Are you in the World of DO, or THINK?

Are you thinking about business growth in the right way?

Most entrepreneurs and founders are natural-born managers with a can-do instinct and a 'let's get on with it' psychology. I think that's great, and it's one of the reasons I guess why I enjoy working with them.

At some point in the early days of your business, you will reach a crossroads in your growth that will force you to make an uncomfortable decision. The decision is how to generate the sales opportunities you need to fuel growth that will build out your beachhead. At this stage in any youthful enterprise, money is tight. This makes it all the more difficult to suppress your natural can-do instinct to take action that will produce immediate results.

Action without thought is dangerous, almost as dangerous as too much thought without action and the paralysis it results in.

The THINK/DO model

The Think/Do model is normally my first conversation with founders and entrepreneurs. It's about reworking the psychology of growth planning. Left to following instincts business founders will naturally go through the following logic pattern:

We need sales leads.

Do we know how to do this ourselves? No.

Therefore, we need to hire a third-party to hunt out the sales leads we need and bring them to our door.

Only then can we turn those sales leads into deals and grow our company.

This all seems highly logical, IF ONLY there weren't some home truths of marketing effectiveness that are being ignored.

The buyer ivory palace issue--Gone are the days when you could drop in at the home or offices of your prospect out of the blue, or make a call to a landline and speak directly to your prospective buyer. Buyers of all forms have many communications safeguards to block your approach. They will LET YOU KNOW if they find your offer of interest.

The paucity of content issue--The movement of audiences to social media channels and video away from television and broadsheet advertising means that your marketing communications are competing with an abundance of content. In modern marketing, you are competing in a single global online market with everyone, not just to shop next door. Every business is trying to be heard. ChatGPT and other AI tools are making it easier to produce content, and your audience is swamped with imagery and content.

The multiple decision maker issue--Even if you can get through to a prospective customer somehow, in the business world at least, you are ignoring the other brutal fact that it takes (according to Gartner and others) at least six stakeholders in a business to make a decision these days and you need to influence all of them!

If you don't know the ins and outs of how the value of your business and offerings benefit customers, then don't expect any third-party to do lead generation any better than you can.

Founders and entrepreneurs jump into the World of DO because they want to act now to build sales opportunities. On the surface, hiring a hunter to catch your sales leads makes total sense, because it should produce sales leads fast (highly productive), but in reality, it rarely produces results (low value). Neither does this investment in others help your team to develop the know-how it needs to build success. You spend these marketing dollars and they are gone forever.

The World of THINK

When founders and leaders reach this t-junction in their growth journey, my first job is to talk them down from the ledge to resist their natural instinct to take immediate action and instead invest their hard-earned cash in themselves by entering the World of THINK.

Success in marketing today, as it has always been, revolves around the value your enterprise brings to customers. What has changed is the need to expose more of that value to online web surfers and social media followers, so they can experience more of your value in all its dimensions--authenticity, clarity of purpose, experience, trustworthiness, personality, social and ecological conscience, mindfulness, and product/service quality and usefulness--without you in the room.

To enter the World of THINK you don't need a hunter, you need a guide. That's the role of people like my team at Tomlin & Co. It's our job to help founders and leadership teams identify, harness and originate ways to amplify their customer value, creating the platform for marketing that means communications are forensically targeted and understood by buyer influencers.

The money you planned to spend on a hunter to enter the World of Do probably has to be re-assigned to pay your guide in the World of Think--and that's a gutsy decision that goes against every instinct in your body as a can-do business professional.

What is there to think about?

Aside from acquiring some additional know-how on how to set up your business to achieve growth that they don't teach in college, there are three chunks of thinking work you will need to step through to get your customer value in the right shape. Once you have done this work, you will be able to confidently launch your enterprise on your unsuspecting buying audience at scale--this time in a form that will result in the growth you're looking for.

Your three big jobs prior to launch are:

1. To fundamentally get under the surface of how your value to customers needs to be articulated for customers to listen. Remember, it's not what you say, it's what they hear. To create effective marketing campaigns, you will need to be world-class at amplifying all aspects of your customer value.
2. To get your senior team to agree on an aligned set of business strategy, marketing, and go-to-market plans. There is no point in winning the wrong business or bad business. It won't generate the level of profit you need to fuel the development of your team. Neither will it fuel the marketing funds you need to accelerate growth.
3. Make the un-made decisions. There are nine big decisions you need to make before you start building out your beachhead that you probably still haven't made yet.

Investing in the World of THINK requires courage. From a psychology standpoint, it doesn't feel as effective or productive as hiring a hunter to immediately go out and find your sales leads for you. In the Western world, we are trained from our first day at school to value doing over thinking (whenever did your mum and dad ever ask you to 'Think your homework'?).

Counterintuitively, entering the World of Think before you join the madding crowd in the World of Do is the single biggest and best decision you can make as a business leader. It generates infinitely more robust growth plans because it invests in the knowledge your team needs to know itself. When you enter the World of Do, you will KNOW who your customers are, why they will be attracted to your door, and why they will buy.