Pursuing Efficient Ineffectiveness…..

We have long been consumed with efficiency in our GTM efforts. We spend billions in providing tools and technologies to increase the efficiency.

For years, we’ve focused on how we can pack more outbound emails, social, and calls into each hour. We can generate 1000s of “personalized” outreaches in each hour. And AI has shown us how we can scale these to even higher levels.

We have tools that help us in preparing for calls/meetings with prospects and customers. They help us research, target. We can incorporate engagement data. And again, AI has does much of that work for us, eliminating the time we used to spend on doing these things.

There has been no part of our GTM strategies that we haven’t been able to drive stunning levels of efficiency. And we are on a race to drive these even higher!

And we seem to measure “success” based on our abilities to drive much higher levels of “work.”

That work, regardless of the volumes and efficiency with which we perform it, is meaningless if it doesn’t produce the outcomes we need.

And this seems to be lost in all the expert advice and with the productivity tools/techniques we are consumed with. We don’t do the work just to do the work, we do the work to produce outcomes.

When one looks at lean/agile experts, their first focus is effectiveness. That is, “What work do we need to do to produce the needed results?”

Once this is in place, then these experts ask themselves the question, “Can we produce the same outcomes by working more efficiently?” Reduced effectiveness or outcomes, are unacceptable in any efficiency efforts.

But our adoption of these principles into our GTM efforts have completely lost this.

• Response rates are plummeting faster than our ability to scale the outreach.
• Customers proactively seek alternatives to working with sellers, seeking to minimize time spent with them.
• Win rates, likewise, have plummeted, even as we stuff more and more into the tops of our pipelines. We accept declining win rates, declining deal values, lengthening buying cycles. All of these adversely impact the results/outcomes we create.
• Customer regret, once they’ve made a decision is increasing. This adversely impacts the customer experience, retention and renewal. And in defending the status quo, we no longer help the customer innovate and change. They can only turn to others to continue to improve and grow.
• And the list continues, declining percentages of people making quota, declines in organizations to achieve their revenue goals, increases in attrition and turnover at all levels.
• …….and on and on…..

Our jobs are not to be efficient for efficiency’s sake. Our jobs are to produce the outcomes we need to grow and scale.

We do not produce the results we could and must produce by being efficiently in effective.

How do we get better at everything we do, rather than simply doing more of it?