Progress Is The Result

Progress is the result. And if you don't internalize that, your impatience is going to sabotage the exact thing that you're actually chasing. And that's the lesson, and it came up again recently as I was working through this with my team, actually.

So, here's what this looks like for us. At MSP Sales Partners, we do fractional sales management. We help MSPs recruit sales people, SDRs, we train them, we manage them like fractionally, and they stay employees of the client, but we run the sales management piece. And a lot of the people who come to us earlier stage show up and they go like, "Hey, I want an SDR. I want somebody who's making outbound calls and setting four to six high-quality appointments a month, and I want it in 60 to 90 days."

And sometimes we hit that mark really quickly, and sometimes we don't, candidly. And when we don't, it's not because the service sucks. It's not like some market thing or anything like that. It's because there are things that we have to install first before the results can show up. There are conditions that need to be true in order to get the outcome that we really want.

And if we try to skip to the end with those things, it's like trying to fast forward a pregnancy. You know, like you can't turn a nine-month pregnancy into a three-month pregnancy, no matter how good at being pregnant you are. Like, certain conditions have to be true for that baby to show up healthy. That's just the reality.

And the same thing is true if you're hiring an SDR. Like, do you have a CRM? Do you have a good source of data? Or do you just have like a scraped list that you bought off the web versus a targeted one? Do you have a campaign set up? Do you have any workflows? Are you cleaning the lists that you have? Are you marketing at all? Do you have decent scripts? Do you have a decent offer? Do you even know why somebody should pick your MSP over the one down the street? You know, there's a lot of MSPs doing outbound right now, so what makes yours different?

And then, do you have an SDR? Have you trained the SDR? Have they ramped? And you know, like all of these things have to happen, and they're the ingredients to the recipe.

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So, here's the reframe on this. So progress towards the result is often the actual result. You may not be getting four to six appointments next month, but you got the campaign written. You got the workflow built. You screened out some bad candidates. Hell, sometimes like firing somebody who isn't working out is the progress that is getting you closer to the result. And that's the trap that I want to hammer.

In our quest to get results—and believe me, like I'm saying this as much to myself as anybody else, I am results-oriented—but in our quest to get results, we sometimes get so impatient that we try to force them prematurely. And that impatience is what ends up sabotaging the actual ability to get the results that we want. Let me say it a different way. You're focused on getting the result so much so that you rush, and you skip steps that had to happen, and skipping those steps is what guarantees you never get the thing that you wanted in the first place. And your impatience builds the exact conditions that make the result impossible.

And I'm telling you, I'm saying this as a guy who struggles with this constantly. I have ADHD, I'm ambitious as hell, I've got the patience of a goldfish, but I've burned myself enough times to know better. I've run turnarounds where I thought the result was going to come way sooner than it did, and I realized once I get in there, no, I've got to clean this up. I've got to let these people go. I've got to do some recruiting. I've got to build a better culture. I've got to build this system, and I assumed this thing was already there and that's not there, so now I've got to do that.

And the frustration is real, right? Like I'm not seeing the result. But I am, because the progress in building the conditions that are necessary to get the result is the result earlier in the process.

Now, like I'm not telling you to raise your tolerance for not getting results, and I'm not saying speed doesn't matter. It does. There are times when you can compress the cycle, and you should.

What I am saying, though, is get really clear on what you're actually measuring. Are you making real progress towards the thing? Because if the only number that you're going to accept is four to six appointments in this example, right, and you ignore everything else that has to be true for those appointments to exist, you're going to quit before it works.

And our job, my team's job, is to move the necessary steps as quickly and effectively as we can. Like install those things, get them in place, get the motion rolling, compress the time cycle as much as we realistically can. And our job is also to set the right expectation. Like depending on where you're starting, the timeline to the actual result that you want is going to be different.

So, as a business owner, just keep this in the back of your mind. Like as frustrating as it gets, the progress is the result. And measure it accordingly. Hope it helps. Adios.