Someone in your organization is screaming about leads right now.
Maybe it’s your sales leader.
Maybe it’s your CEO.
Maybe it’s you.
More leads. More sales. More growth.
Louder every quarter.
Here’s the problem.
That’s almost never the real issue.
In episode #109 of Possibilities with Monique de Maio, I sat down with Stephanie Baker and introduced a new format:
Business Q&A: In the Room
Two leaders.
Real decisions.
No theory.
We didn’t perform. We processed.
Out loud. In real time.
Between two people who have been in a lot of rooms…
and know what actually breaks inside companies.
When a company is screaming for more leads, the real issue is almost always one of three things:
→ They don’t know who they are actually for
→ They haven’t mined the customers who already love them
→ Their message says nothing a competitor couldn’t say
Your ideal customer profile is probably not as clear as you think.
You may have five different customer types you believe are your ICP. You don’t.
There has to be something they have in common. Stage. Industry. Business model. Something.
Something that lets you say:
I need more of that.
And before you chase strangers, ask a better question:
Have you fully saturated the people who already believe in you?
Go where people already trust you.
Stephanie has a process.
She asks how the work actually gets done, then reverse engineers it against the official structure.
The gaps between those two things are where the real dysfunction lives.
Roles built around personalities.
Accountability sitting in a Venn diagram between four titles.
Jobs created because someone refused to report to someone else.
This is more common than anyone wants to admit.
The fix is not a reorg for the sake of a reorg.
The fix is tying every role, every responsibility, every title back to actual business goals.
When you do that, the conversation about who sits where becomes about strategy.
Not ego.
One of my favorite questions when a client says they need a rebrand:
What are they actually trying to fix?
Sometimes it’s a product that has aged.
Sometimes the business has pivoted.
But most of the time, a rebrand request is a symptom.
The real issue is this:
The brand promise does not match the brand experience.
I had a client, a telecommunications company, who wanted to own the positioning that they were easy to do business with.
They couldn’t.
And I proved it.
I called their 800 number.
Tested their customer service.
Asked for a proposal.
Five touchpoints.
All of them a nightmare.
Before I rebrand any client, I do a brand experience audit.
Every channel.
Every endpoint.
Every customer touchpoint.
Because if you want to own a positioning…
You have to earn it first.
Both Stephanie and I have been in rooms where something shifted.
You could feel it before anyone said a word.
Communication changes first.
Then attitude.
Then behavior.
You get people nodding in meetings…
and doing something completely different the moment they leave.
The worst kind of executive is the one who says yes in the room and undermines it everywhere else.
The fix is not a team-building exercise.
It’s value alignment.
You can have diversity of thought.
You cannot have diversity of direction.
The teams that work are the ones where people may disagree on approach…
but never on where they are going, or why it matters.
Stephanie questions this completely now.
And I do too.
You do not have to elbow your way into leadership.
You have to show up.
Do the work.
Put wins on the board.
Make your boss look good.
And help the people around you do the same.
That is still the most durable path.
We also talked about the things that don’t usually make it into these conversations.
What Stephanie would tell her 30-year-old self.
The career advice she was given that was completely wrong.
And the decision that changed everything. Taking the job in Amsterdam when everyone else was settling down.
Because real leadership is not just strategy.
It’s judgment.
Timing.
Courage.
If you heard yourself in this…
If something felt a little too close to home…
That’s not a coincidence.
That’s pattern recognition.
Listen to Episode #109 wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you’re sitting with that uncomfortable realization of:
“That’s us.”
You already know what to do next.
~ Monique
Most people don't have a direction problem. They have a clarity problem.
Before you can grow the business, build the team, or make the next move, you need to know exactly who you are and what you stand for.
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