July 21, 2024   |   Read Online

sweating the small stuff 😅

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How you do one thing is how you do everything.

I’m writing you from a wonderful family vacation on Hilton Head Island, SC this week (coincidentally, Jeff's hometown). The reality is when you love what you do and you’re committed to it, there's really no such thing as a day off or vacation. The little things we do consistently, day-in and day-out, create compounding value in our relationships, professions, and hobbies.

This is a perfect segue into today’s topic: sweating the small stuff.

But first, let me introduce you to a guy named John Wooden.

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John Wooden was the head coach of the UCLA Men’s Basketball team from 1948 to 1975. During his tenure he amassed a winning record of 664 wins and 162 losses.

A win rate of over 80%.

During the 12-season stretch from 1963 and 1975 the Bruins racked up 10 NCAA National Championships. This streak including a seven-year period from 1966 to 1973 with 205 wins, only 5 losses, and seven straight national titles. At one point the team won 88 straight games, a record that still stands today.

Wooden was awarded the Henry Ina Award for national coach of the year seven times and the Associated Press award five times.

There's only word for coach Wooden… legendary.

Wooden's first team meeting each season began the same way. With him demonstrating for his players how he wanted them to put on their socks and shoes before practices and games.

Yes, their shoes and socks. Here are the instructions he provided:

“Hold up the sock, work it around the little toe area and the heel so that there are no wrinkles. Smooth it out good. Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on. And the shoe must be spread apart not just pulled on the top laces. You tighten it up snugly by each eyelet. Then you tie it. And you double-tie it so it won’t come undone—because I don’t want shoes coming untied during practice or during the game.”

If this seems trivial, it is. Wooden knew that that ignoring small things could lead to big problems.

As Ryan Holiday explains in Discipline is Destiny:

“In basketball—a game played on a hard floor—an athlete’s footwear is incredibly important. An improperly worn shoe can lead to a blister, which can lead to an infection, to favoring a foot, to going up for a rebound wrong, to a broken ankle or a blown-out knee.”

Discipline and consistency in the small things set the stage for success in the big things.

So it goes with any profession. It all begins with the fundamentals. The small stuff.

Wooden's “socks and shoes” talk inspired me to put together my own list of small things for my teams, be they sales, business development, marketing, customer onboarding, support, or otherwise.

If you’re going to have humans interacting with prospects and customers in SaaS, you might as well aim to maximize the benefits only a human can provide: empathy, compassion, genuine care, and authenticity. Robots and AI won't replace these any time soon.

Here they are in no particular order:

No empty outreach — For anyone connecting with a customer or prospect (sales, cs, marketing, etc), always add value. An insight, a useful stat, a connection, an article.

Hell, even a candid, personal update about yourself. Talk to the customer as if you already know them and as if they are listening to you. Eventually they will.

Minimize their effort (not yours) — Computers don't have empathy. Use this human superpower to your advantage. A pet peeve example is sales reps using their calendar link to schedule a meeting with a prospect.

If you’re trying to schedule a meeting, send an available time. Or two or three. Use your calendar link, but as a fallback. Ask if they have an assistant who you can work with to schedule.

Don't trade courtesy for expediency. After all, we probably need the meeting more than they do.

Prepare — You're better off than 95% of your competitors if you research your customer and send a short, pre-meeting video or email with the context for your meeting and resources. Not a book. A pithy email with useful information.

If you imagine the timeline of engagement with a customer moving from left to right, we are trying to pull everything as far to the left as possible. You have the power to do this. To accelerate rapport, education, and action. Control what you can control.

Show up and do the work—You are going to have bad days. Terrible days. Deals or renewals will fall through unexpectedly. People won’t respond to your calls, emails, and texts. You’ll have interactions that don’t go well. It’s okay, just show up again the next day and keep going. Let these words from Kobe Bryant inspire you:

“I wasn’t scared of missing, looking bad, or being embarrassed. That’s because I always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind. I always focused on the fact that I had to try something to get it, and once I got it, I’d have another tool in my arsenal. If the price was a lot of work and a few missed shots, I was OK with that.

I never felt outside pressure. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, and I knew how much work it took to achieve those goals. I then put in the work and trusted in it. Besides, the expectations I placed on myself were higher than what anyone expected from me.”

There is an element of fortune and luck in business. Put yourself in a position to be lucky by showing up. Do the work, trust the process.

Listen more than you talk—When a customer asks you a question, ask them a question in response. This will allow you to ensure you fully understood their question.

People who give answers too quickly often miss the deeper intent behind the question and seldom realize it. But customers and prospects do. The first priority is building trust. Knowledge transfer, commitments, and closed/won opportunities begin with trust.

Be wary of good news—Admiral James Stockdale was a POW in Vietnam’s Hanoi Hilton. He survived eight years of imprisonment and 20 instances of torture while many of his comrades died in captivity.

What was his secret? A combination of faith and realism. His approach has been immortalized as the Stockdale Paradox:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

If something sounds too good to be true it probably is. The worst sales and customer success people have “happy ears.” They choose to prioritize information that confirms the outcome they desire while ignoring other obvious signals to the contrary.

These are some of my fundamentals for sales and customer success professionals:

• No empty outreach

• Minimize their effort

• Prepare

• Show up and do the work

• Listen more than you talk

• Be wary of good news

I believe they will increase anyone's chances at success in SaaS. Or any other business for that matter.

What would you add? Feel free to hit "reply" and let me know the first thing you think of.

🤘

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