Perfectionism Is the Enemy of Success
- Dan Greenberg
- Nov 21, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 22, 2023
Most of us have heard a saying that goes something like, perfectionism is the enemy of success. I think many of us can intuitively understand it, but as with many sayings, even the ones that make the most sense, are hard to translate into practice in life, and even harder to translate into practice in a specific discipline. I think it’s important to look a bit deeper at what it means, and how it affects sales and sellers specifically.
We live in a world where access to data is seemingly endless, and yet, insights that can be gleaned from data are only slightly more available to us than before. Some of the reasons for this are related to limitations around tools and resources, but a much greater impact comes from humans’ limited capacity to synthesize and analyze real life occurrences due to the infinite number of variables. In other words, we can get better at gleaning insights from data over time, but there are limitations that will always cause there to be a gap between the amount of, and kind of data we can collect, versus what it can actually tell us.
And yet, business leaders still want to “wait for the study’”, “hold off until we see the report”, “delay until we get more information before making any decisions”. I understand this inclination, it’s human nature to want to gather as much information as possible before making a decision. And that can be a good thing. Making data driven decisions about how to approach problems is logical, but there are limitations. In this world of endless data that we live in, we expect that we can always get more data, and so we wait. We wait for all of the information, but at a certain point, more information cannot give you more insight into the right course of action. We wait for more information because we genuinely want to make good decisions, but we also do this out of fear. We think to ourselves, “Well, at least if I have all of the data, I can defend my decision, and then I won’t be blamed if it goes poorly”.
The problem with this approach is that when we wait too long, it becomes too late to make the right decision at the right time. When we wait too long to do something, either the decision gets made for us, or the decision becomes obvious because the situation has changed, and we missed the opportunity to make a decision when it mattered. Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005, Colin Powell, who was responsible for countless immensely consequential decisions developed what he called the 40–70 rule. He explained that with less than 40% of the information that you need to make a decision you are likely to make a poor decision, but that if you wait for more than 70% you will likely take too long, and the decision will be made for you.
What does all this have to do with sales and selling? Well known salesman, author, and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar famously said, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly…until you can learn to do it well”. At first this may sound wrong to us. If it’s worth doing, just do it well, we might think. But what Ziglar was saying is very important. Before you learn to do something perfectly, before you have all the information you need; start doing it. Doing something is better than waiting. Sure, develop yourself, improve, get better over time, but don’t wait until you are there before starting.
I have witnessed many sellers over the course of my career say that they don’t want to waste their time making calls to clients if they aren’t sure those are the right clients and if they aren’t sure that the message is the right message. Heck, regrettably, I have been one of them. I’ve witnessed many managers and leaders holding off on sales efforts because they are waiting for an NPS survey, or market and competitive data that will help them understand how to sell and who to sell to. Thankfully, I don’t believe I have ever been in that group.
The amount of extra help that you can get from waiting for a bit more data, even a lot more data, is often negligible. It’s not that it can’t help at all, the problem is that the time you are spending waiting for data, you could be spending doing, and learning from that doing. It is much easier to make a decision, and implement it, and then iterate on it and make changes to that system than to try to improve on something that you have not put into action yet.
This is not an argument against the collection and analysis of data, in fact it is the opposite. The sooner you start doing, the more data you will have. Sure, you will make some mistakes in the beginning, but you would be surprised how many good conversations and relationships start from buyers informing sellers that they are thinking about something incorrectly. Rather than an argument against data collection and analysis, this is a call to shed two biases:
Scalable data that can be mined and scientifically analyzed for actionable insights is always better than less scalable empirical data and learnings from lived experience. Sure, the scalable data is statistically more sound, and we need it in order to make good decisions over the long run, but qualitative and deep discussions with clients are a big part of the puzzle as well. More importantly, the sooner you start the sales motion, the sooner you start to gather both kinds of data. Collect some data and information so that you aren’t going into situations blindly, and then take action. You can always adapt and iterate on the fly. Start emailing, start calling, start setting up meetings. If you wait, the positives from the additional information you gather likely won’t outweigh the negatives of waiting.
More data is always better. Sure, as a general rule, more data can help make more informed choices, but we don’t operate in a vacuum. There are other factors to consider. ‘More informed’ does not always equal ‘better’ because the past does not repeat itself identically. In addition, data still must be analyzed correctly, and it must give us incremental information that we did not already know, which is not always the case. For these reasons and others, there are significant diminishing returns to the collection of more data, and sometimes those returns diminish to zero, or even below.
I'll leave you with a quote from writer / journalist Carolyn Gregoire: “The great irony of Perfectionism is that while it is characterized by an intense desire to succeed, it can be the very thing that prevents success. Perfectionism is highly correlated with fear of failure, which is generally not the best motivator, {it is also associated with} self-defeating behavior such as procrastination”. Yes, there are times in life when perfectionism is beneficial to the moment, and to the task at hand, but like most things, it is situational. Building a machine that will create a component for the space shuttle demands perfectionism. In sales, on the other hand, perfectionism is rarely the answer, mostly because we are dealing with unpredictable humans and situations with so many variables that there is no formula for getting it right every time, so the best bet is to do the opposite. Get it wrong. I don’t mean on purpose, but act. Do it a lot, and get it wrong sometimes, and then get better over time.
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