You’re working along on your plan and you hear some “no’s,” or you get a little bit stuck in the traction, and maybe you’re spinning your wheels. So you throw your hands up in the air and you say, “Ugh, it’s not working!”
And then you go back to the drawing board. You’re at the drawing board so much that it actually feels like you live there, right?
Today I want to share with you some awesome insight from my personal business coach Heather, that will really help with this. listen to her podcast here or read on to discover more.
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One of the most common follies that I see business owners make is that they’re living in this constant state of analyzing and strategizing…and then analyzing and strategizing again.
Well, we often feel, as business owners, that we need to live in this strategic zone. We feel like strategy is the best thing that we can be doing, and it’s the only way to get to where we want to be. We can to continue to always strategize our next move. But often strategizing is actually distracting us from execution and from improving our skill sets.
When things get hard we tend to want to implement something fresh and new. Maybe it’s a new training we just watched, or something from a book that we just read instead of working through the actual thing that has been hard for us. We want to find that easy route, but no route worth taking is ever truly easy.
Let’s just say that you were knitting (I don’t know how many people actually knit anymore but the analogy works, so I’m gonna roll with it), and you realize that you made a mistake a few rows back. What would you do? Would you just pull back those few rows to fix the mistake and then move forward? Or would you pull everything off the needles, grab a new ball of yarn, and just start all over again?
It would be pretty irrational to start from scratch when you could just go back those couple of rows, take one small step back, and then start moving forward again without erasing all of your progress. Yet we do this in business all the time, right? We grab that new ball of yarn, we take everything off the needles, and we completely start from scratch.
So when we’re trying to do outreach and it doesn’t work, then often we decide “Well, outreach just isn’t for me,” or “Outreach just doesn’t work anymore.” And then we find something new and shiny that will “fix” it instead of finding out it outreach really does work.
What if it’s just the script that you were using that was the problem? What if you had no consistency in that script? What if it was the people you were reaching out to and you need to find a new pool? So we have no way of knowing what the actual problem was.
Let’s say you were building a castle out of LEGOs, and the top of the LEGO castle fell off. Would you rebuild just the top or would you get frustrated, knock down that entire castle, and then yell, “I’m gonna build a LEGO igloo instead!”
Instead of constantly building your strategy on the fly, the way that I recommend building a strategy in your business is to focus on the strategy for just one afternoon per quarter. That’s just a half a day every three months.
Here is what that process would look like:
Step One: Outline the goals that you’d like to achieve in the next quarter.
Step Two: Look back on the previous quarter before you start strategizing how you’re going to move forward in reaching those goals. Look back on the previous quarter and think “What are the things that helped me to move the needle forward? What worked, what didn’t work, what might work had we not given up on it, or if we tweaked it slightly?”
Step Three: With that feedback in hand, you can pull together a strategy for yourself and for your team for that next quarter that will help you to reach those goals.
Step Four: Map out what steps you’re going to take during the first couple weeks of that quarter to execute the strategy because we all know that a three-month goal is a big one, and you’re going to have to take and break it down into baby steps.
Step Five: What’s the first baby step that you’re going to take toward that goal? And what are we going to focus on first and execute? And then in a couple weeks you can pause what you’re doing and you can see what progress you’ve made, and, from there, you can make any adjustments necessary. You don’t change the strategy or the goal, you simply tweak the execution until you finish.
When I worked in the banking industry, we would meet with our manager every week or every two weeks to talk about what did we achieve, what did we want to achieve, what’s our goal that we’re working towards for the quarter, and if we had a rough week what are we going to do differently this week to ensure that we make the necessary tweaks?
The strategy that we were doing day in and day out, whether it was focusing on credit card sales or whether it was focusing on outreach and getting more people into the branch, that didn’t change for the quarter.
I want you to think about how this is different than how you’re currently working inside your business. How’s this different and what difference do you feel that these five steps can make to your business and to your team’s ability to reach the results that you’re looking for?
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Such great insight from our Emerge business coach, Heather. I hope this encourages you as we all step into our 2019 goal setting sessions.
And on Tuesday, December 11th at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET to talk about how to recruit more people so that you are set up for success when reaching your 2019 goals. If you want to join me, you can register at emergesalestraining.com/freerecruiting.