Don't Drop The Ball - Part 1

Why the best leaders are paranoid about basic execution

I need something fixed in my house. So I called a local contractor and told them I wanted to pay them money to fix it. Twice. They still haven't called me back. They probably just forgot.

This kind of thing happens all the time in certain industries (e.g., home services). Maybe this is an unfair generalization, but many of us have learned to accept that certain kinds of businesses aren’t as on top of it as we might like. And on some level, I get it. Maybe I shouldn’t expect a great craftsman to also be a great administrator. Maybe mechanically-inclined people (on average) are just a little less buttoned-up; a little less organized. As the saying goes, “God doesn’t give with both hands.”

But in my world (PE-backed B2B software businesses) where NPS and CSAT and customer health scores and all kinds of other numbers that describe how well we’re treating our customers get dissected at every board meeting, the idea that “we just forgot” isn’t as acceptable. Not with all the technology we use. Not when we have CRM systems, customer success dashboards, automated follow-up cadences, and renewal calendars - all designed to make sure that those table-stakes opportunities to do the right thing for customers don’t slip through the cracks. The chance to answer a question. The chance to fix a problem. The chance to get back to someone when they ask for help.

And yet, these balls still get dropped. All the time.

That contractor who never called me back? I guarantee you that kinda thing is happening inside your business right now.

I’ve seen it.

We All Drop The Ball

Here’s how these tiny misses look inside a B2B software business:

• A warm lead fills out a form. No one follows up.

• An obvious upsell opportunity is staring a rep in the face, but they never bring it up.

• A “Tier 1” customer hasn’t heard from the sales team in months.

• A renewal is up for negotiation, and nobody gives it the care it deserves.

• A customer submits a support ticket. It sits in limbo, untouched.

These aren’t failures of strategy. They aren’t the result of weak positioning, product development mistakes, pricing miscues, or poor product-market fit. They’re basic executional failures. The kind that shouldn’t happen but do, constantly. And they don’t take brilliance to fix. They don’t require new technology or a bold vision. They require paying attention to the things that matter most, and building a process that replaces human discipline with something a little more dependable.

Look, dumb things happen for good reasons. Sales reps get pulled into negotiations for deals that can make or break the quarter. Customer Success people get bogged down into gnarly onboarding issues. BDRs scribble down lead details, get clobbered on a few cold calls, and lose track of who else they were supposed to get in touch with. Today’s to-do list quickly crowds out yesterday’s. The thing that felt important in the moment tends to get buried under everything that follows. I get it. It happens.

That’s why I want to be clear. I don’t think these lapses are acts of incompetence. They’re acts of distraction. Nobody decides to ignore a customer. They just forget. But the problem is, customers don’t experience it as forgetfulness. They experience it as indifference.

And what does indifference feel like? It feels like being stood up. Like someone canceling a dinner date at the last minute. Like getting an email that your meeting has been rescheduled for something more important. It’s a small wound, but we feel it just the same. And when it happens at the wrong moment or if it becomes a pattern, you start to wonder if you were ever a priority at all. You start to question your value. You start to wonder if they even care.

And guess what? That’s how your customers feel when stuff like this happens.

When you drop the ball (when you let a lead go cold, when you leave a customer hanging, when a renewal gets bungled) it chips away at something fragile: trust. And trust, once damaged, doesn’t just snap back into place. It has to be rebuilt. Rebuilding is hard work. It takes time, and it isn’t always successful.

But here’s the part that should make you feel encouraged: this is preventable. It’s not a deep strategic puzzle or an unsolvable flaw in human nature. The same forces that create these lapses (distraction, busyness, competing priorities) can be countered with structure, process, discipline, and, most importantly, attention.

Rethinking Perfection

My college lacrosse coach, Frank Fedorjaka, used to encourage us to try and have “perfect practices.” What did that mean? In a perfect practice, the ball never touches the ground. No drops. Perfection to him wasn’t about making flashy plays or taking risks. It was about playing clean and eliminating mistakes.

That instinct lives in all of us. Even if you’ve never played competitive sports, you can feel it in your body when you drop the ball. Think about the last time you were head-down in your work, only to realize you missed the start of an important meeting. That terse “Are you joining us?” email. The acidic drop in your stomach. The flush in your face. The embarrassment of knowing you let something slip that you shouldn’t have. We’re biologically wired to deliver; to do what we say we’re going to do. It feels bad when we don’t.

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the U.S. nuclear Navy, put it this way:

"Responsibility is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else."

Among military celebrities, Rickover isn’t a well-known name. But the man had a spotless record. Under his leadership, no nuclear-powered vessel ever suffered a reactor accident - a record that remains intact to this day. That’s not because his teams performed a bunch of heroic acts. It’s because they never had to.

Rickover’s philosophy wasn’t about reacting well to crisis. It was about making sure the crisis never arrived. His standards were so high, his systems so rigorous, that the absence of disaster became the defining trait of his leadership. No headlines, no dramatic recoveries. Just perfection in prevention.

I love that Rickover quote above. If something is yours, it’s yours. No amount of delegation, technology, or process absolves you from the core idea of what it means to lead. Leadership is paying attention. Leadership is doing your absolute best to make sure the ball does not touch the ground. Good leaders don’t hope people remember to do what they should. They build processes that make lapses in that kind of attention glaringly obvious. They build systems that make forgetting impossible.

And by working cleaner and minimizing silly mistakes, they win more.

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In part 2 of this series, I’ll share three real-life “don’t drop the ball” systems I use with the companies I work with.

If you’re not a subscriber already and you’d like to read part 2, hit the button below and I’ll make sure you get it when I hit publish later this month.