“Never mistake activity for achievement.” –John Wooden

Going from vision to reality is hard. Getting a lot of people on the same page is the first challenge. Moving from strategy to planning to execution comes with challenges at every step. In my books I give a lot of time to keeping the vision simple and checking understanding every day. The best way to find the distance between your vision and your people's understanding is constant conversation.
For example, I am talking to a company creating a product offering for their customers. Actually, inside their customer's businesses they already sell multiple products to various buyers. These products can work better together based on the customer's needs. To help this effort they are hiring a crack team of sales people to talk to all the buyers, design a custom solution, and improve the customer's business. This lets them charge a premium for the services.
Talking to potential customers, this idea is a winning one. At the executive level customers can imagine the process improvements, elimination of redundancies, real-time insights, and bottom line improvements. They say, sounds great, I didn't know this was possible.
Sounds like a winner, right? The first challenge I bumped into is inside the seller's own company. Each product line is its own world. The right hand rarely pays attention to the left hand and it works for the organization as a whole. Breaking through these silos will be a challenge. An even bigger, more immediate challenge, however, is happening at the management level. The executives are talking high level conceptual ideas and the managers are translating these ideas into day to day decisions that are out of step with the original vision.
How do I know this? I am talking to both parties and as an outsider it's glaring. I ask the executives in charge how they imagine the sales conversation going, then I ask the managers how they imagine the sales conversation going, then I ask the salespeople how the conversations are going, then I ask the customers how they'd like the conversations to go. It's a simple process and it reveals gaps at each level. The conversations are not going as expected and working back from the customer puts the disconnect at the feet of the managers. When I bring this up with one of the managers they say, interesting but we have to hit quota and my approach is the best way to hit our number. (by the way, it's not)
The solution for the executive team to make more progress, faster, is straightforward. Spend more time talking. Work through scenarios. Talk to more customers. Deal with internal objections.
Easy to say but everyone is busy and getting busier. Hard to do.
Good stuff.
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