“Moving the needle”

“Most Annoying Business Jargon” (forbes.com)

This grabbed my interest when I realised that sometimes a small change in a single aspect of a business can have a large impact on the whole business. I also realised that all you need is an easy way of expressing what a solution could do for a business when there has been no sponsorship into the matrices yet. Our software (Shark) contains many business metrics as standard which are the building blocks of business cases – any of them can be used to demonstrate the impact of moving the needle.

For example, you have a solution that may save costs and therefore improve margin. For moving the needle, often an arbitrary movement of 1% is taken as the starting point for the conversation. So, what might a 1% change in revenue be worth? The trick is to choose a handful of metrics (e.g. improve customer retention, shorter sales cycle, more sales calls, improve margin) that are relevant to the business, populate the metric with current (known) data and include a 1% improvement.

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The output from Shark will give the Net Present Value (NPV) of all the chosen metrics to illustrate the case and can be used to prompt a potential customer into action.

Moving the needle isn’t a business case, merely a way of highlighting what could be possible. It’s a good way of engaging a customer on the economic impact of a solution. Building a sponsored business case with agreed and correctly phased metrics rather than arbitrary improvements is the next step.

So easy – and don’t be put off by the jargon!