How To Screw Up in 2009

In the spirit of resolutions, goals, and planning for the year ahead, fellow sales coach Adrian Miller posted this article on her blog recently. In it she shows how to ’shoot yourself in the foot, create your own problems, and just plain screw up this year’:

You’re bound to read plenty of articles about how to succeed this year. Some undoubtedly have great tips, but just as many have uninspired, absurdly upbeat ideas that you’ve read a hundred other times. So, I thought I’d mix it up a little with a primer on how to shoot yourself in the foot, create your own problems, and just plain screw up this year.

No, I don’t want you to follow my advice, but these not so gentle reminders will help you avoid some of the most common ways that so many of us fail. Enjoy!

Cower in Fear
With the overwhelmingly bad economic news we’ve all been subjected to over the last several months, it’s natural to feel uncertain about where business is headed. This inevitably leads to fear and backing off from investing in the very things that generate business. One of the quickest ways to screw up is to cease your marketing, networking and public relations efforts. If you start retreating, your competition will be more than willing to fill your vacancy.

Don’t Exceed Your Clients’ Expectations
Sure, you’re already bummed out about business being slow. So, don’t exert any extra energy to go above and beyond what your clients expect from you. Trust me, if you only do the bare minimum, they’ll reward you with no more future work and plenty of free time for whining and complaining.

Don’t Mine the Gold in Your Existing Client Base
Want an especially fast and easy way to screw up this year? Keep hitting your head against the wall going after those expensive, impossible-to-get, cold leads, and avoid the warm, cost-efficient existing clients to whom you can cross-sell. Sure, your current contacts might very well appreciate and need what you might have to offer, but it’s so much more fun putting the effort in with those chilly individuals who will never buy from you.

Stay Focused On What You Can Get, As Opposed to What You Can Give
It’s all about you, you, you – right? When it comes to networking, just keep thinking about what you can get out of each one of your contacts. Don’t bother to be helpful or useful. Selfishness is the name of the game when it comes to pointless networking in 2009.

Develop a Reputation for Irrelevance and Inefficiency
Like it or not, each one of us is an individual brand. Some have quality brands that clients appreciate and buy from, and others of us are more known as the cheap knock-offs that should be avoided. To avoid success this year, work extra hard on letting your good name fall apart in your clients’ and prospects’ eyes. Try making some promises that you can’t keep, never follow through on what you say you’re going to do, and maintain a bad attitude at all times.

There are countless ways to royally screw up this year. Yet, there are just as many opportunities for great success. Stay positive, motivated, and helpful to others; and you’ll find that this year will be both productive and fruitful.

Four Ways to Make Your Biz New Year’s Resolutions Stick

Four Ways to Make Your Business
New Year’s Resolutions Stick

Call them goals, targets, aspirations or whatever you like, but at this time of year most folks make the expected ‘New Year’s Resolutions.’ Normally thought up on the spur of the moment, they often mirror (at least to some extent) what everyone else is going to do: lose weight, join a gym, or stop smoking. Unsurprisingly almost everyone falls off the wagon by the end of January and gives up. They fail because the resolutions have not been well thought out, let alone clearly planned or executed with precision.

So this gives you a great excuse not to set resolutions for your business, right?

Absolutely not! Failing to plan is nothing more than planning to fail! You just have to do it in a fundamentally different way.

Resolutions have a negative connotation so let’s rather call them Aims, Intentions and Determinations. Then let’s take a look at a process to help you decide on yours for 2009 and on how to make them happen.

Written Down and Visible

It may or may not be just psychological, but it really is a fact that what gets written down gets done. Be it a shopping list, a ‘to do’ list or in this case your aims, intentions, and determinations you have a much stronger likelihood of (a) not forgetting anything and (b) making sure you achieve your goals, if they have been put into black and white.

Where you write them down isn’t important, what is important is that they are written down and somewhere visible so that you see them every day. I like to have mine on the whiteboard in front of my desk. I have clients who use their office notice board, have them in a frame on their desk, or even as the wall paper on their PC’s. It’s not naff – it’s commitment.

