AI Automation. Economic Policy. Foreign Wars. Labor Strikes. Offshore Talent. Price Gouging.

Look to Robert Greene’s 3rd strategy of war for help. “Do not lose your presence of mind … resist the emotional pull of the moment … detach yourself from chaos.”

Seem obvious.

But as you unpack the strategy, two seemingly oppositional ideas emerge.

This plays out a few ways in the business world.

If you are a PLANNER, how do you respond when your plan starts to fail on execution? Change the plan? Terminate the plan & cut your losses? Or execute the plan to completion?

If you are an OPPORTUNIST, will you pivot your team into a new technology / vertical / model when an opportunity opens on the business battlefield?  Abandon your old model if it works? Hunt for the next opportunity if it fails?

All the B2B greats crafted & executed plans, AND adapted to in-the moment opportunities to strengthen their business empires.

And the epic B2B failures did as well.

Kodak (a PLANNER) didn’t embrace digital, then failed. Fear of change disguised as self-control.

Sears (an OPPORTUNIST) diversified into real estate, insurance, and credit cards then failed. Emotionally reaction vs. proactive action.

Try this instead:

️️ Strengthen Your Planning Skills

Even though ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’ ‘failing to plan is planning to fail.’ Going through the process of overplanning – seemingly obsessive levels of research, mapping out more scenarios, pressure testing theories with prototyping, etc… – will help you and your team prepare for the chaos.

Pressure Test in the Real World

Seek ways to put you and your team in chaotic situations. Live product demos at a conference, cross-fire-style panels, or a funky holiday campaign. Get comfortable with the combination of inner nerves and external social-emotional pressure from your team. Stick to the plan or deviate from it; either way, put in the reps to produce more rational decisions in emotionally charged environments.

Exercise for Opportunity

Modern militaries run ‘exercises’ in peacetime to prepare for all of the bad things that can happen in war. For business, you can run exercises to ready your company to rapidly capitalize on opportunities. Potential opportunities you can train for: a competitor going bankrupt, a competitor getting acquired, a law changing to disrupt your vertical, or a scandal impacting trust in your industry. You should have a plan ready on the shelf, with the confidence and competence to execute the plan instantly.

The B2B Bandits’ Plan for Chaos

In true unapologetically human, here’s our brutal self-assessment of our adoption of this strategy.

Planning … or the lack thereof

Admittedly, the Bandits obsess about our clients’ plans way more than we do about our own plans.

Everything from triangulating data from multiple tools, e.g. SparkToro vs. SpyFu analysis, to pre-establishing pivot points on campaigns.

EXAMPLE: if we finish an outreach campaign to 350 targets with weak results, we will pivot to X audience with the same message. Or, if we see better than expected traction, we will increase the audience size by adding X industry and Y geographies.

To help with our ‘do as we say, not as we do’ itis, we’ve repurposed a weekly status meeting into a working planning meeting for our holiday campaigns.

Public Pressure Testing

The Bandits thrive in the pressure cooker. 5,000 mile Food Biz Roadtrip in 2015. Live unscripted email rewrites in 2018. Rooftop Happy Hour series in 2023.

Creating situations where we need to do our thing live and unedited has been part of our soul since our founding in 2009

I’m not going to lie. Some of our public performances failed—hard. But now our team has overcome any allergy to embarrassment and can reliably power through—or pivot—without losing our cool.

Opportunity Plans & Exercises

I think the Bandits have done a good job over the past 15 years creating ‘in case of emergency break glass’ plans for handling marketing technology disruptions.

We researched possible outcomes for the Gmail/Yahoo email-geddon, and tested several varieties of tech stacks. When email deliverability went atomic, we were ready.

But the Bandits had no plan on the shelf for industry or service changes, e.g. the commoditization of online retail marketing services during Covid. No code integrations appeared. Turnkey automation got cheaper. Offshore talent pools accelerated their learning through sheer project volume faster than we could. And Red Bull fueled college drop-outs were starting dad-funded Shopify agencies every week.

I don’t know if we would have stayed in eCommerce even with a battle plan. We probably would have still doubled down on B2B, but in a much more efficient—translated: less expensive—way.

In 2024, the Bandits have added new plan categories to our twice-monthly strategy sessions.

Industry Death: If B2B SaaS doesn’t recover when interest rates drop, then B2B Bandits will do X, and practice it by doing Y for Z amount of time.

Channel Death: If email service providers continue tightening the noose, then B2B Bandits will do X, and practice it by doing Y for Z amount of time.

Competitor Acquisition: If X gets acquired, then B2B Bandits will pre-draft and launch Y campaign, for Z amount of budget.