Finish Strong

Ok, today's Friday...my favorite day of the week. I'm challenging myself to finish this week on a high note.

This has been an unbelievable week from a business standpoint. I've put two full days in with my new, top prospect, who's just recently committed to locking arms with us for 2010. Knowing that this is a critical point in the sales process, I've made them my top priority this week. They've seen something in me and my offer that appeals to them...Now, I'm going to make absolutely certain that they KNOW they've made a good choice. I conducted a sales training for their sales group in the STL area, and as a result, we've gained leverage. We now have their counter guy pushing our product, and all three outside reps are fired up about selling our windows. In fact, all three outside sales reps stepped out of the meeting and began making phone calls, hoping to schedule joint sales calls with me next Tuesday and Wednesday.

The bottom line is these guys now know I'm for real and see me as a valuable partner for them in growing their business. After the meeting, I pinned them all down for feedback to see where each is at individually...are they gonna push us or not. The feedback was strong and consistent with all five guys. Before this meeting, they didn't know if I was the guy they could take in to see their top accounts and prospects, because they've all had bad experiences with reps going in and mushmouthing the whole deal into oblivion. Not the case. They are all working hard to schedule their top customers/prospects for us to call on jointly. Huge progress! The result could very well be that we now have five qualified sales people going out every day, cultivating relationships with contracting businesses that could buy anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000 per year each in windows. This is leverage.

There's another factor at play here...I can reference this success with their other two locations. Now that we have a few of their own in our corner, it'll be that much easier to get the rest of the group's attention. Overall, when we earn the focus of all their sales reps, we will end up with 15 new sales guys...this is how I plan to hit my objective of $3,000,000 of new business in 2010.

On the MBJ front, the Austin crew produced four projects this week for us. This generated cash as well as profit...all good stuff. We are two weeks away from our canvassing launch. Leads should start flowing within the next three weeks. The goal is 16-20 leads per week for our canvassing team as a whole. Our metrics tell us we need approximately one hour of canvassing per lead. The metrics come from last year's efforts. They hold up as long as the effort is directed at the specific target neighborhoods and subdivisions we've outlined.

My overall fitness level is improving, as you'd expect. Any time you do anything conistently, you're going to see improvement. It's impossible not to. My results should trend on a steeper path to good, now that I've got a solid foundation of working out consistently. What I mean is there seems to be a point in this process that after a few weeks of seeing modest gains, all of a sudden you see significant change almost overnight. I fully expect to experience this sooner rather than later, especially now that I'm locked in on really eating clean.

All good things, really. The discipline aspect of this program is getting easier, I must admit. Well, it's not that it's necessarily easier, I think these Simple Disciplines are becoming habit...second nature. Nothing excites me more than the prospect of having the discipline to execute the highest-level tasks all day long, habitually. The vision is around the corner, once this becomes automatic.

Let's use this afternoon to not only fill our schedule with new biz opportunities for next week, let's take a moment to make sure we're moving closer to our visions. Only you can answer this question. You know what you've been doing over the past few weeks. Are you doing the things you committed to do? Are you writing down your objectives and creating solid plans to accomplish them? Are you preparing yourself for each meeting and opportunity you get? Are you giving the people you meet with your fullest attention and your very best effort? If the answer is yes, congratulations...you're on your way to greatness. If no, now is the time.

Starting right now, get on the phone and get five good meetings set up for next week. Fill your day Monday and Tuesday with three new biz calls and four or five calls with existing customers, to figure out ways to help them increase their purchases this year 30% over last year. This sort of specific goal planning will give you the direction and focus you need to not only hit your own goals for 2010, but to truly help your customers grow and become more profitable.

That's a great objective for next week. Target your top 10 existing customers, write them all down. Look at their total sales volume for 2009, write it down. Figure out, from their totals, what you need to get from them in 2010 to hit your growth goals, organically. Find out what that sales dollar figure is, figure out what that growth is percentage-wise. Call every owner from all ten and get in to see them next week. Go in with a plan - a real, specific plan of action to help those guys sell whatever you need them to sell this year. Make sure your plan includes the massive value YOUR ROLE is going to play in making this real. For me, it's going to be sales training on product demos and building canvassing teams for my in-home partners, and territory management training for my distribution sales reps with an emphasis on joint sales calls with each rep, myself, and new business opportunities.

Now, when we present these plans, we present them in terms of the increased profit each customer will experience...not in terms of ME making more money for myself. In the end, our customers really only care about themselves and their companies. They've got a whole host of challenges we don't understand, because we aren't them. Makes sense, really. Most of the time they see reps as company employees who collect checks week to week and don't have to worry about the pressures of making payroll, paying for insurance, etc. So, just be sure to make all of the focus on the customer's business. They'll respond well to this approach.

Whether you choose to implement this mini-strategy or not, I think you get what I'm after. The idea is that we have to have specific goals we're working toward each day, week, month, quarter. If we only focus on yearly goals, it's easy to get complacent. I think I've got a shot at already having closed what I need for the year. If I didn't re-focus and set these shorter-term objectives and play these smaller games within the big game, I'd get bored or lazy or something. We need to keep this fun, keep it interesting. Creating challenges like this is an entertaining way to achieve the goals we're supposed to be achieving anyway. But, this stuff forces us to carry that sense of urgency we all need to have in order to become who we want to become.

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