Prioritising revenue and thank you!
A recent new client scrum we did really enforced how much we’ve changed as a business since focusing on revenue for clients. Where in the past I would have been pushing for certain “tech-tasks” I found myself admitting that the fix wouldn’t affect revenue as much as many of the other issues we identified. If it isn’t going to generate more revenue it can wait.
What I learned
- Still in Stage Four – Yaawwnn.
- How do you prioritise tasks?
- Focus on quick wins.
- A big thank you to our clients.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers, how you going? We’re still in stage four lockdown for some reason, I don’t know why. Anyway, longest city in the world. We’re not going crazy at all, much.
Is it going to make more money?
I want to talk to you a little bit today about a scrum that we did yesterday because it was really interesting, we came out with 28 things just in that initial scrum, and we haven’t even done the mystery shop yet and we’ll probably find another 20 things when we do that.
But when you come up with that many potential things that you need to work on to hit a revenue goal, you’ve got to start prioritising and go, “Well, which one of these are we going to do first?” because they all take time. So you’re looking at what’s going to have the highest impact in the shortest space of time, near the task that you’re looking for on the revenue goal.
So one of the tasks yesterday was something that ordinarily I would said, “Oh God, we’ve got to get onto that, we’ve got to fix it straight away.” And that was the robots.txt was empty. But when you look at all the other things that we’ve got to work on, and whilst that job might only take half an hour to do it properly, there are plenty of other things that are going to impact revenue, and that’s what the client’s marking us on, right? They’re not marking us on a tidy robots.txt. So we’re going to go and work on the things that can impact revenue the quickest. Some of those things are just removing old plugins that aren’t being used, or identifying a plugin that might be just generating an extra two seconds page load time because it makes the menus look nicer, but are those menus looking nicer making up in conversions for what you’re losing because the page is loading slower now?
So it’s all those sorts of things, but if you have that revenue goal in mind, it’s easy to prioritise those tasks because unless the task is going to help you hit that revenue goal, then why are we doing it? Some of the things you might do just to make it look nice or bit of an understanding or a photograph update, whatever, those things are fine. But when you look at some of the old SEO stuff that we used to do, the robots.txt, that would have been really important.
We must be doing something right!
I’m sitting there yesterday in the meeting and I couldn’t justify it to the rest of the team that this should be something that we do straight away, and that was really interesting. The other thing that was interesting that happened yesterday is we found out that 38% of our clients have been with us for longer than five years, which is just extraordinary and I just want to say thank you to those clients.
They’re not watching this show, of course they don’t need to, but if they were I’d say thank you. The other thing that plays into that is the average length of time of a team member, and that’s five years as well. The current team, on average, have been with us longer than five years, and they’re extraordinary people and we wouldn’t be getting these results unless we had that stability and that skill level in our team.
Everyone has to kiss a few frogs along the way, we’ve certainly done our share. We find that that focus on that collective goal with the client and the agency and the staff and the team, we all know what we’re working on, we all know where we have to get to, so we can challenge each other to say, “Well, no, that’s Jim…” And this has happened to me, “Jim, that is not going to help us get to our revenue goal faster.”
I know it’s annoying, to me, to see something that I want to fix, but if it’s not going to get to the revenue goal faster, what are we doing? It’s just a thing that you might want to do to make it look better or tidy it up, remove a variable. But if it doesn’t help get to the revenue goal, don’t do it.
So, big thank you to the clients, big thank you to the staff, and a big thank you to you for watching, sharing, liking, subscribing this video. Thanks very much. Hopefully that’s helpful, we’ll see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
