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Thursday, December 12, 2024

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The Unintended Consequences of Your Team’s Pursuit of Efficiency over Execution

Accountability is the cornerstone of our team’s values, and we pride ourselves on delivering what we promise, when we promise. To ensure every team member embodies this value, we actively seek feedback from our own clients on their degree of satisfaction with Anova’s performance.  Our year-end employee evaluations are tied to client satisfaction and program success. Despite consistently ranking in the top-performing quadrant, our team often faces challenges in one area: deal flow (defined as the number of new business contacts clients provide for win/loss phone interviews).

In today’s data-driven world, with the rise of advanced CRM software and generative AI, customer data seems abundant. As a result, clients often express confidence in their ability to provide customer contact information during our initial discussions. However, Anova’s experience with leading B2B companies tells a different story:

Short-term Focus on Efficiency:

• For clients who choose to rely solely on their CRM data and implement an automated approach to deal flow collection, we often find that the data quality is more deficient than expected, resulting in response rates typically in the 10%-30% range. These programs also exhibit a longer ‘time to value’, with the two main drivers being (1) it can take a client upwards of six months to establish internal processes and obtain sign-off on the CRM integration, often to discover (2) the majority of CRM data is incomplete, inaccurate or outdated. So much for efficiency.

Short-term Focus on Execution:

• For clients who acknowledge that their CRM data is incomplete or error-prone, we advise that they directly contact their sales team to collect recent prospect information versus downloading inaccurate deal information from the database. Clients who engage and work directly with their sales team, on average, achieve a 60%+ response rate and a two-week turnaround for completed interviews.

Anova’s experience has repeatedly confirmed that when clients seek efficiency through automation, they tend to overcomplicate the short-term mandate and end up delaying ROI.  While automating deal flow submission should remain the long-term goal, if it’s going to delay getting into the field, our advice is simple: Focus on the most pragmatic short-term solution and just get started. Even if it’s only a couple of prospects from your top revenue opportunities to kick things off, the insights gained from these initial conversations will have measurable impact—certainly more impact than not executing at all.