Are you secretly multiplying by zero?
What happens when just 1 variable breaks down in your growth formula
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we can grow.
How to grow our brand awareness.
How to grow our handraisers.
How to grow our pipeline.
How to grow our revenue.
How to grow our retention rates.
In the midst of this, I’ve had some things not go so well. Things that I realized, despite growth in some of the above areas, completely cancel out any downstream effects due to one variable.
Or more simply stated: I was multiplying a bunch of big numbers by zero.
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What happens when you multiply by 0
Math wasn’t my strong suit growing up. But one thing I do remember from the early days was that any number (or series of numbers) multiplied by 0 equals 0.
10 x 25 x 2 x 15 x 98 = 735,000
10 x 25 x 2 x 15 x 98 x 0 = 0
Essentially, no matter how big the number, no matter how many things I might have going for me, if just one 0 enters the multiplication equation, everything comes crashing down.
Remember a few weeks ago when I shared the insight from Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player and how in amateur tennis, players lose points 80% of the time (vs. hitting winning shots)? This falls into that same vein of thinking where we’re working to avoid unforced errors.
Example: health
I think starting with an example relevant to our day-to-day will help connect the dots on this before we get into a marketing example.
I like to think I’m a healthy person.
I prioritize my health in a number of ways in effort to be able to do all the things I want to be able to do in the course of a typical day + to have a (hopefully) long life ahead.
I make getting 8 hours of sleep a priority
I do some form of exercise daily
We meal prep healthy meals for the weekdays
I don’t smoke + I only consume alcohol on special occasions
Nothing crazy or over the top here, but a definitive priority in health can be seen.
Now let’s say one day, I decide to go for a bike ride for daily exercise, but I choose not to wear a helmet. I’m pedaling along and all of a sudden a squirrel darts out in front of me. I swerve my bike to avoid the squirrel and SMACK - I’m hit by a car, thrown over my handlebars, and come crashing down on my head. No more Saturday newsletters from Sam.
All of the healthy habits I’ve been following for years down the drain because I chose not to wear a helmet.
I multiplied by zero.
Example: marketing
Like I shared at the beginning of the newsletter, most of my time is spent thinking about or working on helping Loxo grow.
All of the things we can continue or start doing to hit our increasing goals:
Spending more on ad platforms
Tweaking our pricing/plans
Creating more blog, podcast, and/or video content to be found organically
Hiring a new team member to focus on a specific growth lever
Now let’s say one day, one of our core processes breaks down due to a technical glitch. Every prospect that fills out a form requesting a demo from us falls into a black hole. The form is broken. Or the tool that allows them to schedule a date/time for the demo breaks and all of the previously automated work now becomes manual.
Our pipeline just went from great and humming along to $0 in a day due to that one variable breaking.
It was multiplied by zero.
Takeaway
As fun + exciting as it is to constantly find new and additive things to improve the outcome we seek, we have to be even more disciplined in making sure that we don’t allow any zeroes to enter our equation. This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing either where we make sure a variable doesn’t equal 0 when we first insert it. We have to be diligent in regularly checking back in on our equation to confirm that none of the variables turned into a 0 while we weren’t watching.
Book quote of the week
If there’s one thing that’s been reinforced for me the past few weeks, it’s that as a marketer + GTM leader, I can’t afford to not have my hands in the dirt. Understanding what we’re doing all the way down to the tactical execution level. Observing all relevant datapoints from the very top of our funnel all the way past the bottom of the funnel and into retention, NPS, and more.
Any time that I’ve gotten too far away from the day-to-day, I lose my touch. Numbers start dipping. Items start slipping. So this is yet another reminder to myself of the value of first principles learning and engagement.
“His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!”
- The Fish that Ate the Whale, Rich Cohen
In case you missed these this week
Friday health thoughts: tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems
See you next Saturday,
Sam