If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. All you need is patience.
James Clear
In today’s post we’re going to discuss the numbers to track in your pipeline, what to prioritize, and playing to your strengths to fuel your follow up game.
There was a great discussion going on in Wednesday’s Mastermind on the topic of, “What methods are being used to engage Facebook leads?”
We shared everything from what scripts are being used when picking up the phone to what’s inside the gift being dropped off at people’s houses.
Whatever your approach, it’s about consistency.
A study was done by Sales Insight Lab to find out what activity you should do to get more clients and more deals. Turns out it’s the number of appointments you have. Get more appointments and you’ll do more deals. Simple, right?
Some people love numbers. Others not so much. I’m in the middle. But I’ve learned to value them immensely. Why? Because they calibrate my priorities during the day.
Every morning I quickly look at our dashboard and manually update a few things. This gives me a quick overview of the health of our business, keeps me consistent, and I most importantly know what things I need to prioritize.
What we track matters. I learned this from numerous coaching sessions with incredible business leaders. Sir William Thomson famously said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it.”
It starts with understanding the funnel. If you want to grow you need the following:
Traffic > Leads > Appointments > Clients > Deals > Repeat Clients & Referrals
If you track your activities every day you learn what’s healthy in your business and what needs work.
If you want more clients and you know that having more appointments is the way to get more clients, then you will need more leads. So everything at the beginning of the funnel is the most important. When Leads is “green” then it’s easy to work on appointments. It’s much harder if you don’t have traffic and leads.
People tend to do their best work when they are clear on what matters.
This is why Gary Keller describes leads as the lifeblood of business. If you don’t have leads, he says, stop what you’re doing and get them. But it needs to make sense for your business. Firstly, you need to have a budget for it. And secondly it needs to be a strategy that works for you and allows you to work in your strengths.
Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist and a New York Times best selling author. But he almost never got his PhD. With less than 1 year left to complete his thesis he still hadn’t started it. Then he remembered the proverb of the ant “consider its ways and be wise,” so he actually made an ant farm in his lab and a week later had an epiphany.
About a week after he returned to discover the ants had built a city. This was his eureka moment. The ant moves 1 grain of sand at a time, but given enough time they build an entire network.
He applied what he observed the ants do. He broke his thesis into smaller tasks that were easy to accomplish. By the end of the year he handed in his thesis and became a Doctor.
So when you have consistent online leads, reaching more clients and growing a business is simple really.
- Prioritize the sales activities that matter
- Track your activities. (This will keep what areas you need to prioritize top of mind)
- Understand the health of your funnel
- Break big overwhelming tasks into smaller achievable tasks “grains of sand”
- Play to your strengths
Playing to your strengths
Finally, I want to touch base on what I wrote about last week in the newsletter. If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is, he’s the Michael Jordan of soccer.
Last week I wrote about how he plays to his ‘strength’ which looks like a massive disadvantage. He makes most of his plays with his left leg. Everyone knows it, the defenders know it too. Which means it should be easy to defend against. At least on paper. Yet it doesn’t stop him from scoring winning goals.
Since then I’ve had some great email threads and it made me realize I need to expand on it a bit.
What stands out about Messi is that he is playing to his unique abilities. Too often I see people over emphasize a strategy that depends on a skillset they believe they ‘should have’, rather than leveraging the one they naturally have. Just like Messi, when coaches were trying to train him to strengthen his right leg. It didn’t work out.
But when people accept their strengths and leverage those in their strategies that’s when they start to make big strides forward. It’s hard for anyone to compete with that. Just like it would be hard for another soccer player to copy how Messi plays.
Messi ignored his weakness and turned it into something that made him dangerous on the field. And the results speak for themselves.
That’s why I loved this weeks mastermind. There were so many different strengths on display.
What’s your strength? It may be your tenacity, your fearlessness on camera, your organization, your consistency, your ability to talk to people, your servant heart, your out of the box thinking. What makes you dangerous on the field?
