Numbers tend to persuade people in ways that are hard to imagine. When numbers or stats are high or low depending on the issue at hand, whether it be the number of sales made in a quarter, or the number of clients or deals closed in a quarter or yearly stats.
Numbers can sometimes make a deal or break a deal. Let’s say you want a website to generate X number of dollars per year, and then you also have a budget of Y amount of dollars. Well, if you don’t want to blow out your budget, then the X amount should be considerably higher than the Y amount. If your Y amount is higher, then your business will soon be in jeopardy because numbers don’t lie. You should not spend more than you make. Faking stats is really an ethical issue, but considered a ‘no, no’. Just don’t do it, it will cause you more headache in the long run because most of the time, the truth eventually comes out and when it does, you will have a lot of explaining to do. Do you really want that? However, use numbers in a way that impresses the audience. I see a lot of stat blocks display like how many dollars in revenue a company makes, how many clients the company has or how many users use the products or the services of the client. Or perhaps how many products have been sold by the client. The list goes on and on and most of the time, if the number exceeds the expectations of the customer than it is more likely for that customer to engage with the website and possibly purchase or integrate themselves with that company.
It’s all about engagement and how the numbers benefit the company. The audience likes bigger numbers because bigger numbers are better numbers when it comes to productivity and value. For instance, if your business has locations in 195 countries as opposed to 3 countries. Which company would you rather do business with? Or let’s say that your company has over 200 clients as opposed to 1 client, of course you would choose 200 clients, unless of course the wait time to be the 201st client takes so long because of backlog and bottlenecks that maybe a smaller company would be better to deal with. Sometimes you must outweigh the efficiency with the total productivity and the convenience. Some other great data points to address are the number of products or sales and/or services that your company provides. As you can guess, these numbers are better when they seem impressive.
Let’s say you have a marketing company that specializes in social media and E-Commerce, yet your R & D costs are way above what your company makes. In that case you will have a negative net benefit. In which the company is losing a lot of money, but that does not mean you should give up. There are ways to stay in business having a negative income. But we will get to that later. But numbers don’t lie, neither should you. Honesty is always the best policy because it makes things transparent and gains trust amongst your customers. Once you lie about anything, it will rub off wrong. Unless of course everyone believes in the lie. But who wants to operate a business based on lies? Do the right thing and try to be transparent and honest. It will save you a lot of headaches in the long run. You will also save a lot of money not having to pay lawyers.
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