Why Does the Same Tactic Work for Them and Not You?

If you take a few parts off of a Porsche and throw them on a Camry, it doesn't make the Camry as fast as the Porsche. It probably won't even make the Camry faster, and depending on what you move over, the Camry may not work at all.

What I see people do in business all the time, they see someone crushing it with a specific tactic, right? Like they're doing cold email, or they've got an SDR who's killing it, or they've got a specific sales process that seems to be getting really good results, and they rip that one piece out and try to replicate it and get the same results that they're getting. And then they can't figure out why it doesn't work.

And I'm actually living this right now with my kids' school. So my boys go to a private school here in Cabo, and the school recently changed how they teach math. Suffice it to say, it's not going really well. A lot of parents are really pissed off; we've got some kids that are struggling; there's a ton of confusion about what's actually being taught, how it's being taught, and there's been enough of a stink raised with this whole thing that parents started digging in.

And what we were told was that they adopted a Montessori approach to math. So this is more like Montessori, and here's the thing: Montessori math works! Like, it works really well. There's plenty of data, there's plenty of information to say, "Hey, Montessori as a system works really well". You've got the sensory-based approach to it and it's progressive. So you've got foundations before you get into formulas and memorizing stuff, and like I said, the data backs that up. And for kids inside a Montessori system—the whole ecosystem—it performs really well over the long haul.

But, and this is a big but, Montessori works as a system, right? You've got mixed-age classrooms, you've got unstructured blocks of like three hours at a time, you've got observational assessments from teachers instead of standardized testing. There's a bunch of different things that are working together—a lot of elements working together to simultaneously make that whole thing work. And if you just take one piece out, or you try to cherry-pick one element of it out and then drop that into a traditional school with 45-minute classes, same-age kids, and standardized testing, well, then all you're doing now is running a really low-fidelity version of Montessori because you cherry-picked that one component and you expect it to get the full result.

That's not how systems work. It's why you can't take an individual car part off of a Porsche, put it on a Camry, and expect the Camry to perform like the Porsche. There's a lot of different factors that make that work within the system. And by the way, if you like systems-based stuff, I talk a lot about it in my email newsletter. You can sign up at raiseemail.com—completely free.

So anyway, this is where you've got different components working together as Systems 101, right? And I see it a lot in business. You see a competitor doing that thing—the cold email—and they're getting meetings. So they go launch cold email and then they don't realize, hey, how much does a strong brand play into that? How much does having their ICP—their target market—really dialed in play into that? They've got a killer copywriter; they've got a really good follow-up sequence; they've got all of these other things that they've done. Maybe they've tested it for six months and now it's fully dialed in. But someone sees, "Hey, they're doing cold email," they go to try to replicate it in isolation, and then realize it doesn't work.

I see it a lot actually with sales processes because it's easy to see what somebody's sales process is from the outside looking in. And so somebody sees a competitor doing it or somebody else doing it, they try to replicate it, and they don't realize that the source of the pipeline plays a huge role in whether the sales process is going to work. If they've got a pipeline that's driven primarily through referrals and you're running paid ads to a completely cold audience, well, you're not going to get the same results with the same process because the other person has prospects showing up that are warm, they're problem-aware, maybe even solution-aware and brand-aware. Whereas you're running stuff with paid ads, people don't know who the hell you are, this is the first time they've seen you, and then you guys run the same process on that and you're going to get drastically different results.

Again, a lot of different pieces are working together to make that specific outcome happen, right? And it's the system around the process; it's not the process itself. This is what I keep coming back to: the nature of systems. Individual components don't create an output on their own, right? It's how those components work together that creates that particular output. So it's not one part in a Porsche that makes it fast; it's all of them designed together cohesively.

And my caution to you—and to me honestly—is just be careful about replicating individual tactics that you see working for other people without understanding the whole system that those tactics live within. Because without those other pieces, you're likely not going to get the same results. The fourth-graders at my kids' school are proof of that right now. Suffice it to say, changes are happening here, but it was a good reminder as we're going through this for me to look at my own business the same way and not just look at individual pieces, but how those pieces interact with one another. Hope it helps. Adios!