Making the Work Stick

You can do all the right work and still end up exactly where you started.

That's the risk with excavation and validation. You surface the insights. You confirm them with your best customers. You walk away with real clarity.

And then nothing changes.

Three weeks ago, I launched a series on doing the hard work up front that makes selling easier.

It's built around a simple framework: Excavate → Validate → Integrate.

Week one was excavation. It’s the boardroom work that surfaces what your best people actually do. The behaviors, the instincts, the intangibles that nobody's written down.

Week two was validation. Take your hypothesis to your best customers and find out if it's true. I’ve got a great guide to help with these conversations, and you may be surprised by what you hear.

This week is about integration, and how you make all that work worthwhile.

The Workshop Problem

The excavation, the validation conversations… You walk away with real clarity about what makes you different and why your best customers buy from you.

Then what?

The insights are put into a beautiful slide deck and are mentioned in a meeting or two. Everyone nods, you get a few audible responses, and then the quarter gets busy, the fires need putting out, and everyone goes back to doing what they were doing before.

That's not transformation. That's a workshop.

It’s one thing for a company to have insights. It’s quite another for that company to use them.

Simpler Than You Think

My #ThankfulThursday post this week was about Kelly Riggs.

Kelly has a superpower: he cuts through the noise, simplifies things without dumbing them down, and when he needs to, he'll look you directly in the eye and tell you what you need to hear.

Years ago, I was sitting in a parking lot when he told me something that stuck:

"Dude, you could write a book on one blog post a week over the course of a year..."

I haven't done it yet. But that's not the point.

That comment was one of the first real wake-up calls that I might be overcomplicating things for myself.

Not just writing. Progress. Momentum. Business. All of it.

Integration works the same way.

It sounds like a big, heavy lift. Rewriting onboarding. Documenting playbooks. Changing how you run meetings. Coaching differently.

But it's not as complicated as it feels. It's just a series of small, consistent choices that compound over time.

Weekly wisdom-sharing in team meetings. Monthly coaching conversations that reinforce what you've identified. Quarterly reviews of what's working and what's not.

The path forward is probably simpler than you're making it in your head.

The Bob and Sarah Problem

Here's what happens without integration:

Bob has been your top performer for 20 years. He knows exactly what to do in every situation.

You tell Sarah to shadow Bob. Bob tells Sarah to "build relationships" and "pick up the phone when they call."

Sarah nods, takes notes, and watches Bob in action.

Then she struggles for way longer than she should, trying to figure out what Bob actually does.

Why? Because what Bob says he does and what Bob actually does are completely different things to her. He can't articulate his own unconscious competence.

One day Bob retires, and all that institutional knowledge goes with him.

The integration step solves this. It takes what Bob knows and turns it into something teachable. Something that doesn't walk out the door when he does.

The full breakdown is in this week's post.

Do You Know What You’re Integrating?

It’s important to know “what good looks like here” before you embed it in your org, and I built a self-assessment to help you figure that out.

14 questions. Most people finish in under 10 minutes. It's free.

I’ve had a few dozen people take it over the past few weeks since I launched it, and it’s opening some eyes.

It will show you where the gaps are. How well you know what makes you different in the marketplace, and how well you discuss these differentiators with your best customers.

Whether you're operating on assumptions or evidence. Whether the knowledge in your organization is locked in a few heads or actually systematized.

If you've been reading along with this series and nodding, this is the next step.

Take it, let me know what you think, and if you learned anything.

What's Next

These last few weeks have established the core framework, and there's more to come.

Now that we've covered what the work looks like, I'll be digging into the symptoms that show up when it doesn't get done. The cost of bad-fit customers. The onboarding problem. What happens when institutional knowledge walks out the door…

If any of those sound familiar, stay tuned.

The path forward is simpler than you think, but you still have to walk it, and I’m here to helpif you need it.

Cheers,
JB