feedback loops, get faster to get better

Summary

the businesses that scale aren’t the ones with the most data. they’re the ones with the fastest feedback loops.

at PT Biz we fixed our sales process by getting brutal about lead qualification speed. if a lead wasn’t going to be a fit, we wanted to know that today, not next week. that one change freed the sales team to spend their energy on people who would actually convert.

the filter for every KPI you track. would this number, falling outside a benchmark, trigger a meeting and a decision tomorrow. if the answer is no, stop tracking it. it’s dashboard clutter.

fewer numbers. faster loops. actually act on what you see. that’s the whole game.

Transcript

introduction to the importance of feedback loops in scaling a business

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, I’m doing something a little bit different today.

I had one of the podcast listeners say, hey, can you just go over some stuff that you just actually working on? Like you’re actually dealing with in the business, because in all honesty, I don’t do a whole lot of that. I go over some of the things I’m doing for personal branding and ways I’m trying to grow that right now. But I don’t talk a lot about like, hey, here’s the day to day and in the business.

And I’m going to try it out today and see if you think it’s helpful. If you do think it’s helpful, let me know. The best place might be on Instagram. You can find me there and just shoot me a message and say, hey, that was that was helpful. Or take a screenshot of the podcast, share it as a story. And again, I don’t need you to share it if you want. If you’d rather just see me a DM, that’s great as well.

discussion on the challenges of scaling and extending market reach

Or even reply to one of the newsletters that I send out. Any of that, any feedback, any way you want to give it would be awesome. This is the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and let’s dive into what I’m actually working on. This is something the team is working on. Rarely will there be something that I just say, hey, I am specifically working on this. But one thing that we are trying to get better at is feedback loops.

We are trying to get faster feedback loops specifically in our sales process. The problem is, as you go to scale, and this is probably true for anybody looking to scale, you have to keep widening your net further and further and further. And so you start reaching out. And as you widen this net and you get further and further away from warm and hot traffic. So hot traffic would be somebody who just knows everything about you. They probably consumed a ton of your content and they’re ready to buy.

strategies for quick lead qualification and the benefits of rapid feedback

Warm traffic, they’ve been introduced to you. They’re not 100% sure. And then cold traffic is when you really get out to someone who’s never really heard of you. You’re kind of introducing yourself and then trying to see if they want to become, if they want to do business with you. And that’s where scaling gets a little bit more difficult. And not only that, you have people that you can help and you have people you can’t help.

And it’s the same for us. And this is specifically, I’m talking about NPT Biz. We have kind of an avatar that we just crush it with. We can help our certain set of people really well. And then we have some people who are kind of close, like cousins to what we do, but we can’t help them as well. The business model might be too different or they have a strange offer that we just really can’t help them scale.

tips on setting up effective communication systems for internal and external feedback

There are a lot of things. And early on in business, you might want to accept those because it’s money, right? You’re like, yeah, I can help you. Don’t worry, I can help you. But what you learn over time is you might not actually be able to help those people that well. And then when you can’t help somebody, that’s bad for them. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for your business reputation. So you really do need to figure out how to focus on only the people that you can help.

And once you start doing that and you go out to cold traffic, there has to be some sort of weed out process for a good lead and a bad lead. And this is a decision on the company’s part, not necessarily always the decision on the front end, you know, lead’s part. So someone might opt in for something. They might become a lead. They might be interested in what we do. So maybe they give us name, email address, phone number through online ads, something.

how to ensure data collected is actionable and directly impacts business growth

And it could be a misunderstanding. They don’t fully understand our offer of what we do. And so they’re like, yeah, we’re like, I’m interested. I want to do this thing. But maybe they just run a business. We absolutely can’t help them. You know, something comes up. We have to disqualify the leads. But what happens when you’re advertising online and you’re spending a lot of money and you’re going down this process is you find out. Like if Google or Facebook finds out, hey, this we’re getting cheap leads over here, you know, going out for this audience, especially if you’re kind of doing automatic audiences, then it will start optimizing for that.

And the problem can be there is like, oh, it’s optimizing for the wrong person. And that’s because, you know, a certain person might be opting in, but it’s not the real type of person that we need. And so what we’re working on creating, having explained all that, is faster feedback loops within the team and then also within our ad platforms. So being able to have the sales team quickly qualify or disqualify a lead. Ultimately, it’s called an SQL, sales qualified lead.

There’s also something called an MQL, marketing qualified lead. And I could probably talk about what we’re doing on that side on a different podcast, but trying to get that feedback loop faster, because what we would have to do previously is say we got 100 leads from our particular campaign. We would just have to manually go through 100 leads. And we might do that once a month, once every six weeks, once every two weeks, something like that.

