3VC: Volume, Value, Velocity, Conversion
Every go-to-market goal comes down to one of four levers: volume, value, velocity or conversion.
Human truth
Teams chase every metric at once, or the one that's easiest to see. Usually that's conversion, and it's rarely the lever that moves the most money.
The parts
Volume
More of something: leads, meetings, opportunities, deals.
Value
More from each one: bigger deals, more revenue per conversion, something more to sell.
Velocity
Less time: a shorter stretch from one stage to the next, and a shorter cycle overall.
Conversion
A better rate from one stage to the next.
The four pull on each other. Push volume and conversion drops until you've worked out the process for the new volume, so you watch them together.
When to reach for it
A goal is too vague to act on ("grow pipeline"). You're deciding where to spend effort. You're looking at whether a team is balanced. Someone wants to build a separate pipeline for a new segment.
The essay
I
didn't invent 3VC. It hit my radar thanks to Marko Savic, who mentioned it in a white paper for his company, Funnel Cake.
Volume, value, velocity, conversion. I jumped on it. With my team at Go Nimbly, I built it into a framework we could run with clients, and Michael Ng and Chris Hamje built a working app around it. When I left Go Nimbly, I was using 3VC to make every strategic GTM improvement. Then I brought it to my next two companies, both early-stage startups, and it kept working. To think that frameworks I helped bring to life are being used every day is one of the most rewarding parts of this work.
Here's why it stuck. Any goal in go-to-market is one of four things. More volume of something. More value from something. Less time to get something done. A better conversion rate. When you name which one a goal is, it gets a lot easier to go after.
The levers pull on each other. As volume goes up, conversion goes down, until you figure out the process for the new volume. So you can't push one and forget the rest.
It also tells you where not to spend your effort. Everyone wants to fix conversion. But the gap between a great closer and an okay one is smaller than most people think. Teaching people value, or building more to sell, can move more money per deal than squeezing the close rate.
I use it on teams, too. Most people are strong at one or two of the four. That's fine. It's the team that needs to be balanced across all of them.
And I use it to say no. Someone wants a separate pipeline for a new segment. Fine, if the 3VC math is different there. If it isn't, it's the same pipeline with a new name.
It was never meant to be a pass-fail scorecard. It's a way of looking. Find where the pipeline underperforms on one of the four, then go find the customer gap that's causing it. ■
Where it came from
The idea came from Marko Savic, who described it in a white paper for his company, Funnel Cake. Jason and the Go Nimbly team built it into a framework, and Michael Ng and Chris Hamje built the app that ran it. Infographics titled "3VC Framework by Go Nimbly" still circulate. Jason took it to his next two companies, and it is built into majorGTM today.