Winning Ugly

It's not like there are a bunch of high-quality pickleball books to choose from, so sometimes you have to go to the world of tennis for guidance (click here).

Allow me to share a quote from the book - it'll relate to your world, ok?

• "The way to make the biggest improvement in the shortest time is to better understand and use the opportunities for gaining an advantage that exist in every match you play. The big opportunities and the small opportunities. Especially the small opportunities, the ones players neglect because of ignorance or laziness. If you want to call that winning ugly, go ahead and get ugly. Develop your powers of observation and analysis and then use the information, and your chances of winning will go up by twenty percent or more."

I spoke with a CEO once. He told me what was wrong with his business. He clearly outlined how his customers were failing him.

One problem.

When I dug into the data, he was incorrect. Really incorrect. He completely missed the small opportunities, due to ignorance and laziness as mentioned in the quote above. He simply did not want to "do better" as folks say. By using his imagination (some would call this his 'gut feel'), he crafted a story and then had his marketing team execute against the story.

Is it any wonder that brand lost sales for a half-decade under his control?

There are so many little things that you can do, and if you do them better, you will perform better than your competition.

For some reason in the past year, those "little things" spill into email marketing. Folks have a template, they have a calendar, they have garbage they want to liquidate, and they're optimizing open rates. A recipe for disaster. When I point out that most of my e-commerce clients generate 20% to 45% of annual net sales from email marketing and they're generating 9%, they get frustrated. "That's a lot of work, and we just don't have the resources to do that" is the refrain used when I tell them what they need to do.

They don't like Winning Ugly, do they?