What if I told you that you could boost your sales performance by making small improvements in every aspect of your business process? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, this is exactly what the concept of marginal gains is all about.
What are marginal gains?
The marginal gains theory concerns small incremental improvements in any process, which, when added together, make a significant improvement. It is also known as the 1% Factor and is credited to the British Cycling team’s incredible successes.
The idea was popularised by Sir Dave Brailsford, who became the head of British Cycling in 2002 and transformed the team from a mediocre performer to a dominant force in the sport. Under his leadership, the team won 18 gold medals over the next three Olympics and six Tour de France wins in seven years.
Brailsford’s approach was to break down everything that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1%. He looked for opportunities to optimise the obvious factors like physical fitness, diet, and tactics along with the overlooked and unexpected ones like bike maintenance, hand hygiene, sleep quality, and even pillow type.
He believed that by making small changes in every area, he could create a competitive advantage that would add up to a huge difference in performance. Taken together, the results speak for themselves – tiny gains in all areas greatly improve performance.
How could marginal gains apply to sales?
The same principle of marginal gains can be applied to any business process, including sales. By identifying and improving the factors that influence sales performance, you can achieve better results without making drastic changes or spending a lot of money.
For example, you can look for ways to improve your:
- Sales strategy: How well do you understand your target market, your value proposition, your competitors, and your goals? How do you measure and track your progress? How do you adjust your strategy based on feedback and data?
- Sales skills: How effective are you at prospecting, qualifying, presenting, negotiating, closing, and following up? How do you communicate with your prospects and customers? How do you handle objections and rejections?
- Sales tools: What tools do you use to manage your contacts, leads, opportunities, and deals? How do you leverage technology to automate and streamline your tasks? How do you use data and analytics to optimize your performance?
- Sales mindset: How confident are you in your abilities and value? How do you cope with stress and pressure? How do you motivate yourself and others? How do you learn from your successes and failures?
By making small improvements in each of these areas, you can increase your sales efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, you can:
- Improve your sales strategy by conducting regular market research, setting SMART goals, defining clear action plans, and reviewing your results frequently.
- Improve your sales skills by attending training courses, reading books and blogs, listening to podcasts, watching videos, practising role plays, and seeking feedback from mentors and peers.
- Improve your sales tools by using a CRM system that helps you organize and automate your sales activities, track your pipeline and performance, generate reports and insights, and integrate with other tools like email marketing, social media, and webinars.
- Improve your sales mindset by developing a positive attitude, cultivating a growth mindset, setting realistic expectations, celebrating small wins, rewarding yourself and others, and embracing challenges as opportunities.
Identify areas of opportunity and look to improve them. Just because something works well, doesn’t mean it’s the best or most efficient way of doing it. How could you create a better version of your job, your team, your product, your service, your processes, your customer support, your company?
What are the benefits of marginal gains?
The benefits of applying the marginal gains theory to sales are huge:
- Increased sales productivity: By improving your sales process step by step, you can reduce wasted time and effort, increase your output and quality, and achieve more with less.
- Increased sales performance: By improving your sales skills and tools, you can enhance your ability to attract, engage, and convert prospects into customers. You can also increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by delivering more value and service.
- Increased sales growth: By improving your sales strategy and mindset, you can expand your market reach, penetrate new segments, create new opportunities, and overcome your limitations. You can also foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence in your team and organization.
An example of marginal gains in action: Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines is one of the most successful airlines in the US, known for its low fares, high customer satisfaction, and strong financial performance. How did it achieve this? One of the factors is its application of marginal gains theory to its operations.
Southwest Airlines has been constantly looking for ways to improve its efficiency, quality, and service by making small changes in various areas. Its latest efforts are attempts to speed up the boarding process, which it hopes could lead to five-minute faster boardings per flight. These five minutes spread across the network would enable it to offer more flights each day to passengers.
Some of the things they are doing:
- Removing ads from the jet bridge, and replacing them with “travel tips” for boarding faster
- A time-and-motion study in Atlanta to understand passenger behaviour
- Bigger over-head bins
- Possibly boarding the planes from the front and back simultaneously
- Paperless takeoff documents
- Group chat between workers at the gate, on the plane, and on the ground
- Roving employees with a mobile device to check oversized bags and register pets before boarding begins
- Multiple video screens near the gate displaying boarding countdown, alerts for important announcements and flashing lights when boarding begins
- Portable speakers that play “uptempo music”
- Staging area for families and those with disabilities (including changing carpet colours for each area)
These efforts should be a win for passengers, the airline, and airports. It saves time for passengers, allowing Southwest to turn around planes faster, and reduces congestion. Each of these effects will be minor, but added up could greatly impact the current 40-minute turnaround time. So if successful, this would be a 12% improvement in turn-around and roughly a 25% improvement in boarding time. That is what incremental improvement looks like.
“If you can collect up enough of these minutes in each turn, then you can start to squeeze out some more flying.”
Southwest’s COO
Conclusion
The concept of marginal gains is not new and has been used in many fields, but it has gained popularity in recent years thanks to the success of the British Cycling team. Applying it to your company by making small improvements in every aspect of your sales process, you can achieve significant results in the long run. Whether you want to increase your sales productivity, performance, or growth, you can apply the marginal gains theory to your business and see the difference.
Tools such as CRM can improve the speed of administration, automate laborious tasks, and create time-critical workflows for following up on deals, enquiries, leads, and appointments. Applying marginal gains with software can create huge impacts on your sales efforts.
Remember, it’s not about perfection but progression and compounding the improvements.