“We’re Doing Everything Right, But Nothing’s Working!”

I was struck by this sentence in a LI post today, “We are doing everything right, but nothing’s working!”

I see variants of this every day:

• We’re doing everything right, it’s not working as well….
• We’re doing exactly what made us successful in the past, it’s no longer working….
• We’re doing what everyone else is doing, and what we have always done, it’s not producing the same results….
• We’re doing everything we’ve always done but we have to do 10X to get the previous results…..
• ….[fill in your excuse for non performance]….

Scratching my head at these and similar statements, I wonder, “If you are doing everything right, then it should be working! That’s how designing and executing your GTM/selling strategies work! If it isn’t producing the desired outcome, then there is something flawed in the design or in what you are doing!”

I’m constantly befuddled by the acceptance of YoY slips in revenue performance, slips in % of people making quota, slips in win rates and deal values, slips in retention. I’ll stop here, I get wound up, but you know the same problem.

We keep doing the same things, over and over, faster and faster, yet nothing is working.

I get it, in the heat of the day to day trying to make things work, we sometimes say these things. I’ve done it, usually out of frustration and knowing I have to change.

But when we pause, take a breath, we see these as the examples of Einstein’s definition of insanity.

When the things we have always done no longer work, when they no longer work as well, the only answer is “We have to change!” No amount of hand wringing and no amount of doing more will produce sustainable changes in results.

Sometimes, we think we are doing everything right, we confuse our efforts with results.  But on closer examination, something’s off. We may be taking shortcuts, we may be going through the motions, but not doing things the way they should be done.. The answers may be to get back to doing things right and avoid slipping into bad habits.

Sometimes, we are doing things exactly as we designed them, and they aren’t working. We have to begin a problem solving process. What isn’t working? Why isn’t it working? Has something changed that causes it to no longer work? As we start understanding what the problem is, then we can start asking, “What can we do about it? What do we have to change? What happens if we don’t change?”

Too often, however, we skip this step of understanding what’s happening, why, what we have to change, the risks, and how we successfully make that change.

Instead, we just choose something new. We bring in an new CRO with a different playbook, we leverage the latest tool or technology, we provide different training. We believe the change, without understanding the underlying problem/issues will solve the problem. But it seldom does (or the odds of stumbling on the right answer without understanding the problem are similar to winning at a Vegas slot machine.)

There are no shortcuts to fixing performance. There are no miracle cures, or a “just do this one thing” advice from a guru. We have to understand the problem, we had to assess different paths forward, their risks and time to results. And when we decide, letting our teams understand why this is necessary, we have to execute sharply.

While I say there are no shortcuts to fixing performance, what I am not saying is this process takes a long time! Our experience, in fact, is just the opposite–the time to sustainable improvement with this simple, yet disciplined approach to problem solving is almost always shorter than the time to sustainable results for miracle cures.

“We’re doing everything right, but nothing’s working,” is just sheer blindness. It’s really, “What we are doing is not working, we need to change!”

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion.  I love the way the post is interpreted and how they present the points in a very different way.  Enjoy!