The Advantage #27: The Best Product Does Not Win & Money Loves Fast Decisions
Process and speed decide who wins. Plus: money loves fast decisions.
Welcome Note
Thanks for reading the twenty-seventh issue of The Advantage. This week is about the two things that actually decide who wins: process and speed. Not the best product. Not the perfect answer. The team that runs the process hardest and decides fastest.
The watch is Will Barron, who has coached over 1,000 business owners on selling. His seven points confirmed something I have believed for 20 years: no matter what you do, and especially if you are a founder, you are a salesperson. I push back on exactly one of his points, and I will tell you why.
Then in the Practical Edge, a saying I first heard from my brother-in-law that might be the truest statement in business: money loves fast decisions. The data backs it up. Let's get into it.
WORTH WATCHING:
The Best Product Does Not Win. The Best Sales Process Does.
Will Barron · Salesman.com · ~17 min
This week's Worth Watching is a video from Will Barron, who has coached over 1,000 business owners on selling. He lays out seven points on what actually drives sales results, and they are spot on. Sales is process. Sales is tracking. Sales is iteration and staying at it far longer than feels reasonable.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
No matter what you do in life, and especially if you are a founder, you are a salesperson. For the last 20 years, that is all I have done. I sold co-founders on joining. I sold investors on writing checks. I sold employees, banks, vendors, and media. I sold customers, obviously. And now at Cutting Horse, I sell founders on letting us invest in their business. Strip away the titles, and the job is sales, every day, at every stage.
That is why this video landed. The best product does not win. Not even close. The team that works the hardest, puts in the most hours, and stays at it the longest wins. Founders do not like hearing that because it removes the excuse. You cannot hide behind the product. You have to get in the arena and sell.
The one point I would push back on is the advice to never change the process. I agree you should not blow up the whole system every few months. But in the early days, iteration is the job. You do not know what works yet. Run the process, track the results, adjust, and run it again. Lock it down once the data tells you to, not before.
THE QUESTION THAT STUCK
Which part of your company are you still pretending isn't a sales process?
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 17 minutes
→Sales is a process, not a personality. Charisma does not scale. A repeatable process with clear steps does. Write yours down.
→Track everything. What gets measured gets improved. If you cannot see your conversion at each step, you are guessing, not selling.
→The hardest working team wins. The best product will not save you. The team that puts in the most hours and stays at it the longest takes the market.
→Consistency beats reinvention, mostly. Do not shake up the whole system every few months. But in the early days, iterate fast until the data tells you what to lock in.
→Everything is sales. Hiring is sales. Fundraising is sales. Finding vendors is sales. Run each one like a pipeline with stages, tracking, and follow-up.
PRO MOVE
Pick one thing you are working on right now that is not labeled sales. A key hire, a fundraise, a vendor negotiation. Build it as a pipeline this week with stages, a tracker, and a follow-up cadence. Watch how fast it moves.
My brother-in-law Kevin Flanagan says this all the time: money loves fast decisions. I think it may be one of the truest statements out there, especially for founders. Not only does money love fast decisions. Startups require them.
WHY IT WORKS
Most people think great decision makers are the ones who gather more information, deliberate longer, and get it right more often. That model is backwards. In a startup, the information is never complete. The market moves while you deliberate. A slow right answer often loses to a fast wrong answer that gets corrected.
Speed compounds in two directions. When the founder moves fast, the whole team moves fast. When the founder stalls, the whole company stalls behind them. Your indecision is not neutral. It is a tax on every person who works for you.
THE DATA SUPPORTS IT
The CEO Genome Project, a 10-year study by ghSMART with economists from the University of Chicago and Copenhagen Business School, analyzed over 17,000 executive assessments. Executives described as decisive were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs. Of the executives rated poorly on decisiveness, 94 percent scored low for deciding too slowly. Only 6 percent for deciding too fast. And among CEOs fired over decision-making, only one-third lost the job for bad calls. Two-thirds were fired for being indecisive.
Jeff Bezos put a number on it in his 2016 shareholder letter: most decisions should be made with about 70 percent of the information you wish you had. Wait for 90 percent and you are already slow.
HOW I USE IT
I have been successful in my life because I do not overthink decisions where I have imperfect or inadequate information. I assess quickly and make a call. I know that often I am probably flipping a coin. But I also know the company needs a decisive answer more than it needs a perfect one. That is how I started Freshly, Petfolk, Cutting Horse, and a few businesses we have now formed within Cutting Horse. Assess the situation and go.
To be fair, it is also how I started The Steak Out and WysLife. Both failed. Three out of five is good enough. You do not need to be right all the time. You will be wrong. Correct the error and move on.
This is something my team loves and hates about me. With new information, I will pull a 180 overnight. I will go from being the champion of an idea to its biggest hater. But I move quickly, which allows my team to move quickly. We make mistakes, and we do our very best not to make the same one twice. Our goal is to make more mistakes than anyone we compete against. That is how we learn how to win.
I really do not care about misses, failures, or falling on my face. I get back up, I learn, and I go again. Life is a lot more fixable than most people give it credit for.
THE SHIFT
→A wrong decision beats no decision. The data is clear. Leaders get fired for stalling twice as often as they get fired for bad calls. Decide at 70 percent and correct as you go.
→Changing your mind is a strength, not a flaw. With new information, pull the 180. Loyalty to an old decision is just slow failure.
→Make more mistakes than your competition. Every mistake you learn from is a rep they did not get. Speed of learning is the real moat.
THE CHALLENGE
Pick one decision you have been sitting on for more than a week. Give yourself 24 hours, decide with the information you have, and tell your team. Then watch how fast everything behind it starts moving.