One of the topics that often comes up in the startups I’m involved in is sales. As companies seek to scale, they need to move from founder-led sales to hiring sales leads who can help increase their reach in the market. The challenge is that salespeople tend to be likable, smooth-talking individuals who don’t always deliver their quota but always have good stories about why sales turned out the way it did.
My rule of thumb is that in B2B sales, the new sales lead has one quarter, at most two, to close their first sale and they need to start hitting their quota after that. If that doesn’t happen, they have to be fired. This may sound harsh, but the reality is that no small startup can support individuals who don’t carry their own weight.
The interesting observation is twofold. First, most founders have a really hard time accepting that someone isn’t working out and needs to be let go. Often, they did the hiring themselves and they believe in the person as they wouldn’t have hired him or her otherwise. Typically, getting the individual going requires quite a bit of investment of time and resources, so there’s a part of sunk cost that would have to be written off. But mostly it’s because the founders’ world model and set of goals need to be revised. And people don’t like to be wrong.
Second, the moment the plug is pulled and things have been taken care of, the feedback I almost always get is that they waited way too long before letting go of an individual who wasn’t working out. It’s normal human behavior, but in general, we tend to stick with a set of goals, a plan or a direction way longer than what’s good for us. We often feel in the pit of our stomach that something is ‘off,’ but acting on it requires quite a bit of resistance to be overcome.
One factor is often that we worry about how others will perceive us. We don’t want to look like we change our opinions on a dime and behave according to the “shiny bumper syndrome,” running after every new thing when inspiration strikes us. We rather stick with something that isn’t working and come across as reliable, solid and consistent than change our minds and risk looking unreliable and flaky.
When scaling the problem to a large company context, things become much worse. Any strategy put forward for execution will have a significant number of people who are detractors and who don’t believe in the strategy. To overcome resistance from that group, the proponents have to act with even more confidence than what they actually may feel. Even the smallest hint of doubt will be oil on the fire of those who don’t believe in the strategy and may easily result in a deadlock that will ensure that nothing will happen.
Although all companies change strategies and goals, the point of change is often too late, resulting in a significant loss of opportunity for the company. Many know I worked for Nokia at some point in the past. Even if I left before things really went down the drain, while I was there, I couldn’t escape the feeling that everyone was worried that things weren’t well and that we needed to change.
As the saying goes, great companies change before the need for change is there. Good companies change when it’s clear that change is needed. Bad companies also change but often so late that the only option left is a final Hail Mary attempt that, if it fails, basically puts the company out of business.
Of course, we all want to be great individuals and companies so we need to overcome the dysfunctional behaviors that we’re prone to exhibiting. In my experience, three mechanisms can help: objectification, experimentation and exploration.
First, objectification is concerned with avoiding connecting your personality and personal brand to a specific set of goals. Instead, there’s distance between you and the goals, visible both to you and the people around you. That allows for a much more objective discussion of the challenges associated with the current journey. It’s less of an “I’m right and you’re wrong” discussion, but rather “we thought this is the right path forward, but we’re open to revisiting that belief.”
Second, although I keep mentioning the importance of experimentation, I simply see so many people fall into the illusion of certainty. As another saying goes, it’s not the things we don’t know that get us into trouble, it’s the things that we do know that just ain’t so. We need to continuously pressure-test our beliefs, and that requires experimentation. This is the case for tactics that we believe will progress us toward our goals, as well as for goals where we need to ensure that pursuing them will indeed further us in our personal and company mission.
Finally, exploration. There’s a debate among personal development folks around the notion of a plan B. The idea is that the presence of such a plan B will decrease the commitment to plan A and may be at the core of its failure. Some believe that we should put everything into plan A and not allow for distractions. This may be the case in the 1 percent of situations where a plan fails simply because slightly too little effort was put in. The much higher likelihood, however, is that either the plan is solid and succeeded despite some distractions or the plan is flawed and won’t succeed no matter how much energy we put in. So, we need to spend some part of our energy exploring other paths, other goals and other directions. This allows for a conceptual basis of a plan B in case it becomes necessary.
Humans find it difficult to change their goals for a variety of reasons. For companies, this is an even harder challenge as abandoning goals often also affects careers, positions and opportunities. To avoid disruption and becoming obsolete, we need effective mechanisms for evolving our goals early and proactively. These mechanisms include objectification, experimentation and exploration. To end with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
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