In 1942, American inventor George Corsby built a practical commuter’s car that weighed only 1200 pounds. He was ahead of his time, and people called him crazy. The vehicle was basic, lacking the creature comforts of his competitors – namely size. When asked why, he replied simply: you don’t need a battleship to cross a river.

Battleships

Building your customer journey is like crossing the river – filled with fast currents, hidden sand bars, and any number of bottlenecks. On one bank is a friction-free prairie: your high-converting sales funnel. On the other is your current funnel: bogged down by friction, complexity, and strategic quagmire. This is the scenario most agencies walk into at the start of a new client relationship. It's our job to ferry you from one side to the other, and yet it almost never works. That’s why the average agency churn rate is less than 3 years.

So what's going on here?

Over the past decade, the river crossing has become increasingly complex – fraught with shifting consumer trends, competition, privacy laws, and new channels. As brands hire agencies to help them cross, agencies resort to increasingly complex methods. New technologies enable unprecedented access to consumer data: demographics, psychographic, behavioral, and situational trends. But evaluating this data brings complexity and requires management overhead. Suddenly you’re riding a state-of-art battleship across a tiny river with a crew of 900.

Battleships require an enormous amount of work to move a relatively short distance. Worse yet, most of their upkeep has nothing to do with achieving the objective – it’s simply upkeep. In the control room, KPI overload and confusion cause headings to drift. Captains panic. Now, even more resources are expended just to keep the massive vehicle on course.

Simply put, the battleship is complex and powerful – it’ll make it across the river – but requires 20x the resources, 20x the expense, and 20x the time. It's overkill. By the time you’ve arrived on the other shore, consumer behavior has shifted, new privacy laws are in place, and it’s the other side you really need to be on after all. So you fire your agency, and build another battleship to bring you back. This one promises even newer technology, but ultimately succumbs to a similar fate. The agency cycle continues. 

You don’t need a battleship to cross the river. A speed boat will cross in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the complexity. Ecommerce is all about being nimble, adapting to changing conditions in real-time, and shifting objectives with only a few knobs and dials. Simply put – your initiatives should be simple, lean, and outcome oriented from the start.

Complex is possible – simple is necessary

Behind the senses, agencies are in a full-on arms race. Customers are fatigued as more and more brands attempt the river crossing at once. The channel is clogged with complex initiatives and powerful warships burning millions of dollars a day. Captains are lost in KPI overload, switching directions left and right just to stay on course – but they’re not getting anywhere.

It’s a traffic jam. And it’s why we created Zulu Core.

Zulu Core is built around intelligence and simplicity. We’ve learned that fewer KPIs and simple goals are the key to successful crossings. That’s why our clients ride back and forth several times in the month it requires a traditional agency to cross once. Rather than chase a never-ending KPI current, we obsess over just three: 

• Customers: how many shoppers you have
• Frequency: how frequently those shoppers convert
• Order Value (AOV): how much money those shoppers spend

It’s not to say we ignore other mission-critical KPIs, but we use them to evaluate current initiative performance, NOT as reasons to build new ones. Engineering one all-hands initiative to increase Frequency or AOV will deliver more revenue than 12 smaller initiatives to tackle improved RPR, CACs, RPV, etc…