Michael Erath argues that elite organizations obsess over playbooks so every role knows the correct play in common situations. Assign each seat a single obsession: the CRO owns sales playbooks and execution, frontline salespeople follow them. Clarity and accountability come from knowing who owns what.
Chapters
You mentioned the obsessions. Are there specific obsessions, if I were to use your terminology, of an elite organization, I think regardless of the industry, there are several that that tend to transcend different industries. So, for example, one of the five obsessions is also optimized playbooks. That organizations really need to have optimized playbooks. So people know in various situations what's the play. I run, just like the sports team, they're going to obsess about their playbooks. They're going to train and practice on them. So one of the obsessions that I think, and I'm a big proponent when we're working with clients on this, is that every seat in the organization needs to have one obsession that specifically tells them or clarifies how they interact with our playbooks. So for example, a leadership team member on a sales team, sales manager, chief revenue officer, they might have an obsession to own the sales playbooks, execution and outcomes. So in the original kind of accountability chart language, when I first read Traction for that seat, it just said sales. One word, two words. It was less clear. But if, if a chief revenue officer or sales manager owns the sales process, playbooks, execution and outcomes, if those sales playbooks aren't getting us the results we want, they own them. They need to be the ones to go fix them. That sets a much clearer expectation. And if they're not capable of doing that, they may not be in the right seat. They own the execution and the outcomes. And so then you might have someone who's a frontline salesperson. Their obsession relative to playbooks might be to follow the sales playbook, period. Right? So now I know my obsession to be a successful salesperson is not to go off and do things however I want to do them. We have a process. We have a sales playbook. My job is to obsess about learning it, following it, and executing that. And so that's how we start to kind of create more clarity across multiple roles within an organization around that.
