Shit We Have To Stop!

This week, two separate conversations with CROs.  Completely different markets/industries, both high performing in their segments.  But they were deeply frustrated.  “We’re struggling to make our numbers!”

As we dove into it, their markets were OK, customers were still growing and investing.  Then we dove into the data, pipelines very anemic, but win rates, average deal sizes, sales cycles were reasonable.

“What are they doing to find and qualify new opportunities?  Where are they struggling with their prospecting?”  I asked.

As we reviewed it, their teams were doing pretty good jobs, there were some areas of improvement, but it seemed they weren’t doing enough prospecting.  As we talked about it and why they seemed not to be doing enough prospecting, or even working their deals as aggressively as possible.

Then we got to the core issue, “They don’t have time…..”

I hear this from virtually every CRO or top sales executive I talk to.  I hear it from the sellers I talk to.  I’ve heard the same thing for decades.  One of the biggest issues impacting performance is not having time to do the things they must be doing to achieve their goals.

Let me repeat this, one of the biggest issues I see is, at all levels, we aren’t spending the time we need to spend doing the things we need to achieve our goals.

Sellers aren’t spending enough time working, deeply, with their customers to help them move through their buying cycles.  They aren’t spending enough their time doing the right prospecting that helps them identify and qualify high quality opportunities for their pipelines.  They may be spending too much time on the wrong opportunities, robbing them of the time they need to spend on the right opportunities.

Managers, at all levels are constantly busy in meaningless meetings, or “fixing problems.”  They aren’t spending the time they  need working with their people, coaching them, getting out to customers, doing the things that drive business.

I see this constant struggle in all organizations.  I see it in the highest performing organizations.

The questions are, Where do we need to be investing our time for greatest impact?  And, What shit do we have to stop?

It’s human nature to focus on the first question, but we forget to focus on the second—what do we need to stop?

It’s amazing how we, unconsciously, start robbing selling time.  Some of it is just not paying attention.  In a world where we are pressed for higher activity levels, we seldom think, what should we be stopping?

As we introduce new programs, new processes, new tools, new training, new expectations and goals, we tend to add it to last month’s pile of new initiatives, or last year’s….

And sometimes, while well intended, our workflows, roles and responsibilities are not well defined or they need to be updated.

And, as in the case of one of the CROs I was talking to, the internal organization was failing to meet their commitments, forcing sellers to spend a lot of time managing unhappy customers!  That not only adversely impacted their selling time, but those unhappy customers would be unlikely to do business in the future.

So am I talking about time management?

I suppose I am, afterall, this is post is focused on freeing up people’s time to do their jobs.  But I’m not looking at the traditional, and valuable, techniques of time blocking, to-do lists, activity management.

I suggesting we need to examine how we are spending our time.  Are we spending our time on the things most impactful to doing our jobs and achieving our goals or are we spending it on things that divert us from doing this?

This happens to everyone and every organization, even the best of organizations.

I’ve used this example before, but some years ago, we worked with a high performing Fortune 500 sales team.  They were achieving their goals, but as we looked at how they were doing it and the struggle these great sellers had, something seemed off.  We did a quick study asking them how they spent their time.  For a few weeks, hundreds of them would take 5 minutes every evening filling a report (Yeah, I know, we were taking selling time from them). 

At the end of the study, we found the “time available for selling” was 9%.  That was, time spent prepping for customer engagements/meetings, time spent with customers, time spent in the followup to those meetings.

The key issue was, where were they spending the other 91% of their time?  Some of it was time they were wasting.  Some of it was things they had always done but could have stopped doing.  The majority of it was time they were spending getting things done within their company.  They sold very complex configurable systems, so time had to be spent with experts configuring them, pricing them, developing contracts.  But a huge amount of their time was spent with other parts of the organization.  And those other parts of the organization were just doing their jobs, not realizing they were robbing sales people of their time.

I see similar things, perhaps not as extreme in virtually every organization I work with.

In young high growth organizations, we spend the time because there is no one else, but as the organization grows and people can do those functions, too often, we keep doing what we’ve always done.

In more mature organizations, we keep focusing on new programs, but not on what we should stop.

