Years ago, I had a standing one-on-one every quarter with Brad, the President of our division. I was fairly junior, so I never took it for granted. I would walk through his executive assistant’s office, wait until she told me he was ready, then head into this enormous office with a large table in the middle. Brad would get up from behind his desk and come sit with me there.
Our small talk was terrible. He loved sports, baseball, and motorbikes (I think). I knew almost nothing about any of them. I was always relieved when he finally said, “Okay, what’s on your mind?” Then I had plenty to say.
One of those meetings happened while I was preparing my Executive MBA thesis. I wanted to use it to solve a real problem inside the company, and I had several ideas. Brad knew the business far better than I did, so I assumed I would talk him through them, he would tell me which one was worth pursuing, and off I would go.
But that is not what happened. I explained the first idea and Brad had a slew of questions for me.
- Why did I think that was the problem?
- Why did it matter?
- What would we actually do about it?
- Was I sure I had found the problem, or had I found one part of it?
He never cut these meetings short. We took the full forty five minutes, and he always made me think a lot in those one-on-ones.
At the end of one of these conversations, Brad told me it had been a great discussion, but he now needed thirty minutes and a strong coffee before he could continue with his day. I had no idea whether that was a compliment or a warning.
What I did not appreciate then was how easy it would have been for Brad to simply give me an answer. He had the bigger title, he had far more experience, and he knew the company better than I did. If he had told me which problem to work on, there was a very good chance I would have taken his advice. Instead, he kept pulling me back to the problem.
I think about that a lot now because I spend time in rooms where very experienced people are trying to solve very expensive problems.
Someone on the board asks, “Why is the pipeline weak? We need more leads.”
That sounds reasonable, right?
By Monday, marketing has a new target. Campaigns get built. Money gets spent. Everyone gets busy.
Everyone gets busy generating more leads. Except nobody has checked whether the company actually needs them. Maybe plenty of good leads are already sitting untouched; maybe deals are getting all the way to proposal and dying; maybe the company is attracting the wrong customers; or maybe sales is having plenty of conversations, but customers do not understand why they should buy. “We need more leads” might be exactly right. It might also have almost nothing to do with the real problem.
The same thing happens with bigger decisions. We might see growth is behind plan and think, “We need a new CRO.” Well, maybe that is true. The company could spend months finding one, pay a recruiter, lose another quarter while the new person gets settled, and discover that the new CRO has inherited the same problems as the old one. Nobody agrees on the best customer; the product offering is weak, the pipeline is full of rubbish and sales and marketing are working from completely different definitions of a good opportunity.
The problem is not that board members, operating partners, CEOs or advisers give bad advice. Often they see things other people don’t. Someone who has done fifty deals has patterns in their head that a first-time CEO simply does not have. An operating partner can recognize a problem they have already watched play out three times. A banker knows what buyers will question long before the management team gets into the room with them. That experience is incredibly useful, yet it also makes the advice harder to question. A capable CEO can know the customers, the people, and the business inside out, then sit across from someone who has done this fifty times before and think, Well, they have probably seen something I haven’t. They probably have, but that does not mean their answer is the answer. The company they saw last time had different customers, different people, different data, different products, and different problems. The pattern may look familiar while the reason behind it is completely different.
That is where companies can waste months. The run to an answer before anyone has spent enough time on the diagnosis. Then people get hired, budgets are moved around, campaigns get launched, teams reorganize and priorities change. Six months later, everyone has done a lot of work, and the original problem is still there.
There is a simple way to slow that down without turning every board meeting into a debate. When someone gives you an answer, ask:
What would have to be true for that answer to make sense?
“We need more leads.” Okay, we would expect to see too few good opportunities entering the funnel. Now look deeper. Are there actually too few? Or are good leads sitting untouched? Are deals getting stuck later? Are you losing the same type of customer for the same reason?
“We need a new CRO.” Okay, what would have to be true for the CRO to be the problem? What are they responsible for that is not working? What evidence tells us changing the person will change the result? What problems would the next CRO inherit on day one?
“We need to go upmarket.” Okay, what would have to be true? Do those customers have the problem we solve? Will they pay enough to solve it? Can we reach them? Have we won any already? What happened when we tried?
Now you have something useful to investigate.
This is not an argument for moving slowly, quite the opposite. You do not need three months of analysis, another consultant or a seventy two slide deck. Look at what you already have. Customer conversations, win-loss data, pipeline, sales activity, and what has already been tried. Work out what you would expect to see if the advice is right, then go see whether it is there. If it is, make those changes. If you do not know, test before you turn the idea into six months of work.
That is the part Brad got right. He could have given me the answer. Instead, he kept pulling me back to the problem until I understood it well enough to make my own call.
The next time someone says, “You need more leads,” do not waste time arguing about whether they are right. Ask what would have to be true for more leads to solve the problem. Then look at your business.
You may end up doing exactly what was suggested. You may also save the company six months of solving the wrong problem.
Until the next room,
Archita