Sales and marketing teams are notoriously performance obsessed, and this tends to lead to us trying out everything we can think of in an attempt to meet our KPIs. It’s called the spaghetti approach, because it relies on throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. There’s some merit to this idea, because it’s often the most unexpected (and unorthodox) approaches to sales and marketing that end up being the most successful.

Sales and marketing teams are notoriously performance obsessed, and this tends to lead to us trying out everything we can think of in an attempt to meet our KPIs. It’s called the spaghetti approach, because it relies on throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. There’s some merit to this idea, because it’s often the most unexpected (and unorthodox) approaches to sales and marketing that end up being the most successful.

<p align=”justify”When this happens, we start to lose track of everything from quality control to the reason why we’re doing things in the first place. Suddenly, sales and marketing are focussed more on playing catch-up and trying to tick things off a to-do list than on actually helping the company to scale itself sustainably. And that causes a lot of problems.

Saying No

When everything is being done at the last minute, we start to lose sight of our true priorities because all we can think about is our next deliverable. It’s inevitable that this will happen at some points, especially if you work in a fast-paced environment such as a tech startup. If it’s happening occasionally, it’s not a problem. It’s reminiscent of how short bursts of adrenaline can help us to survive in stressful situations, but how it leads to burnout if it’s kept up for too long.

That’s where saying no comes in. Taking on too much can be counterproductive, diluting your efforts and ultimately making it so that nothing really works as intended. It’s better to get two things just right than to make a mess of five of them, and it’s your responsibility as an employee to know how much work you can handle without overstretching yourself.

Saying no is difficult, whether you’re agency-side and saying no to a client or whether you work in-house and you’re saying no to a manager. The good news is that we’re not saying that you should say no just for the sake of it. You need to be strategic with it and make sure that if you do say no, you’re saying no for a reason. You need to explain why you’re saying no and show how your time is better spent elsewhere.

Finding balance

If your sales and marketing teams find themselves constantly chasing deadlines and struggling to get their work done on time, they’re not going to be able to function at their optimum capacity. If your employees are regularly overbooked, you’ll need to either reduce their workload or hire more employees. And remember that occasional downtime can be a good thing – it allows people to be proactive and to work ahead of time, thus freeing them up at a later date. And it stops them from struggling to meet deadlines on the day that they’re due, too.

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