David Cummings on Startups

The 10x Improvement Challenge

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David Cummings

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Entrepreneurs have an innate ability to solve problems and continuously find ways to make things better. I, like many entrepreneurs, have a tendency to look for incremental improvements e.g. let’s figure out how to shorten the sales cycle from 43 days to 42 days. Instead, entrepreneurs need to challenge themselves to find 10x improvements.

Here are a few examples of potential 10x improvements:

  • Cold Calling – Say your reps are doing 30 dials per day and getting three conversations per day. What if you implemented a service like ConnectAndSell and did 300 calls per day and had 30 conversation per day per rep?
  • Marketing – Say your cost per marketing qualified lead (MQL) is $200. What if you truly invested in great content (not average content) for inbound marketing and drove the cost per MQL to $20?
  • Support – Say your customer support team processes 100 tickets per day. What if you revamped the product’s user experience and associated help/training materials such that customers had a much better experience and support tickets dropped to 10 per day?

The next time you want to improve something, stretch your brain and look for ways to make it 10x better and not 10% better.

What else? What are your thoughts on the 10x improvement challenge and what are some more examples?

Comments

2 responses to “The 10x Improvement Challenge”

  1. iancosgrove Avatar
    iancosgrove

    The title actually gives me shudders because 10x improvement was the name of the Motorola project that led to Six Sigma… which has ultimately done more bad in the world than good. I definitely agree with the Support point you made and building in the Lean approach of 0 defects.. but does cold calling really work? I get an average of 3 cold calls at home a day and just delete the message from my answering machine within the first 3 or 4 words of the message. When it’s work related I usually know someone is trying to sell me something from the country or area code and don’t answer, if it gets any worse we will be disconnecting our land line.

    Seems like instead of pushing sales on people who don’t want it there would be significantly less waste if it was a pull system, a platform that connected INTERESTED parties with the exact services and price ranges they were looking for and/or businesses could compete against each other for that sale on time/cost.

    Reply
  2. Brett Avatar
    Brett

    Where is the call to action button on the Connect to Sell website. I wanted to try it out but can’t figure out how to sign up after you watch the video.

    Reply

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