The Number Was A Guess

The number that finally moved the room was a guess.

I heard about a conversation at a tech company that was about to make a change at roughly the worst moment its customers could have picked. The plan rolled forward the way a full keg keeps going once somebody lets go of it on a ramp. Then someone asked for a guess. How many customers might walk over this, and how much recurring revenue walks out the door with them.

That’s when the talk of doing it differently finally started.

Notice what the question added. Nothing.

The customers were always going to have a rough stretch. The question just put it in a different currency… a hypothetical with a dollar sign stapled to the front, and suddenly the pain registered on the scale that room actually reads.

That’s most of marketing, honestly. Positioning is translation. You take a true thing and price it in whatever the listener already counts. It’s also a little damning that a customer’s rough stretch needed a translator before anyone would sit with it.

A group I work in had a quieter problem. It sounded like a band where everybody knows the song and nobody agrees on the key. (We tried the grown-up fixes first. Different structures, templates, agendas. All very laminated.)

What worked was a temp check at the end of each week. Everyone rates how they feel about our progress toward the goal we share. No finger pointing. No labels. Just a number.

The energy people bring has shifted completely.

Same move as the churn question, pointed at a different seat.

The first room needed the customer’s pain converted into the company’s money before it counted. The second asked the team first, ahead of the customer and ahead of the money, and the team started showing up like the goal belonged to them.

Neither number would survive a statistics class. Both worked because each one handed somebody the consequence to hold. The difference is which room had to be scared into holding it.

Stay Positive & What Would You Rate This Week?