We are driven to grow, to drive much higher levels of revenue and attainment. As I study organizations, three strategies emerge.
Do More is the dominant strategy I see. It’s a simple strategy. If we want to make our numbers, if we want to grow, all we have to do is more. Increase sales by 50%? Easy more prospecting, demos, more deals, more pipeline, all very predictable. And when we have everyone working 7×24, then we hire more to do the same thing. More SDRs, AEs, sales engineers. Sometimes, there are nuances. For example, more tools present phenomenal scaling capability. Now rather than 100 dials, we can do 1000. Marketing automation enables us to dial up the emails at will. Social marketing tools enable us to go crazy on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.
Do more seems to be a key to competitive strategies. Out dial, out email, drown people in outreach and content. And competitors tend to stair step each other with the same do more strategies. And our customers tell us they could do with less…….
The underlying strategy to Do More, is an efficiency focus. How do we accomplish more in a fixed period of time, 7X24 seems to be a limitation in nature, but technology seems to make our ability to do more in that period, infinite.
When Do More fails, and it always does; some recognize the opportunity to Do Better. They question, “Why should we accept 17% win rates? What if we could increase them to 25, 30% or more? What do we have to do differently to achieve those targets?” Do better looks at effectiveness, are we getting the most out of everything we do? Can we increase win rates, deal values, reduce sales cycles. Can we improve cross sell, retention, renewals? Are we hiring the right people? How do we leverage our tools more effectively?
It’s surprising to me, few leaders and sellers seem to look at the do better strategy. They are so caught up in the way things have been done, what got us to where we are, we are doing the same things everyone else is doing……
We tend to look at do better strategies in desperation, when we’ve exhausted the capabilities of do more. But, we must look at how we continue to improve, and do better is a key aspect of continued improvement.
But there’s a more powerful, though seldom executed strategy. One that can drive higher rates of success and and growth than our scaling strategies of doing more/better. It’s the Do Differently strategy.
To explain the Do Differently strategy, by example, think of companies like Uber, AirBnB, Amazon. They didn’t do rides or vacation destinations “more or better” than taxis, limos, car rentals, hotels, bookstores; they did them completely differently. We have countless examples of great companies that have changed the rules of everything by adopting a Do Differently strategy. We have countless examples of new and different processes, approach to doing things Differently.
In doing things Differently, we may have a different mindset, we may define the problem differently, we certainly define the solutions or the process for solving the problems differently. We remove the constraints of the way things are always done and innovate.
As we look at our selling strategies, the most powerful are the Do Differently strategies. Some of the power of these come from engaging customers, addressing markets differently than everyone else. Doing something that innovates and helps us engage customers in more impact and in ways that are differentiated and more meaningful.
As a result, Do Differently helps us stand out from everyone else, creating unexpected value.
There is, perhaps, a more important reason for aggressively pursuing Do Differently strategies. The disruption, rate of change, staggering complexity we and our customers face compel us to Do Differently. If we don’t change, if we simply do more. or even do better, those strategies fail us and our customers. We stop growing, ultimately becoming irrelevant.
No one strategy is the “right” strategy, we have to combine each of these, appropriately. Once we have locked into a strategy that produces results, we scale it as rapidly as we can through doing more. At the same time, we want to look at continuous improvement, how we do better. The combination of efficiency and effectiveness enable us to grow in powerful and predictable ways.
But if we want to be leaders, we must constantly be looking at how we disrupt ourselves and how we engage our customers, we have greater opportunities to grow. We seize share, we outperform everyone else, we change the game. We look at how we do differently and how we help our customers do differently.
The highest performing companies we work with are masters at all 3. They are the highest performers in doing more/better. They are constantly experimenting and mastering doing different. They separate themselves from everyone else and are impossible to catch.
Think about it for yourself/organization. There’s a limit to how to do more, but you need to be doing as much as possible (OK, you don’t have to do it 7×24). You have to constantly look at doing better. But challenge yourself. What is one thing you can do differently–differently than what you have always done, differently than everyone else has thought about it, differently from what everyone else is doing? Experiment with that idea, master it, then do it more and better.
