“Activities Don’t Drive Strategy!”

Brandon Fluharty made a brilliant observation: Activities Don’t Drive Strategy!

While no leader sets out to have activities drive strategy (at least I hope they don’t), too often we get distracted and activities take center stage. Stated differently, we stop seeing the forest and focus on the trees.

Activities are the things we do to execute our strategies. Our strategies define our overall goals, our target markets, how we create value with the customers, how we differentiate our offerings, what we are trying to achieve with our customers and for our organization.

Activities are the things we do to execute those strategies. But if we don’t have our strategies in place, if we don’t know where we are going and what’s critical to us in achieving those goals, we can’t define the activities we need to execute the strategies.

We may choose the wrong activities. We may not emphasized the most critical activities. We may not understand the critical success factors in their execution. We become distracted by the activity itself, even though it may be a meaningless or wrong activity. We become trapped in doing what we have always done, focusing on the activity and exploring how we do more.

Sadly, the playbooks of too many sellers and sales leaders focus first on activity. For example we focus on outreach. We make the assumption that outreach drives revenue (and it is an activity important to our revenue growth strategies). We measure those outreach activities and if we are not hitting our revenue goals, we demand more activities. We focus on more deals, not how our effectiveness in managing and winning those deals.

We never question, are those outreaches the right kinds of outreach, should we change our what we are doing? Or outreach activities may not be the problem. We tend to squander 80-85% of the opportunities we qualify. The problem really is with our deal execution, not our outreach. We need to look into not doing more deals, but how do we get more out of the deals we are already engaged in!

Our activity formulas tell us when to hire more people, yet we neglect to look at how we raise the productivity and performance of our people.

Our activity formulas guide us based on what we have done, and never enable us to imagine what we could do.

Our activities limit possibilities because we never confront the issue, should we do different activities? We would never imagine shifting to an account led strategy, or a partner/channel led strategy. We would never explore new markets or regions, if we let our focus on activity become our strategy.

Our strategies must always define and drive the activities critical to the execution of those strategies. And when we fail, we must start with our strategies, questioning whether we have the right strategies in place, then are we executing the right activities as effectively as possible?

Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post, enjoy!