How To Eliminate Seat Lag Syndrome

If you want to know who someone really is, watch how they respond in what some would call a down economy.

If what I'm about to share describes you in any way, shape, or form, the good news is that you can change it almost overnight.

I know I go on and on about 100s of my richest, most successful clients all the time, but to help you avoid Seat Lag Syndrome, I’m going to tell you about how it affects the brokest people I've worked with. Some of them have been fired and refunded over the years. 

Picture in your mind a game of musical chairs. Remember that game? What is the object? To put your ass in a chair as quickly as possible before someone else takes it of course.

Now, imagine there are so many chairs that getting to one is pretty easy. In fact, you bring other players into the game on your behalf, and they still rarely ever have to strain much for a chair. More chairs just keep getting added, and even though there’s mild friendly competition, you still secure many of the best chairs daily as long as you work hard enough.

But now imagine I take away a bunch of the chairs. And because the sea of chairs shrunk into a smaller space, you meet some players you've never encountered before. They have more people on their team, and they're faster than you. They steal chairs fast because they're simply better than you. They train more than you, wear aerodynamic clothes, special shoes, are lighter, have faster reflexes and have been securing more chairs than you for a longer time.

I watched this happen during the pandemic. I had a much different experience than many other businesses. Besides the riots and screams I could hear in the streets from the 10th floor of my downtown Indianapolis office at the time, I really couldn’t tell that there was an economic problem until I started interviewing people. I realized that so many advertising companies sucked, and because they weren’t getting results, businesses were faster to cut them and fire people. The batch of candidates told me everything I needed to know about what kind of results these companies were getting. One girl I interviewed was shocked that part of her check would be based on results. Others were scared off by me and my ideologies about results, study, and work ethic.

When I spoke to business owners, I could always tell which ones would fail or not. All I had to do was look at what they were good at and what they invested in. It takes a tremendous amount of time and skill to script, rehearse, and practice really good excuses and rebuttals about your results. That's a skill that successful people just don’t have time for. They can't afford that luxury. It takes a lot of energy to resist and argue advice from someone like myself, who has looked into thousands of ad accounts and helped 100s of business owners. I see the same with teams.

The thing is, if you’re under 10 million, you’re not even penetrating enough of the market to complain about a recession, election, or economy right now. You’re penetrating maybe 1-3% of the available market. That's a big MAYBE. Just go look at how many people there are in your target market who make the appropriate income, how many deal with the problems your product solves, and how many became customers. Unless you sell penguins, you might be surprised at how little you do compared to the big dogs. The fact is, things were easy for your marketing and sales teams and now they're not as easy because there are fewer chairs. It's a season that demands you rely on more than a good product alone and some luck. 

That's Seat Lag Syndrome. Just look at the thriving companies, and you will see some clear distinctions. 

Welcome to Pro Ball. This isn’t t-ball anymore, that’s all. 

You have an advantage against larger companies. You can niche and be more relevant and intimate with your audience. You have less risk than they do. You don’t have massive teams. You haven’t invested in becoming great and ruled out all the simplest things that create growth constraints. 

Your real problems aren’t even problems. It’s a lack of direct focus on being great and knowing your customer. You've waited too long to improve things and let your team get by with poor reporting and procedures. Your orders have been less than suggestions to them instead of commands. 

If you can’t tell me what percentages of your best customers work in what industry, how many children they have, divorced or married, where they live, or what car they drive, you just haven’t tried hard enough. Thats all. 

If your sales team isn’t sending detailed reports of their calls, if they can’t recite all rebuttals word for word with their eyes closed, and if they aren’t coming up with new ways to overcome objections and increase show % every single day, then they’re mediocre at best. That's Seat Lag Syndrome

It's not as much your fault as the propaganda you've been force-fed about advertising and selling, and those who have taken advantage of the ride– the vendors and employees who have relied on luck. The opportunistic masterminds and advisors who road your wave and shared a strategy that no matter what it was, would have worked for you anyway because they picked a good product at the right time. And to be fair, some of them were drinking their own koolaid so much they really thought the ads they run for you, the advice they gave you or the job they were doing for you was amazing. So did the people who mentored and influenced them.

There are 2 different versions of you reading this right now. For one of them, this is great news! Its a sigh of relief because it's an easy fix. You realize the sky is not falling right now, and this is a new, exciting opportunity, a no-brainer for you. The other version of you will close this newsletter out, unsubscribe and then spend the rest of the day investing your resources into defending yourself. This version will double down on doing things the way you always have or come up with some brand new idea in an attempt to circumvent what needs to be optimized today. In the end, which you choose will be evident, and it will be shown to the people closest to you. Your grandkids and adoring spectators will inherit your choice and carry it in their DNA.

Talk soon.

–Lance C. Greenberg