Robert Greene’s 2nd strategy of war instructs, “Strategy is not a question of learning a series of moves or ideas to follow like a recipe; victory has no magic formula … Let go of all fetishes—books, techniques, formulas, flashy weapons—and learn to become your own strategist.”

When applied to B2B, consider these three scenarios.

‍ You’ve never done XYZ to grow your company, so you buy the recipe [system] sold by someone who has done it before.

… or …

◀️ You’ve done XYZ to grow your company, it worked, so you do it again.

… or …

⚠️ You’ve done XYZ to grow your company; it failed, so you never do it again.

All three choices can be business-destroying mistakes, fueled by survivorship bias.

Farnham Street defines survivorship bias as: “a common logical error that distorts our understanding of the world. It happens when we assume that success tells the whole story and when we don’t adequately consider past failures.”

In the three scenarios, you are over-relying on someone else’s claim tainted by survivorship bias, relying on your own limited perspective, or dismissing a strategy because it didn’t work for you that one time.

The punchline?

Stop. Buying. Systems. 

Invest in learning more strategic possibilities.

Practice in peacetime. Knowing a tactic without trying it out, will make it useless when your back is against the wall.

When your real world, in the trenches, conditions change, deploy strategies based on the new reality and execute confidently. Rinse and repeat.

The B2B Bandits’ Survivorship Biases

Here are a few ways the Bandits battle our decades of collective survivorship bias:

“We’d crush that.”

After seeing a bunch of our competitors (back in our ‘email agency’ era) crushing it with instructional YouTube videos, we thought if our lessers could do it, so could we.

Nope. Nope. And Nope.

Apparently, asking a Bandit to sit at their desk by themselves, activate screen share, drop knowledge while clicking around and talking, edit it, upload it, tag it, describe it, thumbnail it, publish it, and promote it … every damn week … was a hill too steep.

We were blinded by their survival.

Now, if we catch ourselves saying, “We’d crush that,” we hard stop.

Then, we craft and launch a weeks-long blitz to practice the strategy and see if we can execute it properly.

Most of our competition at the time was hungry for new business. They had time.

We had already achieved dominance in our vertical. We were too busy executing client email campaigns to properly deploy a strategy that hinged on consistent, prolific action.

“It worked for us back in 20XX. I want to hire you to do it in 2024.”

This is a flavor of bias that we’ve been battling heavily this year. Several times a week, some B2B company will hit us up, declaring/pleading, “X worked before; now we want to try it again. Oh, and we heard the B2B Bandits are the best at X.”

But the Bandits spend enough time in the trenches to know that X won’t work in 2024. Even with a unicorn campaign: epic creative, insane ad spend, and flawless execution.

Not gonna lie. The Bandits have buckled under the weight of our previous successes, and taken a client’s money … more than once … this year. However, sweating and spending to repair these relationships, reminded us to reheat the Meatloaf rule:

I will help you grow your business … but I won’t do that.

But I

wooon’t

do-oooooh

thaaaaaaaaat!