Think about the last obstacle your company overcame. Now think about the last opportunity your company seized effectively. What do they have in common?

The answer could be any number of things really, but I would bet that one key similarity is how decision-making was approached in both scenarios.

Whether it’s making decisions to meet challenges or capitalizing on new prospects, asking the right questions plays an integral role – who you talk to, what you ask, how and when you ask, what the communication loop looks like as the topic is discussed, and what the outcome is after asking.

Questions play a vital role in every facet of an organization. Whether it’s marketing, sales, forecasting, finance, product research and development, operations, or overall strategic planning, questions are the cornerstone of running a successful business. Let’s discuss why and what you can do to improve your question asking to be a better leader!

The temptation to oversimplify their sales and marketing strategies has always been a trap for organizations looking to fast-track growth. However, the last few years have ushered in increased competition, added cost constraints, and intensified pressure to integrate technology, culminating in a whirlwind that has heightened the temptation to simplify regardless of the business impact.

I’m seeing this phenomenon more and more these days – organizations that want to use a one-size-fits-all approach to their strategic sales and marketing plans to try to improve their ROI. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t simply fail to give them an advantage over their competition, it also fails to produce the results they are looking for at all. Quite the opposite, oversimplifying is a waste of precious organizational resources – time, talent, and money.

With so much emphasis on big data and AI, today’s leadership conversations seem to be largely focused on metrics. And while B2B KPIs are certainly valuable to track and analyze, when organizations are facing challenges are they really the best indicator of what’s wrong and how to fix it?

The abundance of data available these days makes it tempting to rely solely (or at least primarily) on the data, but the most experienced leaders will tell you that data can’t necessarily tell the whole story, or the right story.

When it comes to diagnosing a problem or turning an organization around people are just as important as data because they can contribute:

• Institutional knowledge
• First-hand experience
• Insight into perceptions and attitudes
• Logic and reasoning

Let’s take a closer look at the benefit that human capital can provide when trying to overcome a challenge or understand and fix an issue to move an organization forward.

Take a moment to answer this question: How does your organization generate revenue?

(This isn’t a rhetorical exercise. Pause for a moment and actually do it!)

Once you have your answer, look at it and try to discern whether the answer you gave was related to methods you use to generate revenue (the how) or the strategic principles behind them (the why).

As a fractional CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) I frequently talk to business leaders who will discuss the ways that they generate revenue with statements like, “We sell through numerous channels to reach a wide market” or “We use reliable manufacturers to source all of our parts so we can get new products to market quickly” or “We provide extensive customization options so our customers can get exactly what they need.” And while these statements may be true, they miss the point of how their organizations are actually generating revenue. These are things that companies do – approaches they take, practices they use, or competitive advantages they rely on. However, they aren’t the true ways that those companies generate revenue …or at least they shouldn’t be!

Your revenue strategy should be more than just a collection of methods – it should be a set of principles.

Have you ever read a business article that talks about “the power of storytelling”? If you have, you probably felt like it was a little shallow that researchers and analysts tout the benefits of storytelling across everything from gaining followers to increasing sales to cultivating brand loyalists. I mean, of course telling a compelling story can potentially improve sales and marketing functions, but is it really necessary at the core of the organization itself?

A recent Harvard Business Review article titled Storytelling That Drives Bold Change flipped the entire idea of storytelling in business on its head! The article claims that storytelling is far more than a “nice to have” sales/marketing approach. It makes the case that storytelling is a fundamental leadership need across all organizations. The executive summary explains,

“When tackling urgent organizational problems, leaders usually work hard to identify underlying causes, tap a wide range of knowledge, and experiment with solutions. But once they’ve mapped out a plan, there’s one more crucial step they must take: crafting a story so compelling that it will harness their organizations’ energy and direct it toward change.”

Frances Frei and Anne Morriss highlight the fact that organizational problems don’t just need a proposed fix, they need a proposal that will win people over. The narrative that leaders craft is just as important to the organization’s ability to overcome challenges as the plan itself.

In times of planning, we ask questions like, “How do we continue this momentum?” and “How can we improve results?” We want to understand the keys to success – the path we should follow to get where we want to go. And yet, we sometimes forget that the path to success is simply moving forward.

Letting go of the old is a precursor to ushering in growth.

There are many times personally and professionally when you will need to let things go and move on to grow. How do we stop doing what we’ve always done and start doing something new?

Turmoil and uncertainty aren’t going away anytime soon. So, as business leaders, we are left with two choices – bemoan this fact or do something about it!

Complaining about reduced budgets, labor constraints, accelerated timeframes on go-to-market strategies, added competition, increased channel options, and the like are futile efforts. There will always be challenges, but there are also tools, processes, and people that can help you overcome these challenges!

Winning companies understand this fact. Their success is built on the ability to analyze where they are today and use that knowledge to find the resources that are going to get them where they want to go tomorrow.

How exactly do they do that?

Business alignment is everyone rowing in the same direction at the same time to get where they want to go together. When departments and divisions across the whole company are aligned around a singular objective, they will accomplish what they set out to do. Therefore, alignment is how businesses achieve their goals.

However, alignment is far more elusive than many business leaders realize. A Harvard Business Review analysis of strategic alignment made the following discovery:

“We asked more than 500 frontline employees, middle managers, and senior executives across 12 different organizations to indicate how aligned they thought their companies were with respect to corporate strategy. And we found that the participants were largely optimistic, on average reporting that they felt strategic agreement within their companies was 82%. But when we analyzed detailed written explanations from those same employees around what their company’s strategies were, we found that actual alignment (as measured by the linguistic overlap in the concepts and words they listed) was, on average, just 23% — two to three times lower than perceived alignment.”

Of course, that begs the question, would you even know if your organization was misaligned?