Want bigger ideas? Ask bigger questions! #30 #cong18

The ideas you generate are constrained and shaped by the questions you ask.
As a simple exercise , multiply your desired results by 10 and see if the ideas are different.

1. Ask bigger questions
2. Get bigger answers
3. Challenge yourself harder
4. Look for a 10X improvement

Alan is a seasoned Head of Growth experienced in B2B Saas.

An award winning Author, Entrepreneur and Marketer, Alan has over 15 years in sales, marketing and product.

As a serial entrepreneur Alan founded Toddle.com, building a user base of almost 30,000 users worldwide before selling the company.
Author of three successful marketing books, Alan previously founded and ran one of Ireland’s leading design agencies winning awards for design and business excellence including a BAFTA nomination.
Passionate about all things growth, Alan has lectured at the Dublin Web Summit, Dublin Institute of Technology, European Institute of Management Practice and judged the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) awards among others.

You can connect with Alan on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter and Instagram or via email.

By Alan O’Rourke.

I was managing a marketing team recently and the usual question comes at the end of the year. How do we grow the software business next year?

• The usual format of that conversation looks at where we are getting business now?
• How can we squeeze that harder?
• What conversion rates can we optimize?
• What resources do we have?
• What new channels can we test?
• Where can we find new pockets of potential customers?
• What budgets can we increase?
• What partners can we work with.
  Etc.

But this particular year I got to meet some super smart marketing and business people at a tiny event around the idea of 10x. (Run by the super smart Colin Lewis). A simple enough concept. Instead of looking at improving customer acquisition by 25%, multiply that number by 10 and then ask the question again. The question then becomes how do we improve customer acquisition by 250%. It suddenly becomes a much bigger question. The old ideas will no longer work. It demands much bigger ideas.

One particular example of this in the marketing team changed the question “How do we get more people to download our app from the app store”, to “How do we get our business app shipped with every phone in the world. A big question indeed that completely changed our frame of reference. Asking that question resulted in wildly different ideas from the team.
Suddenly we are not selling an app to thousands of users. Now we are selling an app to a phone manufacturer like Samsung. Or to an international phone carrier like Vodafone to bundle the app for every business customer.
All of which are possible.
But if we didn’t ask the bigger question, we would not have had the bigger idea.

So what are you working on right now? How can you 10x the result?