Occasionally I’ll get a client who says: “You know we spent several thousand dollars to go to this tradeshow when you add up the booth feestransportation, hotels and food. Then when we got back to the office, we did nothing with all the leads we generated.”

Or, I’ll hear, “I went to a networking event recently. Over all I spent $15 on the entrance fee and $20 on transportation. But more than that I spent time traveling there, being there and traveling home. It took up my whole evening. I got into a few interesting conversations and got business cards from those I spoke with. But you know 3 weeks have gone by and I haven’t touched base with anyone I met there.”

In both scenarios the missing ingredient is follow up. Those that don’t follow up are throwing their time and effort against the wind. It’s like telling the universe, “My time and energy have no value. I don’t deserve success.” They are sabotaging their own efforts. It’s like throwing money out the window and wasting their most precious commodity, their time.

Why do people do that? Fear of success, fear of failure, feeling like they don’t deserve success, like they aren’t worthy of attention from the possible contacts. Lack of time is, of course, an excuse. If they wanted to, they would prioritize the time and make follow-up of ultimate importance. So maybe the networking and trade show weren’t high on the priority list to begin with. Then why get started in what you don’t intend to finish?

Here’s what successful people do.

They realize they have limited time and money. They cherry-pick the events that they will participate in to make sure the events are targeted at their ideal client or the resource they seek.

They plan the whole process, from registration to attendance to follow up and allocate time in their schedule for pre-attendance research and planning, attendance, post-attendance follow up.

They have a follow up process such as: When I go to an event, I write on the contact’s business card, the date and event name, a detail from the conversation that will help me remember him. I also rank the contact a 1-super contact (follow up immediately), 2- ok contact (follow up after the #1’s), 3-add to my mailing list but don’t need to meet with again. The next day I write a thank-you email to the #1’s and #2’s that requests a coffee date, add all #1,2,3’s to my mailing list, invite all to connect on Linked In.  Or if I have a virtual assistant, I scan the cards, email the scans to her and delegate any of these duties. Perhaps I use Outlook or a CRM (customer relationship management) software and I want to put the contacts into that for my follow-up process. Or perhaps I have an automated email marketing campaign of 4-5 educational emails I send to new contacts, which then asks each person to join my company’s mailing list (permission based marketing). There are lots of combinations of steps that could match what suits you and your industry.

They allocate time. Every time they are planning to go to an event, they allocate an appropriate amount of time after the event to do the follow up activities. That way they get done.

They look at each new contact as an opportunity, especially those #1’s. It’s a mindset that establishes value, value of the contact and value of themselves. The successful networker puts a lot of value on her own time and resources. She considers her time and money too precious to waste. So she goes to fewer events and capitalizes and leverages each one in a bigger way.

Successful sales people track over time which events yield results and she attends that one more often. Do you have a spreadsheet that lists all the events you’ve attended? Do you track how many #1 and #2 leads you received, how many appointments were generated from that event, and how many conversions to sales resulted? That’s getting granular about making things happen and utilizing your time for the best results.

Tell us about your networking follow up experiences, good or bad, on the proactive or the receiving end. How does it make you feel if you have a great conversation with someone and then they never reach out afterwards? What do you think about that person and how authentic she is? How do you think you come across if you never reach out afterwards?

By the way, this is a commentluv empowered blog. If you’ve registered your blog with commentluv, when you leave a post, it also invites other visitors to visit your blog and read your last post. Try it out.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here we are at the beginning of August in the home stretch of 2010. I’m sure you started out the year with some goals. Are you on track to achieve them? Perhaps you’re more than 7/12’s of the way to your goals. If socongratulations. Maybe you’ve surpassed your goals. You’re having a great year.

But what if you’re not on track? What are you going to do about it? Now is a good time to stop, reevaluate and do something different. We create our futures. If we sit back and let circumstances have their way, then we are really saying we are victims of the world around us and not co-creators of the world with control and influence. You can turn around the rest of 2010 so the last 5 months is better than the first 7 months. Here’s how. Give yourself a couple of hours. Get out your computer or paper and pen and get to work, and if you want to work comfortably getting the right chair to work is essential and you can find it at sites like https://technomono.com/best-computer-chair-for-long-hours.

