Tips from the Tee Box: How Golf and the Gym can help You get the OSS of Your Dreams

Everyone’s watching. You’re on the first tee at the golf course, adrenaline surging. The fairway stretches out in front of you, full of promise, but hesitation creeps in. Your grip tightens. Not because you don’t want to play, or because the drive itself terrifies you.

It’s because you’re unsure what might happen if you miss the fairway and end up deep in the rough. The embarrassment. The challenges that you just know will come next.

This is what OSS transformation projects feel like for many buyers: a complex mix of ambition and anxiety as you get ready to commence the project.

It’s one of the key elements of The Buyer-Seller Chasm.

The buyers (carriers) desperately need better tools to transform their operations.

The sellers (vendors) already have better tools, which they desperately want to sell.

What’s holding the buyers back?

Trust, risk and fear (and a few other very human feelings) more than technical or commercial reasons in most cases.

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The Couch is the Competition

In the world of OSS transformation, it’s tempting for vendors to assume that their biggest competitor is the vendor across the street. Their product. Their pricing. Their sales or marketing skills. Their ability to deliver. Their brand. But that’s a misdirection (in most cases). That’s not the real competition.

Alex Hormozi highlights that other gyms aren’t the biggest competition facing gym owners. Their biggest competition is the couch (ie convincing potential gym members to get off the couch and sign up for membership). How many of you have seen that (or been that) person who desperately wants to get into shape but can’t bring themselves to get into a gym routine? It’s generally not directly a financial hurdle, but various other more human factors that are the blockers.

It’s the lack of confidence in the way the person feels standing next to other regular, buff gym users. It’s the weather. It’s the procrastination of starting their fitness journey “next Monday.” It’s wondering whether they’ll pay for the first 3 month subscription and lose motivation after the first week.

For gym owners, the most common growth technique isn’t what we might first think (ie to take members from other gyms). The bigger opportunity is to get people in the door, making great progress on their health goals, building routine consistency and telling all their friends.

In OSS transformations, the real competition is our equivalent of the couch. It’s the status quo. The invisible forces that convince buyers that doing nothing is safer than doing something. Where the fear of same is less than the fear of change.

Every OSS buyer faces this internal “what-if” dialogue: “What if we try and fail? What if we invest all this time and money and the system still doesn’t deliver? What if I make this decision and my colleagues blame me? What if we choose the wrong product / vendor / supplier? What if this project goes off the rails and I can’t find a way to resolve it? What if? What if?”

That uncertainty makes staying still feel smarter than stepping forward. In my experience at least, most vendors build their sales strategies around outpacing or outflanking other OSS vendors, but few take time to consider what is really holding buyers back.

There are certainly many hoops that an OSS buyer needs to go through to justify the commencement of an OSS transformation. Many of them are necessary – a technical and fiduciary duty. But many more are effectively just procrastination techniques wrapped up in carefully crafted justifications (excuses). I totally get it. But the 18-24+ month sales cycles that are common for OSS procurement events need to be drastically reduced for buyers and sellers alike.

So here’s thought #1 for today:

Before we try to persuade potential OSS buyers with features or functionality, or try to convince them that something must change, we need to start with the human factors. The potential buyer already knows something must change, so that part of the persuasion journey is already hurdled.

What we collectively need to be better at is providing buyers with the reasons and confidence to get up off the OSS couch. More on that shortly.

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Think Like a Gym-Goer, Then a Gym Owner

Getting people off the couch is no easy task. This starts by truly understanding the human factors that are holding gym-goers back from getting the health transformations they desire. Once we really understand the psychology of (and feel empathy for) the Gym-Goer, then we can think like a gym owner, removing as many barriers as possible.

The same is true in OSS. As a seller or transformation advocate, we need to think like a Gym-Goer. What gets OSS buyers to show up and take the first rep? What are all the possible off-ramps (the emotional roller-coaster below) between their first workout and building a perpetual routine?

Momentum is more important than precision in the early stages. Buyers don’t need every answer up front. What they need is belief and confidence that forward motion is being achieved, even if imperfect.

Small wins build commitment.

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Trust, Risk, and the Chasm

There’s often a dramatic difference in perception between the OSS buyer and the Sellers.

The seller sees a well-defined system roadmap. The buyer sees risk upon risk. Political risk. Career risk. Capability risk. Risk of failure. Fears of being outside their comfort zone.

Many vendors fail to acknowledge just how much emotional weight sits on the buyer’s shoulders.

For vendors it’s relatively easy. Most are continually performing OSS transformations. It’s not their first rodeo. But for buyers that’s not always the case. For many network operators, a major OSS transformation might only occur once every 5-10 years. For the buyer’s key decision-makers, it might be their first-ever OSS transformation or first in years. The approaches might be new. The terminologies might be new. The products will often be foreign to them too. And you can guarantee that they’ve heard about other big, complex transformation projects that have failed to deliver.

