I had a conversation with an executive who was trying to guide a full time Entrepreneur through some business nuances. He was asking this entrepreneur about their sales cycle time, funnel management, prospect/account attribution... he was calling out a bunch of important indicators that professional sales teams always have on lock down, and he was right to ask about that stuff... its useful. But I noticed a thing that he was missing and frankly a lot of MBA types do the exact same thing. He was missing that some entrepreneurs just have a "feel" for it.

The entrepreneur in question here has been independent, and successful for 20 years... doing a lot of it without a ton of process. What may surprise a lot of people is that many entrepreneurs do stuff without process, AND they do it successfully. They have mental models or domain knowledge or pattern recognition that may make formal process unnecessary.

To the MBA this would seem improbable - modern sales process is what it is because its effective right? It seems unlikely that a person whose entire prospecting system is effectively "going out for coffee with connected people" would be able to sustain a business, but it can. Actually, in the circumstance we were talking about it was doing better than sustaining... it was outright successful.

**So who's right here? The executive with the process, or the entrepreneur working from a "feel?" **Well they both are.

Sales processes are useful for a bunch of things: coaching, fixing mistakes, financial projections, attribution, etc... but a lot of these techniques are actually for the management of sales people NOT the growth of an individual sales person. An entrepreneur might choose to skip these methods to focus on all the other stuff they have going on in their world, which can be a lot.

...And as crazy as it sounds some successful entrepreneurs might not even know HOW they are doing something, but they can reproducibly do it and what they are doing is effective... If thats the case it just might not matter. That's one of the weird parts about capitalism and markets - you are allowed to guess, and if you guess right the market may reward you. Of course this screams survivorship bias (and I'm sure there is some degree of that) but observationally I think the process is just intuitive. Its just not formal.

I don't want to make this seem like its only entrepreneurs though. Companies, executives, and employees do this all the time too. A dirty little secret of corporate America is that a ton of people are just taking guesses, sprinkling some numbers on it, and claiming they followed a rigorous decision making process. As the saying goes: more fiction has been written in excel than in word.

The thing I'm just looking to stress here is that some people can actually just operate from a "feel" and it works for them. I'm not saying it works all the time, I'm not saying it works at scale or in competitive markets, I'm not saying it works for me... but there are people out there who are successful by every measure, and its because they trust their gut and their gut is right. So if you run into one of these situations, don't immediately say we need to jam a lot of process on this stuff (for the entrepreneur at least). Make sure that the missing process is actually a problem first.