Step One: Try Delete That Step
"The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist"
An Elon Musk insight into his personal decision-making algo.
Our solution sell parallel is just as brutal;
'The most common mistake of smart sellers is to optimise a process step that should not exist.'
This adds to my recent templating of a First Principles Audit for our process.
Most sales methodologies, playbooks, and CRM workflows are bloated with sacred cows. Steps that once made sense but now just add friction, cost and confusion. The highest-yielding move isn't to make say, your discovery call a fifth more effective, or your proposal template 8pc prettier. It's to strip the step entirely. A true mercy killing.
This bloat isn't easy to slash.
In our data-driven epoch, we're to optimise what we can measure. Pipeline velocity dashboards love activity. Managers love 'accountability'. Founders love the comfort of a 'proven process'. So we tweak, we automate, we add fields. All while the step itself stays sitting there. Like a tax on every deal.
Optimisation feels like progress. Finessing. Mastery. You're working on the process. Deletion feels like giving up. Admitting the map was wrong.
But that's the trap.
Most sales processes aren't designed. They're accumulated. A step added after a deal lost. Another after a random adjacent manager's feedback. Another to satisfy a reporting field nobody reads. Layer by layer, quarter by quarter.
Rather than questioning the steps, salespeople try get better at them. That's not winning. But if it somehow is, then it's winning slower.
Think of our precious process. That pattern of events that when in train, guarantee our sustainable, refinable, repeatable win. To be there every step must earn its place to survive. Ruthlessly.
Before you optimise the step, try delete it.
If it breaks something important, you'll know fast.
Building on his "the best part is no part" mantra, Musk goes on to say, "if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough".
If nothing breaks, you just found your next edge.