The buyer-seller chasm is clearly not just a gap in knowledge like many vendor representatives seem to think. It’s a gap in trust. It’s a gap in confidence. Buyers often struggle to see how they’ll cross the divide from current state to the future state they so desperately desire. Even if they like what they hear (and that’s not always the case), fear stops them cold.

Closing this chasm starts with empathy and acknowledgement of the fears. OSS transformation is complex, so we need to provide clear methodologies and anecdotes that make it feel safe.

It’s also important to use language that is familiar to buyers.

This could be by providing demonstrations that show the buyer’s network makes/models/topologies, their naming conventions, their service types, their processes, etc. In addition, I find widely known / understood analogies (golf or gyms for example 😉 ) can be really helpful. I try to find metaphors that buyers already understand. Familiarity breeds confidence. Confidence opens doors and helps build momentum.

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Build Your Recovery Game

Now let’s loop back to our opening metaphor of being on the first tee of a golf course.

Even the greatest players to have ever played the game don’t hit every shot perfectly. Nor are they able to map out every square inch of the course to know where their next shot might need to played from or plan for every possible contingency before striding to the first tee.

However, they have carefully honed their skills and confidence to recover from wherever their ball might land. When watching the Masters or other golf tournaments, it’s not the pure golf that impresses me most. It’s when a player like Tiger Woods is in a situation that seems unplayable and still knocks it within a few feet of the hole.

When you believe in your ability to adapt, the pressure on taking your first hit from the tee diminishes. You swing freer. You trust your instincts. You know how to recover from whatever happens next.

We refer to this as the golf analogy. With each shot, you’re aiming to get closer and closer to holing out.

They may even fear arriving at worst-case scenarios with no way out (I know that’s how I feel on the golf course 😀 ).

But developing confidence in your recovery game often only comes from having experienced many different recovery scenarios. Just like golf, building these skills often requires creativity and lateral thinking. It simply might not be feasible to fast-track becoming a recovery specialist or have a Tiger Woods on your payroll if you’re the buyer.

This is where a seller / supplier / vendor can shine. You might like to ask them to share stories where your team adapted mid-project. Highlight moments when things went off-plan but were corrected with creativity and resilience. Show how your implementation methodology and plans can cope with unforeseen circumstances.

Sometimes that’s still not enough. Buyers can still be skeptical about whether the seller is acting in the best interest of the buyer or the seller’s own interests.

That’s when a buyer may choose to bring in allies. Experts. Specialists. Transformation coaches. Caddies responsible for guiding the buyer around the course and ensuring they’re not tackling the transformation alone. Working in the best interests of the buyers. Their role is to not just help ensure the OSS transformation goes smoothly by navigating around or flagging potential pitfalls in advance, but to also ensure that when things go sideways, you can get things back on course.

The caddy is someone who’s walked the course (and/or many like it). Someone who can read the terrain. Who can recommend a 6-iron when bravado suggests a driver.

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Make the First Swing Feel Safe

Our previous articles in the Buyer-Seller Chasm series also discusses ways that the vendor can reduce the breadth of the chasm. Think of it this way – if the OSS transformation costs could be ordered on a corporate card, if the implementation were plug and play, if it could be easily self-implemented and then easily scalable, there were little contractual lock-in, etc, then the decision risk would seem much lower for the buyer.

The reality is that it’s simply not that simple, but that’s the mindset we need to bring to reduce the decision burden on OSS buyers.

We use the OSS Friction Continuums (below) to show the layers of decision risk / complexity that face OSS buyers. Most of these factors are somewhat controllable by OSS sellers.

So much of OSS transformation success depends on getting started. If you’re on the left side of any of the continuums above then you’re broadening the width of the chasm and delaying getting the transformation underway.

There are many different techniques we use to help reduce the decision burden for OSS Buyers. These could include tools such as a transformation readiness assessment,  future-state vision workshop, the Inverted Pyramid vendor selection process, incorporating POCs / pilots to validate assumptions and many other approaches. These risk lowering activities are intended to lower the psychological barrier to action.

The key is to give buyers a chance to swing without the fear. Let them miss safely. Let them test. Let them recover. Confidence builds through participation, not persuasion. Once buyers are in motion, everything becomes easier to navigate. You just try to keep knocking the ball ever-closer to the hole.

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The Course Ahead

OSS transformation isn’t just a technical journey. It’s a psychological one. Buyers are excited by the vision, yet often paralysed at the tee. Our job is not to overwhelm them with complex tech discussions. It’s to understand the fear. Respect the hesitation. Then find ways to best help them take a swing they can believe in.

Whether it’s through a golf metaphor or a gym owner’s mindset, our role is to bridge the emotional gap.

PS. Hat-tip to Slaven for sharing the concept that if you’re confident in your recovery game, you can hit from the tee with more freedom.