Smart

The goals you set must be specific and measurable. It’s no good saying you will sign more clients this year and increase your revenue. Be totally specific about:

• How many new clients you will sign,
• At what price will the business be done,
• What turnover you will generate,
• What marketing strategies you will use, etc.

You need to be specific too about how achievement will be measured and when. Break down your goals into achievable and realistic chunks that are nevertheless stretching. I always suggest to my clients that it’s better to aim high and fall short than aim low and succeed.

If you are currently turning over £200k per year setting a goal of £5million for this year is not realistic and probably unachievable, but setting a goal of £1million may not be that far out of reach. I would much rather set a goal of a million and achieve £750k than set a goal of £300k and stop there.

It is equally imperative that your goals have timescales attached, for example by the end of quarter 1… quarter 2… quarter 3… and so forth. Then drill down further into monthly, weekly, or daily goals with specific activities that will need to happen to achieve the overall goal.

Review and Adjust

At a minimum you should be reviewing your achievements against your goals on a quarterly basis–monthly is even better if you can get yourself into the habit. Knowledge is power and you need to know exactly how you are performing against expectations so you are able to take corrective action early if necessary. You may need to increase activity in certain areas, or outsource more in other areas.

Reviewing regularly will also help you uncover obstacles or challenges that are standing in the way of your success and allow you to adjust or call in expert help. Having a mentor or accountability partner is a tool that many successful entrepreneurs use to keep them on the right track (even David and I have mentors to keep us performing at our peak!)

Interview with the Future

Now visualise yourself twelve months into the future, at the end of December 2009. Picture yourself in a relaxed environment looking back at the intervening period which has delivered everything you hoped for.

What does the picture look like to you? How do you feel?

If the level of success you see and feel provides you with complete satisfaction, then go out and make it happen!

If, on the other hand, during this interview with the future you feel that ‘it isn’t enough’ or you are underwhelmed then you need to take another serious look through your goals and aim higher. Remember what I said earlier about aiming low and succeeding…

With all the best intentions in the world, unless you physically take action and execute the aims, intentions and determinations that you have drawn up for 2009 you will get to the end of the year and look back in bitter disappointment.

Don’t let that happen to you this year!

©Vanessa Deakin and Zee2A Limited 2009. Vanessa Deakin works with Professional Service Executives frustrated and disappointed with their current growth rates, marketing efforts, and business profitability. Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes she helps them to skyrocket their results and break their own best records. To learn more, sign up for her e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit her website at www.zee2a.com.

Do you need a Mentor or Accountability Partner to hold your feet to the fire in 2009? Learn about our programmes and how we work or request a complimentary, no obligation 60 minute planning and goal setting session with either David or Vanessa valued at £199 (fee waived during January and subject to availability).

Two Essential Components of Achievable Goals

Last month we talked about the importance of clear, specific, time-linked goals to your professional service business. I hope that many of our readers have taken some time to develop goals for their business following the guidelines in that article. However, we finished by acknowledging that some have become ’scarred’ by previous experiences of setting goals and then being disappointed at not achieving them. The question we posed then was: Are the goals to blame?

I’m sure most of you didn’t need to wait for me to tell you that the answer is NO! Goals may be a key foundations step to achieving business success, but they are by no means the ONLY thing your business needs! Having goals is no guarantee of success, as those scarred ones found to their cost. Why is that?

Have you noticed that goals are somewhat similar in essence to dreams? My eldest brother puts it this way: “There’s a fine line between having a vision and hallucinating”. Now if there’s one thing that characterises dreams and hallucinations, it’s that they most often do NOT become reality! (We’re glad of that when Pink Elephants come past on Unicycles!) If our goals are indistinguishable from our dreams, can it be any surprise that we don’t achieve them?

So how do we ensure that our goals become reality? There are two key requirements to which we must give attention:

Have a Roadmap to Your Goals

You will come across a school of thought in self-help literature that suggests you need do nothing to foster your goals. ‘Just dream it’ goes the logic, ‘and your marvelous brain will go to work to move you closer to what you dream of’. Now, if your financial advisor told you that he was taking that type of approach to growing your investments, how happy would you be? Me either! And it won’t work for your business – taking my word for it will save you a ton of heartache.

