We invest enormous amounts of energy seeking to avoid dong the work. We constantly seek shortcuts, things that enable us to avoid doing the work critical to creating and sustaining performance. Our mindsets aren’t so focused on improving efficiency, rather on avoiding doing the work.
We scour social channels for shortcuts; what are the easiest ways to prospect, how can I send more emails/make more calls, how do I close more deals with less effort, how do I leverage tools like ChatGPT to do the work for me, and on and on……..?
We constantly experiment with different shortcuts, trying to figure out how to make them work for us (apparently they worked for others). It takes some time and effort to make them work as advertised, and when we can’t make them work, we look for another short cut.
We struggle because the shortcuts don’t help us do the “whole job” more effectively. So while they might be helpful for part of the job, they often create more work for the other parts of the job. And as we start linking shortcuts, things that are disconnected in the process, we find ourselves doing more work to fit them together, trying to manage a whole bunch of varied shortcuts that are supposed to make things easier for us.
When we finally find these shortcuts, they don;t last very long because everyone else is doing the same thing. The same prospecting scripts–so nothing is different or stands out. The same objection handling and closing techniques, Carefully constructed phraseology no longer resonates because everyone else is using the same technique. And the answers ChatGPT gives us are the same it gives everyone else. We start thinking, “How can we be different?”
And we go through the cycle again, we look for new shortcuts, Things that enable us to produce the results without doing the work.
When I look at the time and energy people spend looking for shortcuts, I think, “This is just too much work….”
I start thinking, “What would be different if we really focused on ‘doing the work?'”
We would focus our time on how we connect most effectively and impactfully with the customer? How do we engage them in ways that create meaning and value? What experiences do we create that have the most impact? As we begin to learn these, being as effective as possible, then we shift our focus to how do we execute those things as efficiently as possible. We learn what is most impactful, we systematize it, scale it. We learn from others in our organization, creating an execution framework that is consistently executed across the organization. Overtime, we become very productive, doing things that are most impactful in executing our jobs. And as we gain richer experience, we continue to refine and improve our execution strategies.
We also become very nimble in the execution of the process. Because we have a standard process that we consistently execute, we can more quickly adapt to the nuances of each situation.
We are most productive and impactful, when we look at the buying/selling process from end to end, maximizing our effectiveness and impact across the entire process. Shortcuts, by definition, can never enable us to be most productive in the execution of this end-to-end process.
Somehow, it seems it is much easier to do the work……
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