Reverse Engineer the Maths

I’m trying to work backwards from what we want the jewellery business to contribute to its owners.

What has to happen every working day for us to get there?

The thing I’m discovering is that we’re not doing close to enough marketing.

There are so many ways we could sell this stuff. We have existing customers. Leads in the CRM. Then there are events, wholesale reps, direct outreach to boutiques. Hosted trunk shows, corporate and private parties. I hadn’t even thought of that one.

Creator gifting, once the brand foundations are better. Salon referrals. Corporate gifting. Shop in shops. A showroom of some sort.

It’s a lot of things.

But the bit I find useful is taking a funnel, putting it in a spreadsheet, and assuming the conversion at each step is pretty bad.

Assume it works pretty shitly.

Then work backwards from the contribution goal. How much does each sale contribute? How many sales would we need? With outreach, how many people would we need to contact to get enough conversations to get those sales?

If the conversion is poor at every step, what does that leave us needing to do each working day?

That gives us an input we can actually aim at.

Then we can ask who’s doing it. What can a machine do? Where do we need a human? Who owns the funnel, and what are we checking each week?

Maybe this is pretty simple.

Pick the sales engines. Put an accountable owner on each one. Know the daily activity we’re aiming for. Check whether it’s happening and whether it’s producing sales.

And improve it while it runs.

With cold email, the emails still need to get delivered. We can test different approaches and see what gets a response. There’s work in making the funnel function at all.

But does it need to convert brilliantly before we do enough of it?

I’m wondering whether we should work out the volume we’d need even if it converts badly, then get the humans and machines doing that much.

Volume first. Better as we go.

This is where the combination of machines and humans gets interesting. If we can bring down the cost of each marketing action, including the overhead around it, the amount we can do could change quite a lot.

Grant Cardone and Alex Hormozi keep coming to mind when I think about this.

Selling every day. Selling every fucking day.

We have foundations to fix first. The brand needs work. The supply chain needs a solid foundation too. We’re selling a physical product, and we have to be able to supply it.

Part of me wonders whether making enough profit would also make some of the supply problems easier to solve. I haven’t worked that bit out.

But people already like the product. And looking at all these possible routes to customers, I keep coming back to the same question.

Once the foundations are there, how much selling do we actually need to be doing?

Maybe it’s back-of-the-envelope maths, an owner, and doing enough of the thing consistently. More volume, then making it better while we go.

I want to know what that means on a working day.