1. Take the bull by the horns and commit to it. Don’t just say ‘I’ll try’. Actually say ‘I will’. This is a mindset game. When you commit to it, you will. Ask yourself, ‘if not now, when?’ Next year, the year after? Why not now? Why would you want to tread water for another year? It’s amazing how things start to happen when you demonstrate your commitment by taking action.
2. Decide what goal you will achieve by 12/31/2010. Is it a revenue or profitability goal? A number of new clients? A specific task? A statement to the marketplace like a book? Is it the same goal(s) that you had for the first 7 months? Maybe the goal isn’t working and you need a new goal.
3. List all the rewards you would obtain if you were to achieve your selected goal. Yes, you’ll have more income, for instance. But what will that additional income mean to you? What will you do with it? What will it mean to others like your family? Maybe it’s not income, maybe its recognition or health or love. Drill down. Keep asking yourself, ‘and so?’ until you’ve gotten to the point that it really motivates you. Make yourself see the rewards as so powerful that you’d be stupid not to go for it. If it’s not that important, maybe you need to change the goal or change the business. How can you be committed to achieving a goal with all your heart, mind and strength if you don’t want it badly enough?
4. List all the consequences that would happen if you don’t achieve the goal. What are the bad things that would happen if you fail? What will happen to your family? Keep asking ‘and so?’ until you have motivated yourself to realize the ‘do or die’ importance of achieving this goal. Most people are more moved to avoid pain rather than to realize rewards.
5. Start journaling. Write an extensive story about yourself and your business next January. Envision the details of what a day in your life will be like. How will ordinary things happen after this goal is achieved? Write pages and pages of who said what when, how things in your environment looked, smelled, sounded like, felt when you touched them. Put it in the terms of your five senses so it’s real to your brain.  Describe how you feel when business flows, when there’s plenty of clients and cash. Or whatever the rewards are that you detailed in #3 above. If you write these things down, whether or not they actually come true, you are setting up a comfort zone in your neo-cortex, an expectation that this is normal. Before you can move there, you have to feel you belong there and deserve to be there and it’s easy for you to function there. The more you write, the more you’re convincing your brain that this is normal and comfortable. Imagine all kinds of scenarios of success. Aim higher but not unrealistically high. Of course, that depends on how big your comfort zone is already. I can’t stress enough how important a step this is. And you might catch yourself letting bits of your expanded detailed vision slip into your conversations with peers, or family members or employees. This is the best sign that you’re accepting, feeling comfortable at a new level, internalizing the inevitability of success. It truly is a mind game. Don’t let your journaling end. Keep adding to it and expanding your comfort zone. It will be amazing after a year to go back and see that you’ve accomplished the very things you led yourself to expect.
6. After you’ve given yourself at least five pages of visioning, then it’s time to start brainstorming. How are you going to get that goal done and move into that level of success? Think of as many solutions as possible, silly methods, outlandish methods, far fetched methods, concrete methods, ways that require resources that you don’t see yourself having. This gets your mind thinking creatively and sets the bar higher for a set of solutions created from a new mindset. Write down at least 20 different ways to accomplish that goal, the sillier the better.
7. Take a break from brainstorming to analyze your obstacles. Come up with 4-10 obstacles that you perceive get in you and your business’s way of achieving your goal. If it was easy, you would have accomplished it already, so take a minute to list and describe the relevant obstacles. Make sure you include your own limited thinking and blind spots.
8. Go back to brainstorming. But now make your brainstorming focused on each obstacle. Let yourself get super creative. Not everything has to be practical. Thinking silly stuff can lead to other things which might be very doable, but never dawned on you before. Get some other people involved in doing this brainstorming. You egg each other on to be more and more creative and focused. You bring different skills and awareness of various solutions.
9. Now look over all the written brainstorming ideas you came up with. Hopefully there’s 40-100 there. Choose the ones that will be the best to implement. Create an action plan to get each step done along a time line with individual people taking responsibility for each step. Then hold your employees or yourself accountable. It will be easy to slip backwards into old habits. That’s why you need to continually reread your extensive list of rewards and consequences. That’s why you’ll need to constantly add to the fabulous future you envision and describe in your journal.

