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I’m starting and launching a new three-month team coaching program and I’ve been thinking a lot about the decisions that leadership teams and founder teams need to make right now that get them moving forward. One of the decisions was made strikingly aware to me last week, the decision was about how to grow and it’s right on the minds of the business people right now. Essentially, everyone, every team has got much more limited capacity than they did have and resources that are in.
This is the time to use your team, it’s time to use the people around you and not feel like you’re taking on everything yourself. If you run a business, you’re a team of three or more, you’ve got a product in the market which is increasing or decreasing, and you’ve got a desire to become a better team and lead your business in a different way, then this is for you.
The Challenge
I was in a group coaching session with people who run tech businesses and they are all founder teams. The thing we talked about was that with their ability to grow they felt stuck. As a founder team, as a kind of collective, what was clear was that there were all the sales tactic, all the sales processes and all the marketing kind of tips and tricks – social channels, direct channels, all these things which are all sort widely known and choices that you’ve got to make. All of those are there but they still feel completely stuck around where focus and what to do.
Now, the impact of this was that what was happening was as a founder team there was no collective momentum around growth. Now, when I ask some questions and I uncover that I would actually say what was going on was this, which is I kind of call it marketing spaghetti.
What Is Marketing Spaghetti?
When we think about marketing spaghetti what happens is we go into all these sales tactics, processes, marketing tricks and trips and we start to try and execute them to get some growth. So we do Linkedin, we do a bit of outreach in Linkedin, we do a bit of channel marketing, where we try to talk to people, we talk to our customers. Then we hire a salesperson and we’re kind of unsure whether what we’re doing is kind of building a product or selling, essentially we’re doing a whole bunch of things all at one time.
And here’s the problem with that, especially right now we’ve all got limited capacity, limited budgets and limited time. So you think about the limited capacity, you are cutting across all this spaghetti, every one of those tactics that you’re using you’ve got limited time and limited dollars to apply to them.
What’s the impact? None of these gets done properly and all of them get done a little bit and then you’re sitting there going: “Okay, Why am I not getting the results?”. So it has to do with the external market. But some of it has to do with the fact that as a team you’re stuck and you haven’t made the decisions that give you focus.
Does it make sense for your team? You guys as founders? So if you’re a team of 3 or more, you’ve got a productive market, and you wish to become more focused, more clear and more collect and more collective ownership and not be doing this marking spaghetti especially around your sales right now.
There are three questions that the team I was talking to agreed and we’ll be going to answer collectively.
Choose a time period for the next 6 weeks, for the next month or the next quarter. It’s whatever makes sense to your business, if your cycle is really fast and you turn over quickly, your product, it might make sense to go in a month or two weeks, if it’s a much lower services based business it might make sense to be a quarter.
1. Are you going to focus on an indirect channel or a direct channel?
What I mean by that is are you going to focus on customers, building trust with people who already have trust with the customers that you want to work with or are you gonna go direct to those customers and try to build a relationship over that period of time. A simple channel vs. direct questions for just that period of time.
2. Then you’re gonna choose a system or a way of engaging that you think will work collectively as a team.
To give you an example, one of the teams I’ve been coaching chose a quarter, they chose to go direct and the system of the way they are engaging that they chose collectively together was that they were going to go after the lower mid market deals. They are going after big end deals because there’s a few of those. They are getting those from many mid market deals for a period of a quarter. That’s worked for them. It wasn’t just the fact that they made a decision, it was the fact that they collectively focused on this for the period of time.
3. The ability to measure the result. Adust, measure the job, refocus and then go back up to the next time period.
So what do we achieve? Where are we gonna go from here? But the fact is that instead of the spaghetti where the capacity time is spread really thin, what they’ve got is like a train or track where every one of these people is on this train moving forward, towards the same focus and goal.
Summary
First choose a time period, choose whether it’s direct or indirect, and then choose a system or a way of engaging with that group of people that you are gonna try over a period of time. And then measure the result.
It’s pretty hard for people to commit right now to long 12-month gigs but I’ve been working with teams really successfully with this system over a 3 month period. If it works, we keep moving, we keep going.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
So if you’re a team, 3 or more. You have a product in the market, you want to work better as a team, make some decisions that enable your business to move forward together.
Send me a direct message, get in touch. It’s just as simple as a quick conversation to see if the need you’ve got fits with what I can provide and I can help you shift from the spaghetti into a clearly moving forward together.
Take care and enjoy the rest of the week and talk to you soon.
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
If you’re a growing mid size business and you want help to get more focus in your leadership team, scaling with people and systems or leading inside and outside your organisation, then click the link below. You’ll be taken to a super short survey and then asked to book in an initial 20-minute call where we can work out if what you need is aligned with the results I can deliver.
I look forward to the chat…
