Not My Problem | Customers, Etc.
Influence sales strategy by knowing what you can control vs what you can influence
Going into the second half of the year, the Saltbox team had set ambitious goals. I was tasked with staring at those goals and setting objectives for the Member Experience team that were aligned.
The long and short of the goal was this: rapidly grow revenue. The challenge was that we had recently paused hiring and the MX team was already feeling quite resource-constrained. It wasn’t immediately clear what we could do as a team to help achieve the revenue goal. Wasn’t that a sales thing?
It almost made me want to throw up my hands and say, “not my problem!” But by focusing on what we could control and considering what we could influence, we were able to have a meaningful impact on shaping sales strategy.
Where to start
Sometimes when faced with what seems like an impossible goal, you can be tempted to just give up. I have the exact same feeling when facing down a final for one of my MBA finance classes. In both cases, I’ve found it helpful to just get started. Sometimes your brain begins to fill in details you didn’t know were there.
I started modeling out what it would look like if we were to actually achieve our revenue goal by December. I was given a very basic model in a spreadsheet and I started playing with the numbers to see if I could find a place where my team could help.
One of the things I played with was customer size. If the model used small customers, we were going to need to sign a lot of them to achieve our goal. The MX team would be stretched really thin trying to serve a lot of customers with limited resources. But if we instead signed larger customers, we had an opportunity to make a significant impact, and we could do it with a smaller team.
With this insight in hand, we needed to decide what we could control vs what we could influence.
What we can control
I hadn’t yet shared the “we should serve larger customers” hypothesis with other leaders at Saltbox. I first wanted to explore what would be in the MX team’s control to help achieve the goal of increasing revenue.
I started by looking at the customer journey.
Marketing was responsible for helping potential customers be aware of Saltbox, Sales helped guide them toward making a commitment, and the Member Experience team helped them be successful.
One area that I knew we could improve was the stage between Commitment and Success: Onboarding.
The onboarding phase represented the area where the MX team could have the most significant impact that aligned with our goal of increasing revenue. Not only would improving onboarding decrease time to value, but it would also increase the probability members would be successful over the long term.
Okay, so the MX team was going to focus on onboarding, which was in our control. But what did we need to influence that was outside of our immediate control?
What we can influence
The MX team couldn’t be successful by focusing only on what we could control. Investing more in onboarding necessarily meant we would be spending more time with customers. Even the basic model I had created made it pretty clear that this strategy wouldn’t work if were only bringing on very small customers. We had to ask what we could influence.
When working with other leaders on how we were going to meet our goal, I took a strong opinion that we had to focus on larger customers, sharing how this aligned with how the MX team was able to help achieve the company goal. My point wasn’t to control other teams, but rather to drive discussion towards solutions that has everyone aligning towards the same goal. Expressing strong opinions—loosely held—can clarify constraints and drive towards creative solutions.
Ultimately we compromised. We wouldn’t only focus on large customers, but we also wouldn’t accept every small customer either—we introduced a minimum price to ensure the time we spent onboarding was focused on good fit customers.
Control vs Influence: Wisdom
It can be difficult to know what you should control vs what you should influence. To do that well, you need wisdom.
Customer experience teams often get caught up in only what’s in their control: staying on top of the inbox, answering calls, making current customers happy. But as critical advocates for customers, CX teams need to raise their voice and influence earlier phases in the customer journey. Today’s prospects are tomorrow’s customers and it’s critical that feedback about interactions with current customers have an impact on the go-to-market strategy for the business.
Start by focusing on what’s within your control to change. Then ask what you’re able to influence.
I'm glad to have come across this Substack, and I enjoyed this post. We're often told, in life as well as at work, to control what we can control but to detach from most everything else. But this distinction between what we can control and what we can influence is helpful. Situations can change! Leadership changes. Prospects become customers. Processes get tweaked and suddenly outcomes improve (or the other way around). I've noticed that there is a way to communicate in formal meetings but also in one-on-one, informal settings that sort of sets the groundwork for change, once the right opportunity presents itself. I look forward to reading more of your reflections.