I was doing a thought experiment with a team a few days ago. I thought I’d extend it to this audience.
Before I do, I recently listened to an interview with Christopher Nolan about his latest movie, The Odyssey. They were filming the whole thing in IMAX, which presented monstrous problems for the speaking parts of the production. In considering how he addressed it he said,
“The limitations give everybody a focus.”
File that away as we walk through the exercise.
The team sold software-based technology tools. While their performance was reasonable, it wasn’t where they wanted it to be. Pipelines were weak, deal quality was sketchy. Much of their activity was less focused on managing deals but finding new deals. You guessed it, tons of outbound, low response rates, and cycle through the same thing again and again.
The thing they kept coming back to was, “We are doing all these activities, just like we see everyone else doing. We’re using the tools, leveraging AI, but it’s not producing the quantity and quality of discussions we need. We seem to be just wasting our time with doing more and more!”
I posed a question, “What would you change, if there were only 10 accounts each of you could pursue?”
Alarm bells started going off!
“There are 1000s of orgs that need our products, we just have to get to them and talk to them! How can we just limit it to 10 each?”
I told them we would just play with it for a while. I shared my own story with them. Early in my career, I was a global accounts guy. I had only one account. They were always banks or brokerage firms. I couldn’t cross the street, literally, and go to another bank, even if I knew they had a strong need for what I sold.
My job was to hit my quota by finding new opportunities within a single account. And those quotas were big. My first year, it was $27M. It meant I had to find big opportunities, not trials or POCs.
With that, we took a breath. Then I asked them to start thinking about what they would do?
They asked the first right question, “Are they in our ICP?”
I replied, “Each of you are choosing the 10 accounts. If I were you, I would make sure they are in the hottest part of your ICP.”
Then they started brainstorming.
“We’d verify they are in our ICP….”
“We’d research them deeply to understand what they do, how they work, what their problems are….”
“We’d start researching whether they are currently having the problems we solve….”
“We’d start to see, if their competitors are doing things that might represent threats they aren’t aware of…”
“We’d start trying to figure out who in the organization has deepest ownership of the problems…. We’d figure out the other people who might be involved in the change decision.”
“Then we’d start trying to reach them to engage them. We’d try to reach talk to them about their challenges and how we can help them.”
“OK,” I replied, “Be careful about pitching too early, get to know them and what they are trying to do first. That gives the context about how you can help them. Then you can start talking about solutions. What else?”
“Well, since we have only 10 each, we would keep finding different ways to engage them. Perhaps, looking at different parts of the organizations, different ways they might get value from our products….”
I paused the discussion. We all grabbed coffee.
Then I asked, “If you did this, do you think you could have more meetings and engagement then you currently get?”
There was some discussion about this.
“The meeting yield per 1000 emails and calls is very low, a percent at most.”
“I think we might get much more response, at least on a percentage basis because we are much more focused. We don’t have anywhere else to go, so we have to figure out how to make this happen.”
Another person said, “We probably can engage them much more impactfully in the first calls because we know so much more than we do with the 1000s of calls we make. We know nothing other than a name and company name for those.”
Several kept coming back to a previous point. “We don’t have anywhere else to go, we have to find something and figure it out.”
They were beginning to warm up to the idea, so I asked them, “How is it different from what you are doing today? Is there anything that you are doing today that might be better than this alternative?
They thought for a while.
“Well, it takes more time to research those companies and get to know them so we can engage them impactfully. Today, we do mostly no research. We have some AI summaries and maybe a LinkedIn profile. But we really don’t know anything about them.”
Someone took that comment and responded, “How much time does it really take, we have lots of tools that can help us do this. And if we each focused on a segment, we would gain much more knowledge and experience.”
The ideas started snowballing. People started sharing past experiences where they had really connected with people, because they had a deeper level of knowledge about the organization and the individuals.
Some started thinking about their current work. “Well with our 1000s of outreaches a day, we are getting at most 1% responses, that’s about 10 a day. And the quality of the conversations really suck! They don’t produce much. It seems we are spending a huge amount of time for really bad results.”
Again, they started talking about this new approach, their perspectives started changing. They started thinking they could get more results from the time spent focusing on the 10 customers, than from the time spent with virtually no focus.
Finally, at one point, someone said, “What we are doing now isn’t working, why don’t we give it a shot!”
We started going through some planning, we decided to experiment with it for 30 days, to see if there were some changes. We knew that was short, but we just wanted to see if they could have more and higher quality conversations than they currently were getting.
As we started to adjourn, someone asked, “Our solutions focus on a specific set of functions within an organization. What happens, when we have done everything we can, talked to everyone, tried multiple ideas, and they aren’t interested?”
I responded, “Once you have exhausted all the possibilities with your first 10, then you look at the next 10. But be careful, you won’t exhaust the possibilities with one or two calls, that’s just reverting to the way you currently work.”
One lady, who had been pretty quiet during the conversation said, “I’m going to capture the 1000, 10 at a time!”
Some final thoughts:
If what you are currently doing isn’t working. Doing more probably won’t work.
If you are targeting 1000, maybe you aren’t targeting anything.
Can you name your first 10?
What does that tell you if you can’t?
“The limitations give everybody a focus.”
Afterword: Attached is the AI generated discussion of the post. It’s much shorter than their other discussions, I think they were struggling with the ideas. It’s not one of the best. Perhaps best enjoyed by looking at what they missed. Try it out anyway.
