Beware Bluebirds and Elephants — Destroyers of Sales and Strategic Discipline

Bluebird: An unexpected prospect who shows up out of the blue, flies rapidly through your sales cycle and buys your product or service.  You don’t really know where they came from, but you are happy to get the revenue.

The problem with bluebirds is that they lull you into thinking that your sales and marketing efforts are systematic and effective, when you may be simply experiencing a random event.  To really scale a business, you need to make sure you have a repeatable, predictable process to generate leads and bring them through the buying decision process.

Elephant: An unexpected but fortuitous sighting of an extremely large prospect, who then demands all of your focus, energy, and resources to move through the pipeline and then, maybe, eventually closes the sale.  The revenue from this prospect could make your year and the reference value can make your company.

Elephants present two big problems.

The first is that they are extremely hard to close.  They demand tons of attention from your best pre-sales resources.  They also represent a big opportunity cost if you miss — how many other prospects did you ignore while you were hunting the elephant?

The second problem with elephants is that even if you do close the deal, then you have to eat them.  In other words, be careful what you wish for.  If you have to customize your product/service to satisfy the needs of the elephant, you potentially miss the needs of the broader market.  If your strategy is to hunt elephants, make sure you are capitalized for it.  If not, then you need to think carefully about the risks/rewards before engaging in the hunt.