy enterprise tier: roughly $38K of MRR against more than $50K of monthly fully loaded delivery cost. The tier had survived four consecutive GTM reviews. Each review produced a deck; each deck produced a pricing test; each test bought the tier another quarter.
The memo took one afternoon. Stop-quote date: immediate. Stop-service date: 120 days out, with a migration path for the two accounts worth keeping on the core product. Comp adjustment: affected reps kept their accelerator thresholds for two quarters while the pipeline rebuilt.
Two quarters later the picture was different in kind, not just degree. The two migrated accounts renewed on the core offer. Three accounts churned, which the model had already priced in. Sales cycles on the core offer shortened because the team was no longer carrying two motions, and the delivery team’s recovered capacity absorbed the next two quarters of core growth without a hire. The burn the tier had been quietly consuming stopped leaving the building.
The founder’s read afterward was the most useful part: the four GTM reviews had not been analysis, they had been deferral with production values. The memo was the first artifact that could not be deferred.
What is the Decisive Finance role in this?
The per-offer math in step one is exactly what the 14-day Decision Diagnostic builds, and Product Line is one of the five canon recovery categories we score it against. The Diagnostic surfaces the line that converts but does not scale, puts the dollars under Keep, Kill, and Restructure, and hands the CEO a memo that is ready to sign. Guaranteed 3x your Diagnostic fee in recoverable value, in 14 days. Typical 5x to 10x.
Where to go from here
If there is an offer your team is fluent at selling and your margin cannot defend, the three sentences are writable this quarter.
Read the guarantee Book the call
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