Siddharth
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Do you play golf? I try to — although I must admit, not always successfully. Sometimes (OK, often) I don’t hit the ball perfectly. When it’s just ten yards away, it’s only slightly off target. But after it’s travelled 150 yards, it’s in the trees, or in my playing partner Jim “The Water” Ewan’s case, it’s in the water.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could make small adjustments to the ball while it’s in the air, nudging it back on track before it lands miles away from where we aimed?
That, in a nutshell, is what happens in business and marketing. Small errors — left uncorrected — compound over time. But the good news? The same is true for small improvements.
What Golf Can Teach Us About Marketing
Think of your marketing efforts as that golf shot. When you start, you’re full of intent and energy. But if your direction is off by just a few degrees — maybe your message isn’t clear, your targeting is slightly wrong, or your follow-up process isn’t consistent — the further you go, the more costly that small error becomes.
In golf, you might end up in the trees. In business, you end up with missed leads, wasted ad spend, and lost opportunities.
Measuring and Adjusting Along the Way
The secret to success isn’t hitting the perfect shot every time — it’s making small, consistent adjustments as you go. The same applies to marketing.
Let’s say your numbers look like this:
- You receive 100 enquiries.
- You convert 50% into meetings → 50 meetings.
- You send 40 proposals.
- You win 50% of those proposals, making 20 sales at £2,000 each = £40,000.
Now, imagine having a system — or a coach — that helps you make tiny improvements at each stage.
The Power of Compounding Improvements
What if you tested your headlines and improved your lead generation by just 10%, increasing enquiries from 100 to 110?
What if your conversion from enquiry to meeting rose from 50% to 55% because of better scripts or training? That’s now 60.5 meetings.
Then, because of improved follow-up and communication, you send out 50 proposals instead of 40. And finally, through better objection handling, you raise your close rate from 50% to 60%.
Now you’re making 30 sales instead of 20, bringing in £60,000 instead of £40,000 — a 50% increase in turnover without spending a penny more on marketing.
Small Tweaks, Big Wins
That’s the beauty of compounding improvements. Each small gain multiplies through your process. You don’t need to reinvent your marketing — you just need to understand it better, measure it accurately, and make informed adjustments.
The key question to ask yourself and your team is simple but powerful:
“How can we make our business just a little better today?”
When you continuously measure and refine, those small tweaks add up to massive growth over time.
Final Thoughts
Like golf, marketing mastery isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness, feedback, and incremental improvement. If you keep your eye on the ball and adjust as you go, you’ll avoid ending up “in the trees” and start landing on the fairway — and eventually, the green.
So, next time your results aren’t where you want them to be, remember: it’s not one big change that wins the game — it’s the small, consistent corrections that compound success.
By Steve Mills