You know, just it was slow because it’s such a manual process. We weren’t doing it every single day because it was time too time consuming that we’d feed that back to ad agency, all these kinds of things. And now we’re trying to make it to where we know very quickly. The goal is to know within 48 to 72 hours. To be honest, you can’t know much faster than that because it takes time to get people on the phone to answer questions, those kinds of things.

But now we’re able to not only get that information faster, but be able to deliver it to the people who need it faster, which would be the sales team, our ad agency, our acquisition team, everybody, so we can start optimizing faster. And so that is something that we’re currently working on. And it’s like, well, how do you do that? Ultimately, the easiest way to do things like this is either having people self qualify. So you can do that through forms, voluntarily having someone fill out a form.

You can have somebody, you can have a what we call a setter. So someone who’s not necessarily a sales team member, this could be like a front desk person in a brick and mortar, call somebody and have a quick five to 10 minute conversation just to ask them the qualifying questions because you know who you work best with and who you can get results for. And so once you kind of have that avatar, I guess that’s step zero, right?

Have the avatar, then set up some sort of form or questions, either form, they can fill out on their own or set of questions. You can have like front desk person or setter call and ask those questions. And now you can quickly qualify or disqualify a candidate. And then once you know that, whether they’re qualified or unqualified, you can actually scale your efforts from there. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned over and over again, and well, you know, it’s not like I need to keep learning this lesson.

It’s like I need to keep applying it and it’s very difficult to continue to apply is how fast are you taking action on data? That’s the ultimate takeaway. How fast are you taking action on data? So we all collect data in our businesses. Some way, shape or form, we’re all collecting different forms of data. I’d argue that a lot of the data that businesses collect is useless data. And I used to go back and forth with this all the time with a business partner.

He would just want all these metrics and like want me to set up like 50 different KPIs. And then I’d be like, okay, if I set that KPI up and the metric is not good, what are you going to do? Like, what’s what are the actions that you’re going to take if this is if this KPI is bad? It’s like, well, I don’t I don’t have any actions. I just I just want to know it. Now, if you’re not going to take action on a KPI, you shouldn’t be reporting it shouldn’t be there because the only KPIs that matter are ones that you can take actions, you take action on quickly and that you can actually influence the change.

If you’re pulling some data that’s like, let’s just say it’s website traffic and you’re having team members just report to you like, oh, yeah, we got a thousand visits to our website yesterday. It’s like, OK, cool. We want more visits. Well, how are we going to do that? I guess we could spend more on ads. Are we going to do that? No, we’re not going to spend more ads to get more web traffic. Then why are you telling me how much web traffic we got if we’re not going to try and get more web traffic?

It doesn’t matter. You know, you can always go back and look at these things if you need to. But it’s you don’t want useless data reported to you constantly. You need faster feedback loops so you can actually take action. So start thinking about that in your own business as we look at all the KPIs that we have, like another trigger that we have that might be helpful for you is if we have a KPI, we have our KPI meeting every Monday.

If we have a KPI fall out of target, it’s not within the benchmarks that we have set or where we want it, then. It’s either good, excellent, or it can go all the way down to bad, terrible, whatever. But there’s another rating called meeting required. So if we have something that’s within KPI, say it’s a set number of leads that we want on a monthly basis and that’s broken down to week and then we get to week and our leads have dropped and it’s below average.

And so it clicks over to meeting required is the actual like tag that gets associated with that KPI. And that means as someone who hates meetings, I have to schedule a meeting with a lot of important people and the person responsible for the KPI and we’re going to sit there for either 30 minutes or an hour and we’re going to figure out how do we think that we get to this KPI back into the green, back to where we want it.

And we’ll sit there, we’ll come up with a hypothesis, all the things we want to test. Do we need to spend more money? Do we need to invest? Everybody in the company associated with that starts to focus on the one KPI and then the next week, hey, how’s it going? Do we need another meeting? How many things are implemented? How quickly can you implement them? And then that KPI goes back to green and then it’s just whack-a-mole.

There’s going to be another KPI at some point that falls without outside of the lines that we want. And so then boom, another meeting, hypothesis, actions, and these feedback loops, they just need to go faster and faster and faster. And that’s all I’ve been trying to do. Not only in the specific example I told you of, hey, this is what we’re doing with our sales team, trying to get faster data on qualified leads. That’s something very specific.

We’re also doing it across the board and have been working on that for the last year of, hey, here’s a KPI within normal limits, outside of normal limits. We need to have a meeting. What do we do here? The actions we take. And so how fast you’re taking action on relevant data is probably the most important thing that you can use or do to grow your business. But it takes a lot of work and you’re going to have to try harder.