Aggregation of marginal gains
August 21st, 2008I have resisted so far blogging about the Olympics because everyone is probably tired of hearing thoughts on how wonderful it is that the Great Britain team have shown our best performance for one hundred years. But the Beijing Olympics has given us more than blanket coverage of obscure sports such as walking, the Madison and pommel horse. Team GB’s astonishing domination of track cycling also gave us the term “aggregation of marginal gains”: a fantastic concept for improving sales results.
The phrase is attributed to Team GB cycling performance director Dave Brailsford. When asked what was the secret to their phenomenal success, he said there was no one secret. It was down to meticulously attending to 1,000 tiny details, each in itself seemingly insignificant. It is this combination of little secrets – the “aggregation of marginal gains” as he dubbed it, that had given our cyclists their winning edge.
A winning edge that meant that 8 golds out of the 17 won by Team GB were in cycling. To get that into context, if the cycling team were a country, they would be SEVENTH in the medals table (as I write)!
So often when we are not getting the results we want in selling, we resort to some “magic bullet”. We search for a secret that will turn things around.
This is especially true in a downturn in the economy as every sales director in the UK must be experiencing right now. So we look at reducing the workforce and keeping only the best performers. Or maybe we need to recruit new, better and super salespeople. Maybe we need to finally work more closely with the marketing department and that will generate the higher volume of leads that we need.
Any one of these factors MIGHT generate a 30% increase in sales from their current level. But this represents looking for a “secret” that might not exist. Why not take the cycling team’s mantra and try to find 1000 tiny details that we can improve. To get a 30% improvement overall, all we need to do is cumulatively increase the performance of 8 things by 3%. Try it on your calculator 103% times 103%, eight times.
Do you think you can find 8 factors such as hours worked, cold calls made, persistence, leads uncovered, etc that you can each improve by 3%? Of course you can. Then you will have generated a 30% improvement in sales by the theory of aggregation of marginal gains.





