Bullets and then Cannonballs
One of my favorite books is Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. It talks about the theory of firing bullets and then cannon balls. I recommend you read this book at some point. But to give you a quick overview, the concept goes like this:
Start small and test new ideas. When you launch a campaign with a completely new idea, concept, or pricing structure, start small. Fire bullets. They are tiny, fast, low cost, and low risk.
Once you have proven your ideas to be effective, then consider firing cannonballs. They are bigger, heavier, and more forceful. Bullets won’t sink a ship, but cannonballs can. Test your marketing efforts over and over again.
Test, tweak, rinse, and repeat on a small-scale basis. If your tests prove profitable, consider firing a cannonball.
Here is a real-life example
I would always print postcards in groups of one thousand. I would send out five tests over a set period, using the same postcard but with small changes: different headlines, fonts, and offers. The card that produced the best results was printed in mass quantities. We started small with bullets, tested, tweaked, and then fired our cannonballs. My cannonballs looked like twenty-five thousand pieces of direct mail.
Yours can be whatever number, as long as you start small
Remember, bullets first and then cannonballs
This was an excerpt from The Window Cleaners Marketing Blueprint.
Pick up the book here.