In too many organizations, our workflow, roles, responsibilities are ill defined or not working.  Things fall through the cracks, sometimes there are redundant conflicting efforts, and sales people have to patch things together, masking them from the customer.

How do we begin to address it?

A good way is to go through an exercise I call, “Shit We Have To Stop!”

Here’s how it works:

1.  Have the people in the workgroup, or if you are doing this for yourself, write down at least 50 things that take them away from doing their jobs.
   1. Why 50?  It’s easy to come up with the 5-10 things that annoy us, but usually there are a lot more.  Set an audacious quota for shit you need to stop.  If you can’t complete the 50, do the remaining with, “Dave made me waste my time writing this down.”
   2. Be very specific, don’t say, “I’m wasting my time in too many meetings.” Identify the specific meeting that was a waste of your time.  Or rather than, “I’m spending too much time in reports,” make it “I spent 30 minutes on this report this week.”  Until you start getting down to details, you won’t be able to see the specific areas or patterns that are draining your time.
2. Once each person has completed their 50, as a team start going through them, categorize them into three categories (generally, it’s most powerful if you have the team meeting and the put “yellow stickies with a line item” on one of three whiteboards.  Alternatively you can use tools like Miro to help). 
   1. The first board represents all the things that you can just stop doing and it will have no impact on anyone in the organization our our work. 
   2. The second board are things that are actually the responsibility of other that somehow you are doing.  For example, one of the CROs I mentioned reviews every contract, because her contracting team and the legal teams miss important issues.
   3. The third board, represents things you need to stop doing, but you can’t identify where the responsibility for doing these lies.
3. Have everyone in the work group put their 50 items on one of the three boards.  Don’t discuss what they are doing, just get it done.
4. Once every item has been classified onto one of the three boards, choose the first board, things we can just stop doing.  Look at everything the group has put on the board.  Look for patterns or groupings of similar things across the work group.  These might illustrate bigger things around bad habits that impact the entire organization.  For example, I always see things on reporting, people are spending a lot of time generating information for a report, only to discover no one is using it.  Or certain types of meetings.  Or certain tools in the tech stack.  Now just declare these things dead and make sure everyone in the organization has stopped doing them.
5. Moving to the second board, these are thing that must be done, but aren’t really the responsibility of the people on the team.  Again, group these, look for common patterns.  Inevitably, these are workflow, roles/responsibilities issues.  To address them, we have to figure out who is responsible for getting these things done.  Work with them to understand/accept it, and smoothly transfer everything to them.  For example in the contracts case I mentioned a moment ago, the contracts and legal teams didn’t understand their responsibilities and didn’t know what to look for in the contracts.  All easily fixable and saved this CRO 5-7 hours a week!
6. The third board is more challenging.  It is stuff that needs to get done, but not by the sellers.  But we can’t identify where in the organization it fits.  Here, you typically find how the work has changed, but the organization hasn’t changed to keep up with it.  It may be workflow or roles/responsibilities poorly defined.  It may be we haven’t put the resources in place to do these things.  Recently, sellers were spending an inordinate amount of time working with development and operations to make sure they could produce what the customer wanted to buy, they worked with legal, pricing and other parts of the organization to finally put together a proposal.  Inevitably, the customer wanted changes and the sellers would have to cycle through again.  When business volumes were lower, it wasn’t much of an issue.  But as the volume and complexity of the deals skyrocketed this consumed a huge amount of seller time.  Investing in a deal desk and a deal review board, changed everything.  The amount of time sellers were spending sheparding trough each deal was reduced by over 75%.  They redirected the time helping the customers manage their side of the same process or working on other deals.

There is a lot of stuff that consumes seller time that shouldn’t.  Some of it is bad habits, sloppiness.  Some of it is critical but not the seller responsibility.  We tend to be unconscious of what’s happening, just filling our days with more work, but getting less done.

Get your team together, do this exercise.  Every six months, go through it again.  Find the Shit You Have To Stop!

Afterword:  Here is the AI based discussion of this post.  It’ brief but pretty good.  They make a couple of big/obvious mistakes, for example confusing a deal desk for a travel desk.  But the discussion is pretty good.  Enjoy!