If your biz — or your client’s biz — has sales targets (or other target KPIs)…
… then there’s a shockingly high chance perverse venomous cobras are wreaking havoc on that business from the inside out.
Metaphorically speaking, of course…
But this is still a chilling problem you’d be daft to ignore.
Here’s the skinny:
Have you ever heard the story about cobras in New Delhi?
Sometime many years ago, when India was under rule of the British Crown, the British Government was becoming concerned about the number of venomous cobras roaming wild in New Delhi.
So they began offering cash rewards to anyone who killed and brought them a dead cobra.
Initially, this bounty program was a roaring success.
But before long, people started breeding cobras to kill, so they could pocket more reward money.
Once the government realized what was happening, they scrapped the program. However…
This led to the cobra breeders setting their snakes free, meaning New Delhi was plagued with even more wild cobras than ever before.
What a backfire!
This phenomenon is known as a perverse incentive; when an incentive produces unexpected, undesirable results.
And it reminds me of the £50k weekly team sales target from the first biz I ever worked at, many moons ago.
If we hit that target, everyone would get a free bottle of booze. (Ample motivation for an office full of Scots.)
So folks in that biz would pull all kinds of fugazi contortions to make that target happen…
Often resulting in customer complaints when they got invoices for stuff they hadn’t received yet, and confusion from warehouse staff trying to fill orders for products that hadn’t arrived yet.
Total cluster-schmuck!
And the same thing can happen in your biz if you put too much value on certain metrics and KPIs.
Email open rates…
Clickthrough rates…
Even sales targets (in many ways).
As the renowned economist Charles Goodhart once aptly noted:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Reason being:
No singular metric can encapsulate the bigger picture of biz success.
E.g. You might be smashing your sales targets for your latest email campaign…
But if you pulled a bunch of sneaky tricks to make that happen, selling with more hype than you can honestly back up or burning out the goodwill of your list…
… then the campaign wasn’t as much of success as sales metrics alone would have you believe.
Food for thought.
Remember:
An email list is for life. Not just for Christmas.
Or is that a dog?
Alas…
If, like me, you believe your email list is a valuable long-term asset… and you want to maximize its life-time value throughout 2025 and beyond…
Then go here to discover my best tips on how to do email the right way:
https://kennethturnbull.com/email-newsletter
Stay sharp,
Kenneth Turnbull