Why Progress Feels Like Failure

Six months ago, one of our customers had zero appointments coming in from outbound. None.

Last month, he told me the program wasn't working. His words were, "My show rate sucks. I've only got two out of 10 people showing up for the appointments that are getting booked by the SDR."

We do fractional sales management for outside sales reps and SDRs, BDRs, whatever it is, for MSPs. And we're managing one of the reps that we helped recruit and train and get ramped up, and they went from zero to 10 appointments. Now the biggest issue is the program's not working because only two out of 10 are showing up.

Now, he's right about that number, by the way. Two out of 10 is a shitty show rate. But if you look at where he was standing six months ago, before that conversation, he didn't have an SDR. He didn't have a script. He didn't have a list. He didn't have a campaign. He had zero appointments coming from outbound. Two appointments showing up out of 10 is more than he was getting before.

And okay, cool. I can do the math on that. But there's still an opportunity cost to having appointments that are not showing up, right? Obviously. So the part that matters more is that it's progress toward the actual result that he wanted. What he wanted was never appointments. What he wants is sales, right? He wants a repeatable sales motion from outbound. That's the actual goal. It's not even appointments.

You don't get that in one move. Not typically. You get it by looking at it as a system and solving one problem at a time, right? So no SDR or BDR, you get somebody in the seat. Get somebody in the seat, they don't have training. Train them up. They don't have any scripts, get that. They don't have any data, get that. Not enough calls going out, we get the volume up. Calls aren't good. All right, now we're going to coach. And now we're getting appointments.

Now we're at the next problem. Show rate. And it's like, two out of 10 sucks. Got it. And after the show rate, by the way, there's going to be two or three more problems sitting between this person and the repeatable sales and repeatable revenue that they really want. They don't convert, or they aren't closing, or whatever it is.

So today, he's just a couple problems away. Six months ago, he was 10 problems away, figuratively speaking. Same guy, same company, but he's in a way better position today. Much further along in the system. And the moment he wants to quit is right before you start seeing the end result, which is the sales.

It's something I see happen a lot. And the reason is most of us don't measure progress by counting the problems we've solved up to this point. We measure it by looking at one number that we care about at the end, or that we think we care about at the end. And when that number is ugly, the whole thing is broken. Fuck it. It's not working.

And that's how you kill something that's two problems away from getting you the exact result that you really want.

So when I audit a situation like this, I count. What problems did we have when we started this? Which ones have been really solved, like actually solved? Which one are we standing on right now? And what's left between here and the goal? Because you've got basically the same set of facts, and you can have a completely different read on that same thing.

And most of the time, you'll find you're closer than you feel, because a setback feels like the outcome, right? If I'm not getting the result, that feels like the outcome. It's usually just the next problem in line. It's just one big system, and you've got all these things you've cleared behind you that you don't really acknowledge, and you're that close to getting the thing that you want.

Now, there's a fair objection here. Sometimes lack of progress is a sign that something isn't working and you need to pivot. I got that pushback when I wrote about this in a newsletter, and I completely understand that. We've addressed that in a different video. There are times to persevere. There are times to pivot. The vast majority of the time, if you're making progress and solving problems, persevering to get to the goal that you want is the way to go. Again, whole video on that.

The underlying point is this. It's not about getting a customer back. It's not about any of that. It's about recognizing where you are within a complex problem. Oftentimes the impatience is going to kill us, because we get so impatient that we don't have the end result that we discount the progress we made, and we exaggerate the amount of problems that are left to get to the point we want to get to. And we pull the plug, and we change, we pivot, and we go into a whole new series of problems. A whole new series of things we didn't realize were going to happen, because we always think the next thing is going to be easier, and it never is.

So we go in, and there's a whole series of problems to solve there. We have to start the thing all over again. We're basically resetting the clock. And we pull the plug on that one before we get there. And we just keep spinning our wheels.

I've done this personally, which is why I'm so passionate about this. When you're making progress on something complex and you're knocking down problems one after another after another after another, don't let impatience keep you from getting the end result, right? Not when you're that damn close.

And in this case, a lot of the hard problems had been solved. Fixing show rate is actually relatively easy. The next problem is likely going to be that you're not running discovery properly. The next problem after that is going to be conversion. The next problem after that is going to be that we're getting ghosted too much. But we're much closer to the actual thing that we really want.

So keep that in mind. Hope it helps. Adios.