The Beauty of the Breakthrough

If your team is struggling to gain traction in the market, there are three things you probably want to look for to have that breakthrough moment.

Teams get stuck. Teammates get frustrated. The business results look grim and best-laid plans stall. What’s missing? The ever elusive breakthrough moment.

When I started my own agency, I wanted a name that captured not just what we did but the part of this work I enjoyed the most. Admittedly, the "Ventures" part of the name sounded good. But the "Breakthrough" part was a necessity. It accurately describes the value I bring to teams.

At each stop in my career, it was the breakthrough moment that catapulted the business to new heights. In many cases, it was that moment when the team felt lifted, inspired around a new mission.

Here are a few examples.

💡 At Dun & Bradstreet, we wanted to launch a new product. We set off to build a slick, feature-rich experience. But it was the wrong approach. After several weeks of speaking with prospects, we learned it was the performance (speed, scale) that they wanted up front. Those were the features our clients cared most about. It was the basics, not new features that just seemed cool. We won. We launched. We sold a seven figure contract in our first three months and many others.

💡 At SugarCRM, I inherited a product in a cutthroat battle with other marketing automation tools. Small but mighty, we tried to match our competitors feature for feature. Yet, we hemorrhaged customers. We were playing the wrong game. We switched our market to clients looking for basic functionality at an affordable price that worked really well and played nice with the CRM. Once we had that breakthrough moment, our fortunes changed. Client retention turned around.

💡 With a current client, we had been building on a path to provide a new product experience that could help sellers close more business. We demoed the product prototype dozens of times. The breakthrough? The UI helped the audience understand the need but helped us understand our product was wrong. Sellers really wanted a simple messaging service, not a fully baked UI. We pivoted and are having much better product-market fit conversations.

How did these breakthrough moments happen? I think there were three major factors that led to a game-changing breakthrough. As you’ll see, these factors aren’t mutually exclusive.

1) Customer interaction. In each case, the breakthrough moment required chatting with real customers. It's an art and a science. I love this part.

2) An open-minded, egoless team. Each breakthrough required a team that could be open-minded about the future. No one was too married to an idea or afraid to let go of an idea that previously was thought of as infallible.

3) Curious leadership. While the team may be willing to wait for the breakthrough, it’s typically one person at the top who will chase it. It required someone who can ask the right questions and dive into the data with restless abandon. I’ve historically fulfilled this role in several cases. Of course, I can't claim full credit for these eureka moments. I was simply the sherpa that helped the team climb the mountain. And I love that job.

If your team feels stuck with its Product direction, execution or strategy, keep in mind that many companies go through something similar. Here’s a mantra that might help: “The right answer is attainable if we care enough to never stop chasing it.”