Constant Evalutation

Starting 2009, and as many others have, I’m spending time evaluating a few things; this happened last quarter with some planning for 2009 too. And will happen again as we work through the first quarter. My premise is that a regular discipline of evaluation is healthy—personally and professionally.

Certainly 'analysis paralysis' isn’t what I’m suggesting. But a go go go mentality – constantly trying to just go faster and do more (working more hours, sleeping less, etc.) – doesn’t translate to success necessarily. Rather, ‘thinking’ ahead of ‘doing’ makes for better, more predictable results.

Consider circumstances where everything is going great in a business. Spending time to evaluate how they could go even better is a great exercise. If you’re making progress, you need to protect that progress. This is sort of an Innovator’s Dilemma of course.

If you think you’re doing things right but not getting results, this is an obvious time to reevaluate. Should staff change? How and why? Should process change? How and why?

At my last company—Oxlo Systems—we spent a lot of time trying to perfect our professional services delivery. The repetitive stuff—certifying vendors to our integration hub—ended up taking years to get right. This was about making a very clean, technology-supported, expertly-staffed process work like a well-oiled machine. And admittedly it took a toll on staff and loads of process changes to get it just right. And for custom enterprise implementations we needed a method that was super-documented and constantly subjected to both cross-functional review and customer acceptance milestones to ensure we got it right for customers with high expectations. Constant evaluation served us well in achieving the right delivery method.

More recently we’ve been doing this at Leximancer as we look at our pipeline and our sales process. I’ve quantified the number of all prospects against those that made acceptable progress and closed. We’ve certainly quantified revenue against plan. We’re doing still more to refine the profile of specific targets we pursue based on how well our messaging resonates; our platform delivers real value; our length of sales cycle; and our likelihood of meaningful revenue.

Simply stated, as one of my mentors used to say—slow down to speed up; or as I’m saying—constantly evaluate.