Why do we continue to get undesirable outcomes?
Have you ever looked at your sales and marketing from a system perspective? To most this simple diagram looks complex. However, it is high-level and can be broken down into numerous subsets. You may notice the typical Google Acquisition block at its core which is very dynamic as the rest of the chart should be. You should be monitoring flows in and out of all the blocks. This way you can react in practically real-time. For most companies, monitoring a few KPIs and reviewing the rest at a staged interval is fine. But keep in mind that the typical monitoring practice is reviewing closed sales. If your sales cycles are 90 days, your reaction could be as much as 180 days delayed.
Adopting a systems perspective makes visible many of the hidden complexities operating in an organization that might be important targets for change. Reviewing from a system point of view helps generate a set of hypotheses that form the basis for our marketing experiments. This, in turn, guides our efforts to be tested, organizes results from this activity as an accumulating body of evidence, and creates an evolving framework for collective action across our system.
Should you remove the guesswork from your sales and marketing? Should you start creating a repeatable process that can generate repeatable outcomes? We become disappointed when positive results do not readily appear, and then we just move on to the next new idea. If we continue to seek improvement in the ways we have always done, we are likely to continue to get what we have always gotten. This should trouble us.