Most businesses can point to the moment they set their North Star metric, or agreed a Big Audacious Goal that felt almost uncomfortable to say out loud. It's usually an energising exercise. The team agrees on what actually matters, what to say no to, and how to measure whether the business is really moving forward.
For a while, that clarity holds… but then reality starts running the show.
Every founder or leadership team starts with a clear idea of what the business is for. Who they want to work with, how they sell, what they won't do, even for money. Those principles usually get written down somewhere, alongside the North Star metric and the Big Audacious Goal everyone signed up to, in a strategy session or a founder's head.
Then the business starts running and there comes a point when a sales target looks a bit too ambitious for the quarter or a big prospect turns up who doesn't quite fit the ideal customer profile, but the deal size is hard to ignore, or cash flow tightens and a client who's always been difficult suddenly looks like a client worth keeping happy at any cost. Someone will usually always say the six words that rewrite the business: “We'll make an exception, just this once.”
Nobody clocks it as a decision at the time, and that’s the problem. It feels like flexibility, not a departure from the plan. And on its own, each exception is probably is the right call. But businesses rarely make one exception. They make a hundred small ones, over several years, and none of them individually looks like the moment everything changed.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
There's an important difference between a business that has evolved and one that has drifted, and it's not really about how much has changed. It's about whether the change was chosen.
Evolution happens when a business looks at what's working, what its customers actually need now, and deliberately adjusts its principles, and if needed its North Star metric, to match. Drift happens when the business keeps saying its principles haven't changed, still quoting the same Big Audacious Goal in the all-hands deck, while its day to day decisions say otherwise.
Evolution is a decision made in daylight. Drift is a hundred decisions made in the dark, that only add up to something when you finally step back and look.
The trouble is that most businesses don't step back and look. They're too busy hitting the target in front of them. Which is exactly why drift is so good at hiding.
Where drift actually shows up
If you want to know whether your business has drifted rather than evolved, the CRM is usually a more honest witness than the strategy deck.
Here's what to look for:
- Deal size
Start with average deal size. If it's been creeping down over the last few quarters, it's worth asking who's been coming through the door. Clients who only fit ‘just this once’ are, almost by definition, not your best-fit clients. They tend to buy smaller, need more convincing, and value you differently than the client base you originally built the business around.
- Sales cycle
Look at how long deals are taking to close. A lengthening sales cycle is often a sign that the sales team is spending more time convincing prospects who were never quite the right fit in the first place. A genuinely well-matched prospect rarely needs eight meetings to say yes.
- Win rate
Check your win rates. If they're falling and nobody can point to an obvious external cause, a competitor undercutting you, a market downturn, a change in the offer, then the more likely explanation is that the pipeline itself has changed shape. You're not losing more of the deals you used to win. You're chasing deals you were never that likely to win to begin with.
It's also worth checking whether your North Star metric still moves when the business has a good month. If revenue is up but the metric you originally chose to represent real, healthy growth barely shifts, that's often the clearest sign that the deals coming in aren't the deals the North Star metric was designed to measure in the first place.
- Forecasting
Pay attention to how reliable your forecasting still is. Every manual override in the CRM, every note that says ‘special case, don't worry about the usual process,’ is an unrecorded rule change. Forecasting models are built on the assumption that the past behaves roughly like the future. Once enough exceptions pile up outside the model, the forecast stops being a forecast and starts being a guess with a spreadsheet attached.
- Ideal Customer Profile
Ask marketing and sales, separately, to describe your ideal customer. If you get two different answers, that's not a communication problem. That's a sign the definition changed on the sales floor before anyone told marketing it had happened, and the two teams have been working from different playbooks for a while without anyone flagging it.
And don't overlook the slower-moving signs:
- Client churn
Client churn ticking upward, because a customer who was never quite the right fit rarely becomes a long-term one no matter how well you serve them.
- Acquisition cost
Customer acquisition cost rising, as more time and budget goes into winning and supporting accounts that were never the target in the first place. These take longer to show up than deal size or win rate, but they're often the most expensive symptoms of all, because by the time they're visible the pattern has usually been running for a year or more.
None of this means you should stop adapting
It's worth being clear about what this isn't. Pragmatism isn't the enemy here. Every business that's still standing after five years has adapted more than once, because customers change, markets change, and the technology underneath the business changes constantly.
A business that refuses to bend at all doesn't have strong principles, it just has bad instincts and a stubborn streak!
The distinction that matters is whether the adaptation was a decision or a drift. A business that evolves will say, “Here's what we're changing and why,” and updates its North Star metric, its Big Audacious Goal, its CRM, its messaging and its sales process to match.
A business that drifts keeps the same goal on the wall and the same metric on the dashboard, and keeps telling itself the story it told at the beginning, while every deal, every discount, every ‘just this once’ writes a different one underneath it, one that nobody signed off.
The big question worth asking yourself
Pull up your CRM and look honestly at the last twelve months. Which parts of the business have genuinely evolved, on purpose, with everyone from sales to marketing aligned on the change, and your North Star metric and Big Audacious Goal updated to match?
And which parts have simply drifted, one small exception at a time, until the business you're running looks different from the one you set out to build, without anyone ever deciding it should, and without the goal on the wall ever being rewritten?
There's a real difference between the two, with one tending to lead to growth and the other tending to lead to complexity, and eventually to a CRM full of the wrong data, a pipeline full of the wrong clients, and a forecast nobody quite trusts.
If any of the signs above sound familiar, that's usually not a sign to panic. It's a sign it's worth an honest look at what your CRM is actually telling you, versus what you think your business still stands for.
Sometimes that's a conversation worth having with someone outside the business - get in touch if you’d like to chat it through.
