Marginal Gains
Business leaders almost always overestimate the importance of one defining moment in the quest for success and underestimate the value of making better decisions on a daily basis. Almost every habit that we have —good or bad —is the result of many small decisions over time. In reality, it isn't just business people who fall into this trap - almost everyone has at one time or another. Think about the quest for miracle weight loss formulas to pick one perennially visible example.
How easily we forget this when we want to make changes. So often we convince ourselves that we can and should be like Steve Jobs – that change is only meaningful if there is some large, immediately visible outcome associated with it. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, or making a sale, we often put pressure on ourselves and our people to make some earth-shattering improvement that will change our world for the better as if in a single instant.
Meanwhile, improving by just 1 percent isn’t notable - it isn’t even noticeable. In fact it’s frequently plain boring - and therefore it’s more than often completely overlooked. But it can be just as meaningful and powerful. It also comes with way less risk – and cost.
And the truth is - in reality, that's the way dramatic improvements happen. It's just that because we usually only notice them all at once, we assume they happened all at once.
The same is true for sales improvement. As we have been saying for many years now, sales (and marketing) is a process; a complex, interconnected chain of events with many links in the chain. The secret to our success and the success our clients have enjoyed over many years now, isn't a blinding flash of revelation followed by a single momentous event. It's been making small, methodical frequently invisible changes. The magic has been knowing where and how to make those changes and trigger the improvements in pipeline conversion, velocity and attrition over time.
The formula for that success, hard-earned over 16 years of studying sales dynamics and working with some of the world's leading sales companies and thought leaders, have been baked into the algorithms inside Telemetry. All based on the principle and practice of applying Marginal Gain Theory to unpacking and repacking sales pipelines and the systems used to control them.
