I have to confess huge frustration with too many of the conversations I see in my social feeds. People take a position, leveraging (perhaps cherry picking) data to support their premises. While, their arguments make sense–obviously, they’ve structured them to make sense, but they are fundamentally flawed.
Most of the time, they are just defenses of the status quo. And it’s ironic, because too often they think they are presenting deep insights and “aha” moments. But they justify their insights through defending the status quo.
For example, recently I got into a “discussion” with someone arguing the importance of volume of meetings and setting meeting metrics. Logically, his argument made sense. He presented a spreadsheet model where the math worked. But I challenged him. He was basing everything on market data that win rates are 20%. I suggested, “Why don’t we look at increasing our win rates? If we do this, look at how it changes the number of meetings, the number of opportunities necessary to achieve our goals.” He pushed back, suggesting these win rates are normal. He went so far to present market data, “n>100” that for complex B2B sales over $75K win rates were 22%, and justified his premise based on this.
While I question the data, I thought, “Even if this is true, why do we accept this? Why do we accept these win rates as the way things are and continue to design our strategies based on these? What would it take to increase our win rates? What impact would that have on our performance?”
In fairness to his individual, he is not alone in this. I see too many accepting low win rates, or “we have to do 1500 touches for a meeting,” or “this is what SDRs/AEs/AMs do,” or “this is the way you have to GTM,” or…… Even though all of this may be well supported by data, why do we accept these? Why don’t we question them, starting to ask, “What if we could change this?”
Another popular “this is the way things are” topic is tenure. I read a piece by a “thought leader,” suggesting, average tenure of executives is 18 months. And, the data I’ve seen supports this, in fact I’ve seen data suggesting it’s 11-15 months. So he is correct in this data point. But where he goes off the tracks, at least to my thinking, is he goes on to suggest, “because it’s this, this how we structure our jobs to succeed in 18 months….”
And my question is, “Is this the way things should be, why do we accept this, what do we have to do to change this, what would result? Think about it, regardless the size of an organization, identifying a problem and need for change, implementing that change initiatives, and sustaining the improvement, takes a long time. There is very little, other than trivial changes that we can achieve in 18 months. Then imagine the change fatigue as leader after leader comes into the organization,
The reality is, if we accept these short tenures as the way things are, we are very limited in what we can change and how we can constantly improve.
And, supporting this, when we look at consistently high performing organizations tenure tends to be longer.
I can go on, there are so many things that we accept because the data show us that things are so, yet we never question why, what if we could change these.
It’s ironic, to see so many so committed to the status quo. And in being committed to the status quo, we are ultimately committing to mediocrity.
If we look through business history, great leaps forward are achieved through challenging the status quo! Unless some innovators started thinking about, “There’s a different way of getting from place to place than taxi’s, There’s a different way to stay some place than hotels, There’s a different way to search than using Google, There’s a different way to….” And none of those innovators committed to only 18 months and moving on! Look at how long Benihoff, Gates, Ellison, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Altman and others. And look at the commitment to the long term of many of their successors like Cook, Nadella, and so many others.
All of these people were/are committed to change, to innovating, to challenging the status quo, to never accepting the number because “that’s the way things are….”
Innovation and change is always based on challenging, not defending the status quo.
In everything we do with our GTM strategies, we must constantly be challenging the status quo. Despite what the data might say, we make more progress by thinking, “Does it have to be that way? What might happen if we could change?”
Afterword: Below is the AI generated conversation about this post, it offers some interesting ideas and interpretations. Enjoy!
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