Process > Results

A year ago the USWNT (women's soccer) failed miserably at the World Cup, not making it out of the Round of 16. Anybody watching could see that the team had aged.

As happens in sports and business, when things go awry, people get fired. The new Manager, Emma Hayes, had a decorated run as Manager at Chelsea in the UK.

When the new manager chose her roster, she left several of the legacy stars off the 18 player roster. And yeah, she took some heat for that decision.

Five weeks later, the team she selected ... a considerably younger team than usual, won Olympic Gold. The team won six games in seventeen days, losing zero, outscoring the competition 12-2.

So yeah, I bought her book on Amazon.

If you choose to read it, you'll be struck by the honesty, the audacity, bravado, and maybe most important, process over results. You'll be surprised that somebody would be so open about crisis in a personal life and how that interacts with a stressful job. There's a moment where she is attending a conference and she shows up late for a session. The person running the conference tells her she must make a decision ... to commit to the conference or not be there.

She talks about being demanding, and yet, caring. She cares about her players, their lives, and their dreams.

I knocked the book out in three nights and I don't read books.

But wow, the recurring theme in the book is of prioritizing process over results. About doing the right things.

Which brings me to e-commerce. How many of you apply deeper discounts when things go sideways? Most of you? That's an example of prioritizing results over process. Heck, it's a failure of process. How many of you take shortcuts to bump up conversion rates and/or the ROAS of your campaigns? That's prioritizing results over process.

I was on a Zoom with an e-commerce brand awhile back. This brand prioritized results and could have cared less about process. A simple question like "who owns email campaigns?" brought blank stares. The CEO would speak first - the dozen employees on the Zoom would listen to the CEO, oftentimes squirming, making uncomfortable faces. There was no process. There was just a CEO giving instructions.

Almost everything you read about e-commerce focuses on results, or focuses on very pithy processes. You'll read a book where the author tells you that you must "Be Excellent." Hey, thanks, great advice, we'll take that one back to the CEO.

One of my favorite clients is a $30,000,000ish brand that is growing. This brand prioritizes process over results. Oh yes, they care about results. But they care more about doing things the right way in March so that November turns out well. While other brands plan their "Holiday Campaigns" and "Cyber Monday Discounts", this brand hires merchants who share their plans with the marketing team in February/March, so the marketing team can feature key products at the right time in November/December to maximize sales and please customers. The marketers aren't planning campaigns. The marketers have a process for featuring the joy the merchants have for their products during the August/September/October timeframe so that the customer is primed and ready to buy in November/December. This brand doesn't panic when sales on a Tuesday in August are 6% below the forecast ... they're more likely to question the process surrounding the creation of the forecast.

Yes, I get it, you have to have results.

But results without a process or with a bad process is like going on a cross-country trip from Boston to Portland without GPS or a Map ... just looking for highway signs that say "WEST".

Ask yourself on a scale from 1 to EMMA (Emma is the Manager of the USWNT) how your internal processes grade out? Do you prioritize process (doing things the right way), or do you prioritize results?