A company pays a salesperson $125,000 a year.
That salesperson has generated an average of $250,000 a year, for 3 years, in high-profit sales.
He did great.
No he didn’t!
He was terrible.
In fact, he was worse than a waste of money.
And here’s why.
They were losing their company a fortune!
You see, that salesperson left the company and was replaced by a new salesperson.
The new salesperson was also paid $125,000 a year.
And using the same source of leads, over the following 3 years they generated an average of $750,000 a year in high-profit sales.
In the space of 3 years, the first salesperson under-performed by $1,500,000.
Data and information
Too many business owners, and sales/marketing directors, who should know better, make decisions based on data, when what they need is information.
Information is what you get, when someone applies knowledge, experience and context to data.
- Data will show you that your salesperson is generating a 100% profit.
- Information does that. However, your information-based decision-making causes you to research the average conversion rate for your industry. It immediately identifies a major problem that’s losing you a fortune. The salesperson is way, way below average and needs training or replacing.
This same data error is made by most small and medium-sized business owners, when they advertise.
- They run the ads and data shows an ‘X’ percent profit is being achieved. They then look at ways to further increase that profit figure, with better written ads, better timed ads, better designed ads or placing ads on different platforms. This is an extremely limiting approach.
- The business owner using an information-based approach, would start by looking at the ad data. THEN, they’d expand their potential by examining the profitability of investing in email marketing, joint ventures and endorsed relationships, etc.
Just ONE, successful Endorsed Relationship campaign can generate more high-profit income for you in a week than you usually earn in a year. I’ve seen far higher returns than that.
In short, data is extremely useful. But you can’t make informed decisions without information. Data is just a single component. And using it by itself, can ruin an otherwise great business.