In short, as per Part 1, you

1. keep admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it, then
2. continue by looking for cost-effective opportunities for improvement and pursue them and finally
3. never, ever, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll continue by describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, one of the last two mistakes (mistakes 11 & 12) we chronicled in our two part introduction to our “dead company walking” (Part 1 and Part 2) series (where we helped your potential customers identify problems that signify you are a SaaS supplier they should be walking away from). (You can find part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7 here.)

A) Our tech works, any failure is the result of the implementation team/org

We’ve said it numerous times before:

Any failure is your fault, no ands ifs or buts.

If you sell the product, you are responsible for making sure it can work before selling the deal, does work after the implementation, and gets used. Otherwise, you failed.

Moreover, when it comes to external implementation teams, it’s up to you to make sure they are up to snuff.

Put together an implementation partner certification program, and don’t allow anyone to implement your product until their personnel takes your program and passes your course.

Now, it’s true that certification alone isn’t enough to make sure the partner’s personnel puts in the proper effort, but at least you have certainty that they do know how to implement your product, and if a partner will actually go through the effort, they are probably serious about doing a good job on the implementation, which greatly increases the odds of success.

And if they won’t get certified, then you know they don’t care about customer success, just revenue. And, to be blunt, that’s not a “partner” you want!

B) We know what we’re doing.

Okay, the doctor will admit he misled you and is only offering up a solution to one of the mistakes in this article because this is the one mistake you won’t admit to, and he knows it. You think that because you raised a lot of money on a great story that you know how to write the story all the way to, and through, the ending, and that the ending will be a great one. And nothing will shake you from that belief. He’s seen it too often in recent years. Big money creates big egos, and they don’t reset until the walls come crashing down.

Now, for any of you dumb companies reading this for whom it’s not too late, here’s the reality of the situation that you must do everything in your power to avoid.

The reality is that you, like everyone else, can write a story if you put your mind to it. It might even be a good story. But here’s the reality: there’s no guarantee that story is going to sell (or at least sell anywhere nearly as well as you are predicting, or that the ending is going to be the one that you want). The only companies that have achieved both have done so either through luck (which is rare and which you can’t count on) or through learning (by consulting with the best experts they can find across multiple areas of their business).

You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you

1. can’t admit this
2. can’t recognize when someone is right when they are telling you that you don’t know something (or are missing something critical)
3. can’t recognize when someone is giving you (part of) a solution

You’re in trouble.

You’re also in trouble if you assume that because you are a great leader or a great sales person you are a great CEO, or if you assume that because you are a great CEO you can make the right tech decisions, and especially if you assume that because another great CEO told you something was the right tech move (for their company), it is the right tech move for your company.

Everyone has a particular set of skills they are best at, and a set of skills they are certainly not best at, and that’s okay — especially if the set of skills you are best at puts you in the top quartile or higher and brings a lot of value to your company. No one can be an expert at more than a few things. If it takes at least 10,000 hours or five years, and sometimes 20,000 hours, or ten years, to master a subject, then it should be clear that a person will only be able to master a few skills in their lifetime. And if it’s a hard skill, very few will even try (which makes you incredibly valuable).

For example, just because the doctor is one of the leading experts in the Americas and Western Europe on Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization^* (SSDO), is a great architect of optimization and analytic products, has been a great CTO for SaaS companies building advanced tech problems, and can model almost any business scenario mathematically — including the most complex financial models you can dream of, that doesn’t mean he’d be a good CFO. In fact, he’d be a p!ss p00r one and knows it! (That’s one of the reasons he won’t start his own company and be a CEO because startups require a core mix of skill sets, and the right core team, as per the great Garry Mansell’s Simplify to Succeed, and he only has half of them; and in a pinch, he’s a better [acting] COO than CEO, but even then there are better COOs.) And that’s fine. The skills he has are immensely valuable, so why should he pretend to have skills he doesn’t?

So if you have anyone on the executive team who thinks they know it all, or don’t need help, you only have one recourse: get rid of them. It’s harsh, but nothing will kill a startup faster than one that won’t get the help it needs, and it will need help until it can afford a team with all the skill sets it needs to make the business successful. Big money only takes you so far, because if you aren’t selling big deals, that tap will be turned off faster than a speeding bullet.

^* who at one point not only built or consulted on the majority of SSDO solutions between 2000 and 2015 across the Source-to-Pay market but also built models over a decade ago that were only equalled by CombineNet (acquired by Jaggaer) [Sandholm] and Trade Extensions (acquired by Coupa) [Andersson], and only surpassed by Coupa (who acquired Trade Extensions).