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It feels more or less required these days, if you start freelancing, to spend at least as much effort documenting the experience of freelancing as you do actually working with clients. Down that path lies SubStack revenue, paid courses, and eventual thought-leaderdom.
I should note; it’s a solid path. “Knowledge is power” and all that, or perhaps more relevantly, “knowledge has value”. Collecting, refining, and selling information is and should be a valuable service, whether as an analyst, thought leader, or professor.
But that’s not actually what I’m going to do here, both because it’s not quite my cup of tea and because I’m a little too in the thick of things to have anything meaningful to say at this point. Business is going well and my time is in demand.
So what’s this about then?
(I admire the inverted pyramid but I’m a sucker for an anecdotal lede)
Well, as I’ve been doing this work, I’ve been thinking more about more about frameworks. I don’t think that’s an uncommon thing for consultants; you work with enough clients and you start to see similarities between them, start to glimpse the patterns that lie beyond the day-to-day. It’s not impossible to do this as a full-time employee, but it’s easier when you operate at a remove. When you have the perspective that distance affords.
Inspired in large part by the session Courtney McAra and M.H. Lines ran at MOPs-Apalooza on “Lane Systems & Thinking for Martech”, I’ve been reading some of W. Edwards Deming’s book Out of the Crisis.1 I’m not very far in (working my way through business books is a muscle I’m working on building), but what I find striking is the power that comes with abstraction.2 A factory might be a large building with an assembly-line running through it, yes, but in the abstract a factory is a set of operations that must be performed to transform quality materials into quality product. For that process to run effectively and to maintain quality throughout, you need to establish a set of operations that consistently output quality product. The specifics do matter, as do the people who execute these operations, but the process exists as an abstract layer, guiding those people and those elements from raw material to finished product.
This is where my ops-nerd really starts to show.
Because, bringing this back to frameworks, even if that exact set of operations is not transferrable from factory to factory, the patterns of thought and the principles that led to that set of operations absolutely are. If you follow those same patterns of thought, you should be able to establish an effective set of operating principles no matter what the factory produces. It’s about establishing a method of production and optimization at the abstract level that can be repeatedly applied to drive efficiency, impact, and growth.
And the fact is that B2B SaaS businesses, particularly on the Go-To-Market side of things, have a heck of a lot more in common than factories (I am not an expert on factories but I do know a decent amount about B2B SaaS GTM). I’m not suggesting that you can cookie-cutter the same set of GTM operations across every B2B SaaS business on the market and expect it to work out. But I am suggesting that these companies have more in common than they don’t, and that repeatable frameworks are the name of the game when it comes to operating effectively in this space. And that specific tools matter a whole lot less than effective frameworks!
Different businesses have different tooling, different channel mixes, different team structures. But they’re all factories aimed at bringing prospects in the door and outputting revenue on the other end.3 Ideally recurring revenue. And most of them really aren’t that different. It’s about leveraging whatever tools are on hand to build a tailored, bespoke version of the same guiding framework.
I am very much channeling Benn Stancil here, in particular “The end of our purple era” and the references he makes to the SOMA project — I highly recommend that you read that post in concert with this one. But to quote him directly:
“We make progress as a discipline not by reasoning our way through our problems individually—as tempting as that may be, given our rationalist proclivities for thinking from”first principles,” or whatever—but through social inquiry, in which we can all stumble forward together. And resilient standards are better than theoretically perfect ones.” (Source)
If I have my way, that’s where NetSpinnr’s headed. It’s definitely not happening today, it’s probably not happening in the next few months, but that’s the long trajectory.
Written by Jack Segal. Shoot me an email with questions or comments, and if you'd like to support my writing, you can send me a tip using Stripe!
Date
2023-12-06Subscribe
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