Why is an execution skill key to succeed but hard to find
Dieter Weisshaar • July 3, 2023
Foto von Adi Goldstein auf Unsplash
Execution capability is the key success factor
On our famous online book store you find far over 60.000 books on strategy
but only a good 4.000 on strategy execution
or implementation. There are far more universities that offer marketing and only a few on sales as a major. Creating the ambition, the project goals, the strategy is a cool thing and requires great thinkers. Taking the things to daily execution
requires an additional skill
which is rare, may be perceived as boring but is the key success factor for every company.
Who haven't seen it - you have attended a board meeting or town-hall with shiny slides and the next big steps or goals have been presented, but later on the project failed or no impact has been created. Actually 70% of all projects do fail
or do not deliver the intended outcome. There are many reasons why projects can fail but there is one main topic to address, you need people with execution skills
in your organization. That may sound boring but without execution nothing will be achieved.
Few examples
from the growth side of the business.
Creating a pipeline
is mandatory in most B2B businesses to increase revenue. Creating a pipeline requires awareness and value propositions to share with your audience to convince them to buy. You can create reach or awareness in many ways.
- A booth on fair
is used for a while to find new prospects. It is quite an investment and your marketing team can do a real great job with a good presence but if your exhibition team isn't actively talking to people, collect the business cards, agree on next steps and log them into a CRM to execute right after the fair, nothing will happen and your investment will not pay out.
- Digital content marketing is the current state of the art to create leads. You post valuable content on social media to create awareness and direct people to your website, but if you are not offering a call to action on your landing page or gated content (e.g. whitepaper download) to get the contact data of your visitor or a webcast with login data, there is nothing you can follow up on and your digital advertising money is wasted.
Same applies for developing a project through the sell cycle to close a deal:
- Sales processes can be seen as an administrative burden to the creative seller. But customer acquisition cost can range from 10.000 € to 1.000.000 € per deal depending on your business. If you don't take your prospect from one step to the next in the sales process to increase your deal probability or you forget to follow up on something as you may have too many opportunities open, you loose the deal and waste the money and time spent.
We can name a lot more examples, such as introducing a new software without communicating with the user and addressing their expectations.
An Execution Skill
is key to succeed. Obviously you need a team that has expertise, ideally experience, project management skills, required tools and resources in what you want to get done. The Execution Skill
is ability to do T-Management, that means to understand the big picture, strategy, goals, processes, outcomes but as well the ability to sit down with team and go deep in a step by step mode to see where topics are blocked, bottlenecks exist. The ability to overcome these roadblocks
by creating an action plan, ensure approvals or resource allocation, take decisions and use the empowerment to make things happen.
The Execution skill
has a great level of strategic thinking, empathy to work with a team on complex or tough situations and the down to earth mentality
to dive deep and get things done on a quite detailed level or advice teams to do so. Furthermore it requires the ability to handle multiple of these situations at the same time and keep track of these roadblocks, prioritize and resolve them. It is all about the breaking the big picture
down
to more detailed process steps or outcomes and compare them with the overall goals and the desired value the project needs to create. Obviously it requires empowerment
from the stakeholders to allocate resources and take decisions.
That may not be as shiny as the strategy presentation at the board meeting but that is where real value will be created. By the way this skill is required on all levels
- in the board room to get your strategy implemented as well as on your projects to get them delivering desired outcome or in improving efficiency in production.
Back to your lead generation example
and the pipeline. Someone needs to take the lead that your teams generate contacts, that contacts become leads by showing interest, that sales is taking the lead to closing. The impact is only delivered when all steps and teams work together and achieve their KPIs or promises throughout the process or project.
People with Execution Skills
are
- great strategic thinkers
- have analytic skills
- can take topics to an abstraction level and link them back to the big picture
- break down complex topics to manageable tasks, prioritize and measure outcome
- brave enough to take decisions
- have empathy to resolve a problem and create the right team spirit
- good communicators to get the mission across.
Have a look if you have enough Execution Skills on your team and not just the ones with the shiny slides.
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