I wrote, “Hyper-Efficiency, The Secret To Sales Success In 2025!” It’s generating interesting discussion, perhaps it’s the thoughtful image I created to illustrate the concept. Jim Barnet asked a fascinating question, I wanted to expand on it. Jim started to talk about it from the customer point of view (certainly a novel approach).
As we continue to strive for hyper-efficiency, figuring out how we get more and more accomplished within a certain period of time, our customers are at least 2 steps ahead of us in their efficiency efforts. Perhaps, they have achieved “Ultimate Efficiency!”
We continue to struggle to get more done each hour of each day, customers are approaching spending zero hours of each day dealing with our outreach. They simply delete or ignore. And the tools enable them to do this, enabling them to spend no time—not even looking at the things we efficiently generate.
Having mastered this, they have have moved forward to proactively purge sellers from their lives. Over 85% prefer a rep-free buying environment, actively seeking alternatives to dealing with sellers. Where they can’t eliminate sellers, they are minimizing their time with sellers.
Despite our continued attempts at hyper-efficiency, the customers have beat us. They are achieving ultimate efficiency!
Which causes us to ask some uncomfortable questions. If customers are always several steps ahead of us in their efficiency moves, does continuing to focus on hyper efficiency mean anything. Does accomplishing more in an hour mean anything when the targets of those efforts have mastered spending zero time with those outreaches?
Should we be doing something differently? I’m sorry, I’m a broken record on doing things differently.
Perhaps, if we look at where customers struggle most. It’s not in their efficiency, it’s in their effectiveness. They struggle with their change/problem management initiatives. They fail more often than they succeed. They take increasing amounts of time in doing this. They struggle with confidence–not in their choice but are they doing the right thing for the organization and them.
Perhaps if our efforts were redirected to helping them with this. Perhaps if we helped them become more effective and more efficient, we would change the way we use our time.
We would no longer be doing the wrong work hyper-efficiently, rather we would be more effective and efficient with our customers.
I know this is heresy. But since it seems customers will continue to outperform us in our efficiency game, we might look at doing something different (my apologies, this just keeps popping up.).
Afterword: This is the AI generated discussion of this post. It’s short, but they get straight to the point.
Hmmm, maybe they, too are focused on efficiency 😉
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