Let’s go back to the scenario we used in the last article – we were driving on the M3 hoping to get to Heathrow Airport to catch a flight. Did we have to give some thought to how we would achieve that goal? Of course we did! If we had never made the journey before would we leave the route to chance? Or would we make sure that we had the map-book dog-eared at the right page and the route penciled-in? (Okay, okay – I’m showing my age! We’d have printed out the AA-recommended route and made sure that we understood it.) Then as we approached each intersection, wouldn’t we refer back to that map to check that we were about to make the correct turn?

Revenue and sales targets form your business roadmap. Do you have a revenue target for this quarter? Equally important, do you understand how many sales you need to close in order to achieve that revenue target? Any longer than three months, and your ‘map’ doesn’t show the key intersections. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous a map that doesn’t show the route in sufficient detail is, I’m sure!

To force our analogy just a little further, your ‘driving the route’ is accomplished by implementing marketing strategies which lead to sales, and each quarter the number of sales closed will be compared to your ‘business roadmap’ to measure progress. Not enough sales and you run the risk of reaching the airport late for your flight. If you realise that early enough you can decide to drive the next leg of the route a little faster to make up time, but if you’re not monitoring progress how would you know?

Your goals would be slowly, imperceptibly fading into dreams – leaving behind nothing but scars.

Have the Tools You Need

So let’s assume that we have the route to our goals mapped out. Is that it? Well, would a roadmap be much good to us if we had an empty fuel-tank? Or perhaps didn’t have a car? What if we didn’t know how to drive? Nope, the roadmap’s not the end of the story.

In broad terms we could say that the next step is to understand what resources we need to accomplish our purpose. Here’s where we entrepreneurs realise how different running a business is from working for someone! Suddenly we come face-to-face with how little we know about things like marketing, customer service, brand-building, business management and so on. How can we close the gap?

There are essentially three options when it comes to resourcing our business plans: Ignore it, outsource it or learn it.

Ignoring it is not usually recommended, but don’t forget that it is an option! Sometimes I come across well-meaning entrepreneurs who follow every trend in management slavishly, burning time and effort in pointless pursuits. If only they realised that they could just have ignored the trend! Focus on what is necessary to progress your business, and ignore the rest.

Outsourcing is vital, because each of us has only two hands. Remember, though, that outsourcing is not an excuse for abdication. You are responsible for the success of your business – and that can never be outsourced! We’ll explore the appropriateness and the value of outsourcing in a future article.

How sad that in a world awash with education, learning seems to be a sadly neglected skill. Entrepreneurs have (in my humble opinion) an obligation to be lifelong learners, and it’s made so easy for us! Each of us can get what I like to call a ‘Weekend MBA’ simply by reading a carefully-selected book written by an expert in the field – every weekend! Similarly, coaching and mentoring under the care of acknowledged industry leaders can unleash more power than a nuclear reactor – right in our own backyard!

In summary, take the time and effort to give your goals wings. Plan the route to success, then make sure you have what it takes to complete the journey. And don’t forget to have fun!

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited

Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph:  David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing guru who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level of profitability and success.  Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit http://www.zee2a.com

 

 

The ONE Thing Your Professional Services Business MUST Have!

Here’s a challenge: Do you know the ONE thing that separates the successful (including the obscenely successful, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) from the also-rans? Think you do? Perhaps then you also know that this same ONE thing makes more of a difference than pretty much anything else to ensure that your small business will one day become a big business, rather than a failure statistic? Anyone can do it, and it doesn’t require special skills, proprietary tools or expensive resources.

Shall I put you out of your misery? The ONE thing you MUST do for your business is to set clear, specific, time-linked goals.

What? That’s it? Boy, what a build-up for so little … but before you drop this article in disgust and go on to something else, answer me this: What are your revenue goals for the next three months? How many new clients are you planning to close between now and then? What’s the planned average revenue per client you close? Can you also answer those three questions for the remainder of the calendar year? If not, why can’t you answer those questions?

