Happy Triple Threat Thursday!
Here’s one Signal to notice, one Spark to try, and one Shift to consider.
This week’s theme: Work moves faster when teams stop carrying decisions the system should have made for them.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Revenue work is becoming engineering work.
Teams are moving from improvisation to specification.
The days of “just figure it out” are ending. Buyers expect consistency. Teams expect clarity. And leaders are realizing that intuition doesn’t scale past a certain revenue line.
Across the companies I talk to, the pattern is the same.
Stages aren’t the problem. Steps are.
Talent isn’t the problem. Ambiguity is.
People aren’t slow. The system is unclear.
Revenue teams are starting to behave more like engineering teams without even realizing it. They’re writing definitions of done. They’re mapping dependencies. They’re tightening handoffs. Not because they fell in love with process.
Because the market forced them to.
Why it matters now:
Specification reduces chaos. It lowers cognitive load. It reveals where the real friction sits. And when teams move from improvising to operating, output becomes predictable. That predictability is the difference between $8M and $30M.
What to do this week:
• Take one recurring revenue step and write down what “good” actually looks like.
• Name the inputs, outputs, and owner.
• Ask your team to follow it for five days.
If it feels boring, you’re doing it right.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
Use The One Line Test GPT
If you cannot communicate the value, the team cannot execute it.
Most companies underestimate how much weight a message carries once it leaves the room. A value proposition gets repeated by sales. Interpreted by marketing. Expanded by product. Shortened by an SDR. Softened in a pitch. Tightened in an email.
By the time it reaches the buyer, it barely resembles the intent.
This is why so many initiatives start strong and finish confused.
Not because the idea was wrong.
Because the message was never stable.
The One Line Test forces stability.
If you cannot say the value in one sentence, you do not have something the team can align around.
And if the team cannot repeat the same sentence, the buyer will hear a different story every time.
Why this matters:
Mid-sized companies do not lose momentum because of effort. They lose momentum because every function is running a slightly different version of the idea. One sentence removes the drift. One sentence travels clean. One sentence becomes a shared anchor.
How to use it this week:
Take one offer, initiative, campaign, or internal shift.
Run it through The One Line Test.
Share the sentence with your team.
Ask them to repeat it back without notes.
If the message comes back different, it is not ready.
Here is the tool:
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
You do not scale by adding more people. You scale by making the work easier to do right.
A lot of companies try to outrun their problems with headcount.
If something is not moving, they hire.
If a team is overwhelmed, they hire.
If results dip, they hire.
It works until the complexity catches up.
More people mean more handoffs.
More handoffs mean more confusion.
And suddenly the business is heavy in ways no new hire can fix.
I worked with a company this year that added ten people to reduce bottlenecks.
The bottlenecks did not move.
The work was simply too hard to execute cleanly.
Once we simplified three steps in their revenue path, the same team moved faster with fewer touches. The problem was not capacity. It was friction.
Why it matters:
Scale comes from clarity, not bodies.
When the work is simple to do right, not easy but simple, people spend their time performing instead of navigating ambiguity.
How to apply it this week:
• Choose one place where your team routinely slows down.
• Do not ask who to hire. Ask what part of that step is harder than it should be.
• Fix the friction point, not the staffing chart.
The lighter the work becomes, the faster the business moves.
💡 Operator Insight
I asked my client’s marketing team to track how long their decisions actually took.
The surprising part was not the work itself.
Most decisions were made in five minutes.
The drag lived in the space around the work.
The handoffs. The waiting. The hesitation. The “I’ll look at it later.”
Those five minute decisions were costing them five days.
No one in the room had ever seen the problem through that lens.
📚 What I’m Reading
🔗 AI and the Future of Small Business
Insight: Seventy five percent of SMBs are investing in AI, but the ones seeing real lift are the ones who cleaned up their workflows first. AI does not fix structure. It magnifies it.
🔗 Why Big Tech Is Struggling to Convince the Market on AI’s ROI
Insight: Even the companies building AI are being pushed to prove revenue impact, not possibility. The era of AI faith is over. The era of clear outcomes has begun.
🔗 Consumers Are Moving Faster Than Brands Can Respond
Insight: Younger buyers make decisions in days, not weeks. Brands that cannot match that pace are losing attention long before they lose deals. Speed is becoming a marketing advantage, not a sales tactic.
📈 The Takeaway
Friction is usually designed, not discovered. Most teams only notice it once they’re carrying it.
Thanks for reading Triple Threat. See you next Thursday with another Signal, Spark, and Shift.
— Alexandria Ohlinger
p.s. If this helped you think sharper or move faster, share it with someone who builds the way you do. And if you want more practical insight between issues, connect with me on LinkedIn.