Although many of us profess a deep hatred for numbers, we grudgingly concede that they are indispensable to our world.
Numbers bestow order upon our chaotic existence. Their near-magical properties help us quantify the various elements that constitute our lives. Our day contains twenty four hours, our week seven days and our year twelve months. Our houses are numbered, as are the buses and trains we take to work. We create figure-loaded budgets and quantifiable sales targets. We dream of achieving a six-figure salary and a bank balance of a few million dollars.
Suffice it to say that numbers help us comprehend our universe.
However, numbers also tend to straitjacket the mind’s capabilities. In the corporate world, numbers represent certainty.
It is in the comfort zone of certainty that the mind atrophies.
Why should your ambitions, goals, targets and the like be defined by cold figures? Why shouldn’t you throw yourself into the deep end and surpass your own expectations?
iLeader Shashi Sudhanshu, CEO, iLeadFarmers “ Why can’t there be ZERO Ways to Close Deals? …..Whenever I see any blog article starting with #(some number) ways of ……. #(some number) reason for….. most of the time I connect with the author and I ask why that exact number, is that you have got that mantra or is that where you finished digging up your thoughts. I never got a response which made any sense. Someone said its magic number (lol), someone said the trick of odd works, like 7 ways, 11 reasons, 13 myths etc. (rofl).
I have always believed that one day the number game will fail. As the recent article of Fast Company says…. The numbers game (fans, followers, traffic, sign-ups, sales) will always fail as long as we fail to connect to what the customer cares about. “
Numbers blind the soul to the joy of self-actualization. When marketing managers set themselves a quantified sales target, they blinker themselves to the opportunity to cast that self-imposed terminal limit to the winds and motivate themselves to do justice to their acumen.
This acumen, dear reader, can take the possessor far beyond the myopic targets set by an unmotivated mind.
“It’s OK to play a number game in Marketing & Business Development, as long as you are not obsessed with it. There has to be logic & analysis, and it should matter more than mere numbers. Often Marketing & Business Development professionals get trapped in this vicious cycle and lose out on creativity & innovation in process. A common stats I hear everyday- Get 1000 hits on the blog, out of which atleast a 100 will go to the website and then atleast a 30 will register for the product. And on the services side- Get 100 leads/meetings/call and atleast 10 will respond positively & in the end 3-4 will convert. It never works and never will. Poor logic renders no good neither to the product nor the hapless marketing team. “ iLeader Pranali Vichare, Co-Founder, iLeadFarmers.
Pie charts, bar graphs and other statistical diagrams are great indicators of performance, but they often sabotage one’s drive to reach the zenith. The euphoria that you feel on achieving a ‘target’ is transient; true success comes about when you realize that you have soared to heights hitherto considered unattainable.
After all, you can’t measure satisfaction!!