Most people who can’t answer those questions tell me that plans are irrelevant; it’s results that matter. What’s the point (they ask) of plucking numbers out of the air that may or may not match reality? Why not follow the Nike approach and ‘Just Do It’? After all, plans and goals don’t put money in the bank. And of course they are right; in the same way that drawing up plans for a new house doesn’t put a roof over your head – or does it? Do you know anyone who successfully owner-built a new residence WITHOUT first drawing plans? Neither do I, and that’s exactly my point.

Let’s take a few minutes to understand the value of focused business goals to you; and while we’re about it we’ll highlight the three steps to successful goal-setting:

The Journey versus The Destination

Shall we begin by visualising ourselves driving in a car? I usually frame this visualisation within the context of the M3 Motorway in Hampshire, heading for Southampton. (If you unfamiliar with that route you may want to Google it.) The key question is this: Is that a GOOD or a BAD thing?

No idea, right?

We couldn’t answer that question without at least some context, so let’s add a little to our visualisation. Let’s say that we are trying to get to Heathrow airport. (For those unfamiliar with the area, Heathrow airport would be behind us, and getting smaller in the rearview mirror). Now: Is that a GOOD or a BAD thing?

Isn’t it amazing how a simple thing like knowing where we want to go can make such a difference? Goals do that for your business – they give context to your analysis of progress and strategy. They allow you to decide whether to keep doing something or to stop and do something else, because they allow you to understand whether your efforts are moving you closer to where you want to be, or taking you further away.

There or Thereabouts

Let’s just take a moment to delve a little deeper into your destination as context. If you were heading for the airport, would it be enough to know which county it was in? Of course not! In fact, even having the main airport entry road as a destination wouldn’t be good enough – you would also have to know which terminal you were flying from, and where the rental car drop-off point was.

Likewise, it’s not enough for your business to have the goal of ‘being successful’. What does that mean? Take the time to define success. Remember too, that even if you didn’t set up your business to get rich you need financial goals. After all, money is the only means we have of keeping score!

The Tyranny of Time

Of course there are further aspects of context that enhance our visualisation. So, let’s imagine that we have turned the car around and are now heading towards the airport. The clock on the dashboard reads 14:12.

You’re ahead of me by now: You want to know what time the aircraft is leaving before you can tell me whether we’re on time, right? See how powerful that could be for your business? Not just WHAT you want to achieve, but WHEN you expect to be achieving it. So if what you are doing isn’t producing results fast enough, you can start trying something else, because you know where your business should be at a certain point in time. Since you are the driver, you are the only person who can make those changes – and you need the context within which to do it.

Don’t fall into the trap of setting your timelines too far ahead. (Many folk I speak to can tell me what their five-year revenue goal is, but not their current-year goal.) Within the context of our visualisation, what good would it do to know that we have to get to Heathrow in two weeks time? There would be no urgency, no immediate need to consider progress and direction – nothing to help us enhance performance. In short, an opportunity wasted. You – and your business – deserve better than that!

In summary, the ONE thing your business cannot do without if it is to succeed is goals. Those goals need to be clear, detailed and timely. If your business doesn’t have that, don’t delay! You could be on the road to Southampton at this very moment!

Having goals is not the end of the story, as many learn to their cost. The single biggest excuse I hear for not having goals is: ‘I set goals in the past and didn’t achieve them, so what’s the use?’ It’s not too dramatic to say that such people are emotionally scarred by their past inability to achieve their goals – but should they be blaming the goals? Does the problem lie elsewhere? We will explore this further next month.

Are you a Professional Services Executive yearning to grow your business profitably without sacrificing your quality of life? Are your goals becoming clearer but the strategies to achieve them still eluding you? Zee2A can help! Find out more about our Marketing Edge Mentoring Programme here.

©David Deakin and Zee2A Limited

Would you like to reprint this article? You may do so as long as you include the copyright notice and the following paragraph:  David Deakin, CEO of Zee2A, is a marketing guru who works with Professional services Executives yearning to take their business to the next level of profitability and success.  Through one-on-one and group mentoring programmes he helps them to create sustainable marketing strategies that attract more clients at profitable rates. To learn more, sign up for his e-zine, or make an enquiry please visit http://www.zee2a.com