Lots of similarities can be drawn between the world of sports and business.

One of them being that both disciplines are high stakes. The “winner” takes an outsized portion of the glory and the financial reward.

The results might be 1 - 0 but that’s enough to clinch the EUFA or the World Cup and the glory and merchandizing opportunities that flow from that.

It’s the same in sales and business. If you are better at handling the sales, marketing, and branding processes over your “rivals”, then the market returns are going to be significant compared to the rest of the pack.

You don’t have to be obviously better than the rest of them, small marginal differences applied consistently over time will compound and make the difference.

The difference between Coke and Pepsi isn’t that great.

The difference between Dangote, Honeywell and the rest of the industry aren’t huge, but the returns on their efforts clearly are.

The difference between the number one fashion stylist in Lagos and the number two probably isn’t that great, but there will be a difference in the premium for which “number one” can charge over “number two”.

So if there are similarities in effort and return for both sports and business, there must be some more anecdotal wisdom that we can carry over to improve our sales and marketing efforts.

Sure there is!

In sports there’s this idea that feedback is the breakfast of champions.

The team that can take feedback from it’s own internal analytics, feedback from the fans, feedback from internal and external stakeholders, etc is the team that is going to reap the oversized rewards.

That’s why team sports spend a lot of money on coaches, nutritionists, mental health and personal performance specialists, community outreach, public relations, and now it’s common for teams to use video and game review technology and sports psychologists to go over their performance during the game.

We should be doing the same in business.

We should be looking for internal feedback from our sales and marketing teams, external feedback from investors, other stakeholders, market participants, user surveys, customer satisfaction conversations, client debriefs when they choose to leave us, government officials, and maybe even our spouses and close friends!

We should be open to feedback from a variety of sources.

This is because just like in sports, feedback will provide all the data we need to improve our performance, improve our product or service, and refine not only WHO we think our ideal customer is, but HOW we go about engaging them and biulding relationships.

Feedback is indeed the breakfast of champions!

Take this as good, friendly, neighborly advice from your brothers and sisters in the sports and entertainment industry.

If the stakes are high enough, we ought to take feedback and improve our performance no matter how marginal.

That might be the difference between being “number one” and “number two” in the market.