Their Grass Is Not Greener

Your company will have problems executing. The people on your team will make mistakes, and these mistakes will become problems for your clients. Sometimes what you deliver is so wildly at odds with what you sold that you could die from embarrassment.

What’s worse, the failures to execute occur most often with new clients. Adding insult to injury, the problems are also bigger when you are right at the beginning of the relationship. For some reason, the bigger the client, the more trouble you have at the beginning. Because you own the outcomes you sold, your phone rings when the train comes off the track.

You wish your team was better. You gave them the killer hand-off, and you wish they’d just execute as promised. Maybe you wish you worked for your competitor. Surely they don’t have these problems.

The truth is that your competitor doesn’t have it any better than you do. Apple makes the best products on Earth. Walk into the closest Apple Store on a Saturday morning and look at the line of people waiting to get help with their product (subtract the one’s with the spider-webbed screens). No one, no matter how good they are, is without their problems and challenges when it comes to serving their clients.

The reality is that business is hard. Execution is difficult. There isn’t a single one of your competitors who doesn’t have salespeople who share the exact experience you have when it comes to failures. Your competitors have the same challenges delivering the outcomes that they sold, and they are just as unhappy when this happens as you are now. Your competitor’s salespeople are no more happy to stand in front of their clients to address the problems their team has executing.

There is one more thing that you and your competitor have in common. You both believe the other’s grass is greener.