Nigel Wilkinson
Managing Director of Daneswood. Nigel has been in sales and marketing since the 1980's and run digital marketing agencies since 2000.
Monitoring your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is how you know where the business is and where you are going. How can you grow 20% next year, if you don’t know where it stands now?
A recent article about snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan highlighted the importance of knowing your numbers and how small improvements can mean big results. Now, you may not like snooker, but stick with me!
Ronnie, for those who aren’t snooker fans, has without doubt the best claim to be the Number One player of all time, more 147s in competitions, more world championships, more titles, etc. By a long way, his results outperform everyone else.
For all his talent, Ronnie doesn’t win every game, far from it. In fact, he only wins 61% of frames, but that converts into winning 75% of matches.* Interestingly, John Higgins has won 59% of his frames, only 2% less, but that converts to 69% of matches and only four World titles, compared to Ronnie’s seven titles. Only two per cent less frames won, but three less world titles! Still pretty amazing, but you get the point! Marginal Gains = Big Results!
For those who are tennis fans rather than snooker, Federer won 54% of points, 58% of games, 76% of sets and 82% of matches, resulting in 20 Grand Slam titles.*
How can we apply this to business? Well, this lesson was drilled into me back doing cold calling early in my career. If I made 60 calls, I would speak to 20 decision makers, 3 would be interested, and 1 would make an appointment. Cold calling today is MUCH tougher, and those numbers are from a different era, but the principle remains the same.
When I set up my own marketing agency, those numbers could be played forward; for every 2.3 appointments I made, one person would buy from me. With an average sale in those days of £1200, that meant every appointment was worth £521 to me. Each time I spoke to a decision maker, it was worth £26. That’s a good incentive to keep dialling!
Once you know your numbers, you can look where to make improvements. In digital marketing, that might look like: How do I get my Ads seen by more people? How do I decrease my cost per click? How do I increase the number of people staying on the website and viewing my content? How do I increase sales or enquiry conversions? What if I increase my average sale value? How do I encourage people to buy again and more often?
The problem many businesses have is twofold. One, they don’t track numbers, and secondly, when they do, they are looking for the “Golden Bullet” to increase sales. Sorry, but unless you have something badly wrong in your business, there is rarely one thing to fix.
To get the big results, improving each step by 2-3% can quickly compound your results to make the final outcome bigger than you can imagine.
The secret is in knowing your numbers; what are the KPIs that really matter? Understand the “marginal gains.” What are the several small things that slip under the radar, that you can improve to add up to big results?
If you want help with understanding your sales and marketing KPI and getting better results, please do get in touch. If you want to improve your snooker or tennis…. Sorry, but that’s a whole different ballgame!
Sources*
Federer’s stats can be found here: https://www.ultimatetennisstatistics.com/playerProfile?name=Roger%20Federer&tab=statistics
The Edge is Everything: Oliver Johnson https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-edge-is-everything