11: Maximizing Affluent Sales Opportunity
The author refers to the assertion offered in his preface that serving the affluent is a path to becoming affluent, and states that affluence doesn't happen effortlessly. In his research, he has found that many among the affluent work 60 or more hours per week, and if you are intent on joining their ranks, you must be willing to do the same.
There follows a brief stump speech along the same lines: you don't grow rich accidentally and it takes a lot of work. But more importantly, it takes focus and planned effort, not merely reacting to the events of the day and getting caught in what Stephen Covey calls "the tyranny of the urgent."
Switch to the customer side, the author's own wife had the notion to redecorate their kitchen, which she considered but did not act upon for a couple of decades, to the point it became a joke in the family. But even when she mustered herself to finally do something about it, she got a weak response: she invested the time in answering an online questionnaire about the project.
It took a few months for the studio she contacted to respond, and they did so with a form letter thanking her for her interested. She took offense at this, and rightly so, as it was clear the vendor paid no attention to the information she had taken the time to provide, and didn't seem enthusiastic about winning her business. As such she didn't do business with the firm and became discouraged about undertaking the project at all.
The point is fairly obvious: the project was an opportunity for the firm to make a substantial project, and likely the owner of the firm would have liked to have the income - but getting the business required more than the lukewarm and lackadaisical response they provided. And given that the customer was in a purchasing state of mind, it wouldn't have taken much more effort to send an immediate response, follow up, and win the business.
Envisioning Your Future
The first step in achieving a goal is having a goal: to know where you want to be in the future. The author recommends a twelve-month horizon, as a shorter amount of time is insufficient to make substantial accomplishments and a longer period of time leads to vagueness and procrastination.
And so, consider where you want to be in a year,, and quantifying them as much as possible: what do you want in terms of average monthly sales, average monthly income, and number of clients? Your goals should be challenging, but realistic.
It may also be necessary to refine the goals to make them more actionable: you may wish to have twenty new affluent clients, but to get there, you need to increase your introductions and referrals, join a few more organizations, build your contact database, and send out more promotions. Each of these may be a goal of its own.
There's also an oblique reference to goal-setting versus merely projecting: there are certain things you presently do that have predictable results. If you do nothing differently, you will likely achieve some level of outcome. But this is merely projecting. Goal setting involves setting benchmarks that exceed the results of routine performance, and require you to do something additional. If your goals are merely projections, they require no action other than to keep doing what you're doing, and will result in no real improvement.
Then, perform a gap analysis: for each goal, compare where you are today to where you want to be in future to indicate what you must achieve. If it seems insurmountable, revise.
Next, set objectives that lead to the achievement of your goals: if you have a goal of gaining 20 new accounts by the end of the year, how many must you gain by the end of the month?
(EN: One word of caution from another source is that achievement of a long-term goal may not be by steady projection, and generally is not. There is an achievement curve that may start off slowly and gain momentum, such that the majority of the results are achieved in the last third, or last half, of the period.)
And from there, divide it further: to achieve a given goal at the end of the month, what must you accomplish this week? What must you accomplish today?
There's also a brief mention that a goal may require avoiding as well as achieving - specifically, avoiding habitual patterns that, while comfortable and familiar, may inhibit or prevent success. The implication seems to be that you should make achievement top priority, but it seems that avoidance is also necessary.
Activating Your Achievement Cycle
When you have set goals that are important to you and outlined the steps you must take to achieve them, all that remains is to do it. Unfortunately, many people are held back by self-doubt and negative thinking, the sense that they can't do something saps their enthusiasm and discourages them from taking the necessary action to succeed.
The author explores this a bit, but doesn't seem to arrive at a more productive suggestion than to avoid falling into the pattern. If dejection leads to negative thoughts, and negative thoughts lead to reluctance to act, then the process can be derailed at the onset - but catching yourself when you are feeling dejected, and focusing on what is possible in order to get yourself back into the right state of mind.
One tip is to consider past achievements: chances are that you have succeeded at something in life, however small, and remembering that you have accomplished things in the past will lead you to the sense you can accomplish things in future, and overcome doubt.
This is reckoned to be part of the reason that people who are already successful continue to succeed: the confidence they take from past success enables them to believe in their ability to succeed again, and to find the motivation to do the things that, when you think about them, are often quite simple tasks that anyone can do.
Commitment and Action
Achieving success at any goal requires committing to the goal, then taking action.
Commitment means accepting that a goal can be achieved, and being motivated to take the actions necessary to achieve it. The author provides a few tips:
- First, envision the future, and be mindful of the reward you will gain for the action you will undertake
- Review your goals periodically. At least once a week, make not of the progress you have made, and what you must do next.
- Refine your goals if necessary. However, do not do this casually, because it's more convenient not to do things.
During the second step (progress review), decide what you need to accomplish in the short term, the upcoming week, and determine what steps you must undertake each day.
To turn the commitment into action is simply a matter of acting on your plan. Schedule activities you have identified, then do them as scheduled.
After that, the author returns to cheerleading: maintaining a can-do attitude. The process outlined above should help to keep your eyes on the desired outcome, which will give you the conviction to carry through, and to break down lofty goals into simple actions that can be taken.
Staying On Your Critical Path
The notion of the critical path is borrowed from project management: it is a method of prioritizing tasks to ensure that the most important things receive the first attention. It's especially important in that a person's time is consumed by so many things, and it's often the case that they decide to do what is most convenient or expedient rather than that which is most important. As a result, the most important things never seem to get done.
The author provides a "critical path organizer" that coaches the user through a brief process:
- List out all tasks that must be done in the following week
- Assign a "score" to each task that derives from its level of importance
- Determine which tasks can be done each day and schedule them
- When scheduling activities, give priorities to those that have the highest score
- At the end of each day, make sure that activities with a high score are achieved, or reschedule them for the following day
- At the end of the week, tally up your score for the week to appreciate your progress.
- Consider whether you might have done things differently to achieve a higher score, and what adjustments you can make in future.
Some time is required to do all of this analysis and planning, but the author asserts that you will be more effective for having taken the time to do it rather than proceeding without it.