Why Smart CEOs Get Stuck Too Long

You understand the technology like maybe nobody else. You have a product or a solution that is going to transform your market. You’ve identified who needs it and yet you’re still struggling to break out. What’s getting in your way? I found that even the smartest CEOs can get stuck when they miss a couple of really important things. Here are three.

Us vs. Them:
One, your focus needs to be from the perspective of your prospects and your customers. It’s so easy being a technical expert to overfocus on what you can do and what you have to offer. Yes, it’s transforming. It’s better than anything. It’s totally the right solution to the problems they have. They need to hear first, what’s the value that that technology provides to them before you start explaining how it works.

The Frankenstein Effect:
Secondly, as you’ve built this business, it’s a real common mistake to when new ideas come up and new solutions come up and new opportunities come up to ad a new initiative, add a new program, ad a new product version, add a new process as you add people. And when you do that and you don’t remove the old ones and you just bolt that on, you can have what I call the Frankenstein effect where your disorganized and complicated engine, no longer functions fast and efficiently. So you need to take the time to do a reset, look at everything that’s going on and make sure you’re not duplicating your effort, you’re not doing conflicting things and you’re not defocusing the people on the processes on your team.

Fear of Focus:
And the last one I want to talk about today is a fear of focus. CEOs that see an opportunity to scale their business are often afraid or hesitant to risk narrowing their target, both their solutions ability and who they’re selling it to. The fear is that they’re gonna miss the bigger market. And I found that CEOs that are willing and have the courage to focus very sharply on their best and most benefited prospects, when they win there in a big way, that actually will lead to the expansion of their market in a much more rapid fashion than if they try to water things down and make it appeal to too many different audiences.

B2B Clarity:
There are more, but those three are ones that you should probably start with to free yourself from the stagnation that’s slowing you down and slowing down the growth of your business.