5 ways to fight inertia in your business
In sales there are two big lies we tell ourselves.
The first is that our competition is the competition - when most closed lost deals are “no decision”
The second is that the customer made “no decision” - when they did make a decision - to stay with what they have.
Starting and scaling a business is a war against inertia.
What is inertia in business?
Inertia is “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.”
A bicycle will not move unless you pedal it.
An apple will not move unless you pick it up.
Things don’t happen unless another force makes them happen.
As a founder or revenue leader, you fight against inertia every day - to change the way that your customers, your partners or your team behave each day.
If your company just stopped today - the majority of your ideal customers, potential partners, target employees would just carry on as normal, unaware that anything had changed - inertia.
Here are five suggestions to fight inertia in your business
Reduce the cycle time
Sterling Snow, ex CRO at Divvy that scaled to a $2.5bn exit in four years highlights being on a monthly rather than quarterly cadence as one of the critical elements to their success.
Monthly targets gave their team 12 opportunities to win, reassess, reforecast and adjust each year instead of four.
A monthly cadence gave everyone, including Enterprise sellers and their customers, momentum to keep moving, instead of easing back because its the start of a new quarter.
Increase urgency
Urgency permeates through a company - you know it when you see it, and you know it is absent when you can’t.
Urgency is how you approach each day and each week.
“In some companies nothing happens in a year.
In other companies everything happens in a day”
Pick up the phone instead of booking a meeting next week.
Do it now instead of waiting until tomorrow.
Start each week with energy.
Delegate instead of holding on.
Get rid of time-sucking recurring meetings.
Go and see your customers.
Give your team permission to act.
Say yes.
Just do it.
Accountability across teams
As companies grow, teams focus internally on their own goals and metrics.
This siloed approach slows a company down. You lose the focus on the customer and delivering an amazing experience to them.
A buyer looking for information loses three weeks getting passed from a marketing form, to an SDR, to an AE, to the specialist who has the answer to their question.
Counter this by ensuring every team has a compensation element that is linked to the overall goal - revenue.
Tie their comp to what happens after they hand over the customer to the next stage of the process.
One team, with one goal - revenue.
Encourage sideways discussion
A common trait in large companies is what I call the Marina Bay effect.
Marina Bay Sands is a three tower complex in Singapore, connected by a rooftop garden.
Each of the towers represents your functions - Marketing, Sales and Customer Success.
Inertia creeps in when your hierarchal structure prevents individuals in one team speaking directly with their counterpart in another.
Instead, they escalate through their own management, asking for their leaders to communicate and then push down the other tower.
This creates bottlenecks and delays.
In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman (CEO of Snowflake and ex CEO of ServiceNow) discusses how he encourages teams to just pick up the phone from sales to marketing, from marketing to product - just speak and don’t look for aircover the entire time.
Picking up the phone is just one half - your culture needs to embrace receiving that call or responding to that email from a peer even if it hasn’t come down through your own chain of command.
Accelerate decision making
Scaling a business is about speed. Can you go faster than your customers, than the incumbents, than your competitors?
Jeff Bezos talked about how Amazon accelerated their decision making by thinking about one way doors and two way doors.
A one way door decision is like selling a company or resigning from your job. These decisions are difficult to reverse - so you want to make sure before you pull the trigger.
But most decisions are two way door decisions. You can reverse them if it doesn’t work out. A marketing tag line, a web page design, a pricing model, a partnership model.
With a two way door decision the winning strategy is to make the decision quickly, implement and learn. You can always tweak and revert if needed.
As companies scale, their ability to make decisions slows - and inertia creeps in.
Look out for inertia and stamp it out when it appears
Inertia is a disease that will continually try to creep into your business as it scales.
As inertia takes hold companies where everything happened in a day quickly become companies where nothing happens in a year.
Keep alert and use these five techniques to minimise it:
Reduce cycle time
Increase urgency
Accountability across teams
Encourage sideways discussion
Accelerate decision making
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Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.