10 Years. 10 Insights. #6
Insight 6: Trying Harder Isn’t a Strategy
This is the sixth post in a ten-part series marking Inkberry’s 10th anniversary. Each post covers an insight drawn from a decade of working with B2B founders and leadership teams on growth strategy.
If you want different results, be willing to change what you’re doing. This one sounds obvious. And yet, in my experience, wanting different results while continuing the same behaviors is one of the most common patterns I see in leadership teams. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a very human response to a genuinely hard situation.
The Problem – When What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
When a set of behaviors and strategies has made a company successful, it’s natural to keep leaning on them. The challenge is that circumstances change, and what worked before doesn’t always work now.
Companies grow. What works for a five-person team doesn’t necessarily work for a fifty-person organization. Market positions shift. A company that was once a disruptor becomes a market leader, and the playbook needs to change with it. New competitors enter. Customer needs evolve. The market moves, and sometimes the company doesn’t move with it.
When results start to slip, the most common response I see is doing more of the same thing, working harder, pushing the existing tactics further. But effort applied to the wrong approach doesn’t change the outcome.
Why It’s Hard to See
Part of what makes this pattern tricky is that it often shows up as a focus on symptoms rather than root causes. A common example: sales aren’t where they need to be, so the leadership team focuses on improving CRM adoption and pipeline tracking. That’s not wrong, but better tracking doesn’t fix a market fit problem, a channel problem, or a competitive positioning problem. It just gives you a cleaner view of the same issue.
Nobody likes to be wrong, and making a significant change means acknowledging that the current approach isn’t working. That’s uncomfortable for any leadership team, particularly one that has built real success on the strategies they’re now being asked to question.
How to Address It
The first step is to create the time and space to actually examine the problem. Not in a regular weekly check-in, but in a dedicated effort to step back and ask the foundational questions.
Where does the company stand in the marketplace today?
Does the market still need your solution in the way it’s currently being offered?
Who are the competitors now, and how has the competitive landscape shifted?
What’s actually driving the gap between the results you’re getting and the results you want?
This kind of analysis takes real bandwidth, and that’s where many companies stumble. They assign the strategy work to an already stretched executive and expect it to happen alongside a full workload. It rarely does. If you’re serious about changing direction, you need to dedicate real capacity to figuring out what that direction should be, whether that means carving out time internally or bringing in outside help.
Once you have a clearer picture, set a new goal and build a strategy around it. The capabilities and talent that made your company successful in the past are still assets. They may just need to be applied differently.
Finally, approach the process with curiosity rather than pressure. If you’re trying something new, give it a fair runway, define what success looks like in advance, and evaluate the results honestly. Experimentation only works if the culture allows for learning without blame. Most companies start out nimble and curious. Bringing that same spirit to the challenge of change is exactly what’s needed.
If your leadership team is navigating a moment like this and could use an outside perspective, I’d love to talk.