Quality of Execution Is Part of Every Great Strategy
Modern business thought has a clear hierarchy: strategy over tactics. If you are not strategic in your approach, you don’t know where you’re headed or what you’re trying to achieve. As a result, tactics leave you aimless, or spinning your wheels, or working much, much harder than you need to.
All of those statements are true, but the framing is totally wrong.
Strategy and tactics are not opposed to one another. You are not a strategy person or a tactics person. Strategy and tactics are two aspects of the same thing: the business getting what it wants.
And in that regard, quality of execution (i.e., tactics) is very, very important to success.
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There is a gap, a sometimes unacknowledged gap, between designing a great strategy and achieving the goals that strategy sets forth.
That gap is filled with - to put it plainly - doing stuff. Your strategy must be translated, from a plan, into action, that will drive results. A customer does not suddenly purchase your product or service simply because you have a brilliant approach to going to market. You’ve got to actually get there first.
I call this “choosing the right tactics” and I’ll warn you: it makes a lot of CEOs’ eyes glaze over. That’s because it’s in the weeds, and many CEOs are big-picture visionaries who can’t be bothered with the details.
The details make a difference, though.
Here’s an example I encounter all the time with clients: underperforming sales function. The team has a clear strategy, leadership is well-aligned, but the business consistently misses their quarterly revenue targets.
Why?
Well, that’s what we need to find out. Often, I can’t answer that question by sitting with the leadership team. We have to get “boots on the ground” and talk to the people doing the selling.
Here’s what we might uncover:
- The product is stale and customers no longer see its value
- The pricing is too high based on customer perception of what they are buying
- The sales process is messy and prospects are falling through the cracks
- The team is under-trained and not closing well during their pitches
- The current messaging attracts prospects that don’t have enough budget
- There is no scorecard holding the sales team accountable for weekly targets
- The leader who owns sales is splitting time across two roles and prefers their other role
Any one of those challenges is fixable. A company might even be dealing with 2-3 challenges simultaneously. But each of those challenges requires a different solution. And you’ll only know what solution to apply when you know what problem you’re actually facing.
That’s what I mean by getting in the weeds. It’s a pain, it’s ugly, and it takes time. It usually requires sorting through incomplete data and navigating defensive team members. It’s also the only way to truly assess what’s working and what isn’t.
(And by the way, with a mature leadership team, getting in the weeds is not necessarily the CEO’s responsibility. If there’s a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or sales leader in place, it’s their job to go digging around for the source of the problem.)
It’s far more interesting to pull out the white board and tinker with your strategy than it is to interrogate your team’s quality of execution. But quality can, and does, make a big difference. Most companies don’t require rocket science to run. They don’t fall down in the realm of good ideas but in translating ideas into action.
So stay strategic. But make sure you get tactical, too.
