"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."
William Shakespeare
The secret sauce behind high performing teams is that they understand it is no good just trying to get ready. Consistent success comes from capitalising on moments, the timing of which you don’t control. If we treat getting ready as a moment in time, then we likely will miss the moment that matters. We’ll be all dressed up, but with nowhere to go.
Instead the focus needs to be on maintaining and improving a constant state of readiness. In the context of my current field, B2B customer growth, we don't control when clients decide to act. Markets change. Buying groups evolve. Competitors move. So readiness can't be a project milestone, or a moment in time, it has to become an organisational capability.
And driving growth with a customer-led mindset takes a full team effort. Account focused programs can stall not because of a failure of strategy, but because of a failure of execution, as leaders struggle to truly align the cross functional team.
That's why we developed the Readiness Flywheel to help guide customer growth teams towards building this muscle and shared this at our recent London conference Rethink, alongside our client Samara Donald from AWS.
Rather than treating readiness as something you complete once, the flywheel creates a continuous cycle of:
🎯 Planning – aligning around where to win and the outcomes that matter.
🤝 Preparing – giving teams the skills, clarity, motivation and data they need to succeed.
⚽ Practicing – rehearsing, building repeatable plays, coaching behaviours and learning through execution.
📈 Performing – measuring outcomes, capturing learning and continuously improving.
🤖 AI and agents - have an important role to play across every stage, as an accelerator to readiness, helping the wheel turn faster and faster.
The more I think about customer growth, the more I believe the biggest barriers aren't strategic or technological, they're human and organisational.
➡️ Do teams understand the strategy?
➡️ Do people know their role and how they contribute?
➡️ Are we inspiring teams around a shared mission, or simply asking them to execute another programme?
➡️ Are managers coaching, or just reviewing dashboards?
➡️ Are we measuring campaigns, or building capabilities that compound over time?
The key to customer growth is creating organisations that are constantly maintaining and improving readiness.