When John Lasseter was directing A Bug’s Life, he had the goal to top Pixar’s performance of Toy Story. His team realized very soon that most of their experience from Toy Story was meaningless when applied to A Bug’s Life because of the scope of the new story.

A Bug’s Life was the first fully digital, wide screen animated production and new technological challenges were brought to bear. In fact, John commented that they were “drowning” in the technical issues that arose.

One of the producers told John that they were limited technologically to produce crowd shots with more than 50 characters. Could you imagine an ant colony with only 50 ants visible at any given time?

John’s response?

“I am willing to accept that if that is all you can do, but I willing to be that you guys can do better. “

They formed a team called the “crowd team” to solve the problem and they over came the technical issues and A Bug’s Life was the highest grossing film of 1998.

When thinking about running your business, you have to be very careful to not get caught up in the newest technology of the day and focus on your business. Don’t let technology get in the way.

Sometimes the technology is part of the business requirement. We just have to not let the tech get in the way. Start with understanding your business objective (sell more stuff, decrease costs, communicate with customers) then focus on what will get you to that end.

As I started a sales career years ago, I had sales managers say, “You know sales is a numbers game… you just need to talk to more people and you’ll sell more stuff.”

I always thought that was plain stupid. If I talk to 100 people in 8 hours per day and want to double my sales then the only way I could do that would be to work 16 hours per day.

There had to be a better way. And that is to get the 100 people you talk to to buy from you more often.

In sales, we call this the conversion. In short, the conversion is someone doing something you want.

As sales people, well good sales people do this any way, we  try new approaches with prospective clients. We say new things in new ways with people and see what sticks… see what people respond to.

This process of trying new things and seeing what gets the best result is called conversion rate optimization. It is to see what approach will get more people to do more things more often.

As we market our businesses, and ourselves, for that matter, we are always trying to find the right way to become more successful. The question is, “how do we get more people to buy from us more often?”