If you and others in your company really engage in this process, you can lead yourself and your business out of the mediocre and into expanded capability and success. If you start now, the last 5 months of 2010 can have real possibilities of turning around and exceeding your goals. If you wait too long, you’ll have less and less chance to make 2010 the year that you want it to be. Your choice, do the 9 steps above or tread water.

Will you give it a try?

Share your story of a mindset expanding experience that’s been helpful to you.

By the way, this is a commentluv empowered blog. If you’ve registered your blog with commentluv, when you leave a post, it also invites other visitors to visit your blog and read your last post. Try it out.

In our businesses we can go two steps forward and then two more steps forward. But some of us go two steps forward and one step back. And repeat. Why is that? Some of us are naturally more cautious. Perhaps we fear failure or maybe success. More likelyhowever, is that we haven’t organized our time and efforts into systems that prevent problems. So fires continuously arise and we have to put them out. We run our businesses by reactively extinguishing problems rather than proactively preventing problems. Solution: Prioritize how we spend our time to address what is important before it becomes urgent. Remove low priority items that get in the way of high priority ones.

We address this in our highly acclaimed coaching program called Magnified Marketing Multiplies My Money!  We apply time management skills to the practice of marketing so you have no more excuses. Click here to read more about it.

Below is a funny comparison that illustrates just how difficult you could make something for yourself.

Please leave a comment about what you’ve observed in yourself or others about the easy and difficult ways to get something done.

 

Oil Change Done the Easy Way:

• Pull up to Jiffy Lube when the mileage reaches 3000 miles since the last oil change.
• Drink a cup of coffee.
• 15 minutes later, write a check and leave, driving a properly maintained vehicle.

Money spent:
Oil Change: $30.00
Coffee: $1.00
Total: $31.00

Oil Change Done the Difficult Way

• Wait until Saturday, drive to auto parts store and buy a case of oil, filter, kitty litter, hand cleaner and a scented tree, use your debit card for $50.00.
• Stop by general store and buy a case of beer, (debit $20), drive home.
• Open a beer and drink it.
• Jack car up. Spend 30 minutes looking for jack stands.
• Find jack stands under kid's pedal car.
• In frustration, open another beer and drink it.
• Place drain pan under engine.
• Look for 9/16 box end wrench.
• Give up and use crescent wrench.
• Unscrew drain plug.
• Drop drain plug in pan of hot oil: splash hot oil on you in process.
• Crawl out from under car to wipe hot oil off of face and arms. Throw kitty litter on spilled oil.
• Have another beer while watching oil drain.
• Install new oil filter making sure to apply a thin coat of oil to gasket surface.
• Dump first quart of fresh oil into engine.
• Remember drain plug from step 11..
• Hurry to find drain plug in drain pan.
• Drink beer.
• Discover that first quart of fresh oil is now on the floor. Throw kitty litter on oil spill.
• Get drain plug back in with only a minor spill. Drink beer.
• Dump in five fresh quarts of oil.
• Beer.
• Lower car from jack stands.
• Move car back to apply more kitty litter to fresh oil spilled.
• Beer.
• Test drive car.
• Get pulled over: arrested for driving under the influence.
• Car gets impounded.
• Call loving wife, make bail.
• 12 hours later, get car from impound yard.

Money spent:
Parts: $50.00
DUI: $2500.00
Impound fee: $75.00
Bail: $1500.00
Beer: $20.00
Total: $4,145.00

Happy Independence Day! When I meet a coaching prospectwe talk about their goals. We keep talking until we get to the core. We peel back the superficial layers, like peeling away the layers of an onion. Eventually we get to the inner issues. What are they? People want freedom, financial freedom, freedom from stress about money, health, tension, boredom, pressure. They want options and the wisdom to choose and use the options wisely.

Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. We learned that in American history. If you want an American revolution, if you want to have freedom from taxes on your tea, you then have to run the country yourself. If you want choices, then you have to take responsibility for the choices you make. If you want to learn how to invest, then visit this website. If you take the responsibility, then you deserve the freedom. Hence no ‘taxation without representation’. Our Independence Day holiday is a reminder of all that we hold dear nationally, our individual freedoms that we fight wars to maintain. But what about some other freedoms? We get caught in habits, auto pilot types of reactions to situations, somebody pushing our buttons, entrapments of our own self-limitations of how little value we think we can  accomplish in the world, ideas about how much or how little we deserve, chips on our shoulders that cause us to think small or play the victim. What about these examples of loss of freedom? They happen in both our professional and personal lives.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• If you are way too heavy, are you giving yourself the freedom to live a longer, higher quality, energy rich, healthy life?
• If you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, are you giving yourself the freedom to be happy, engaged, productive and developing your true potential?If you have conflicts with a loved one, are you giving yourself the freedom to live a harmonious life surrounded by love rather than conflict?
• If you have undeveloped talents and passions that you’re afraid to uncover, are you giving yourself the freedom to live the adventure of true authenticity and ease?

My mother always said, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ ‘If you can’t find a door, open a window’. The way to independence may not be easy,(i.e. American Revolution) but if you’re committed to true independence, you will find a way to make it happen, people who can help, passion to motivate yourself and others. That’s the responsibility part. That’s when you’re truly independent and not marching to someone else’s drum. Will you abdicate your freedom or take responsibility to create the life of freedom that you deserve? Please leave your comments about personal freedom and independence as we celebrate our national independence day. Thanks. Enjoy!

Have you ever watch somebody dancing on the stage or on TV? If it's done wellthe movements flow easily into each other. Each movement is performed with maximum energy, maximum stretch, maximum power, maximum concentration. Each segment leads to another which builds on the one before. There's economy of movement meaning that there are no stray movements that distract or waste energy or don't contribute to the value presented to the viewer.  There's a planned use of all the space on the stage or within the viewing angle of the camera. If there are multiple dancers, they don't run into each other or trip over each other. They sometimes move as a unit, and when they don't, they complement each other. The purpose of the dance is to present a theme, picture or story, to communicate to the audience an experience portrayed through dance. Often the movements are done in conjunction with music.

Is all this random? Hardly.

Behind all this movement is a choreographer who has created a concept, orchestrated the players, selected the music, laid out each performer's path through the space, coordinated their efforts, demonstrated the power and intensity and shape of each of the movements to convey the theme, determined the rhythm and timing to maximize the audience's perception and enjoyment, selected the right performers for the right roles, determined the deadlines so that the performance would be ready for opening night.

Here are 10 business planning parallels between the world of dance and the world of business?

1. A business without a plan is like a dance without a choreographer. Movements are haphazard. The purpose is fuzzy. It's a mish mash of what everybody (every body) thinks might work, but it most likely doesn't work together.

2. Employees like dancers create more value (a better dance) when they work together toward a common purpose or theme.

3. When everybody knows the path (direction) and what they are supposed to do, they can dance (execute company goals) more freely with greater concentration, conviction, energy, strength and stretch (of their comfort zones). It's very freeing to have indecision removed and know precisely what will lead us to complete our purpose.

4. Better use of resources and less waste. When the choreographer (like the business leader) determines a progression toward a destination, resources such as space on a stage or dollars in a budget can be better leveraged for highest and best use.

5. When a dance is well choreographed, or a business is well planned, it is highly sustainable. Just like legendary ballets such as 'Swan Lake', well planned businesses such as Southwest Airlines have long standing reputations and legacies for their ability to delight the audience.

6. The performers often help the choreographer plan the dance. The choreographer has an idea (sometimes the performers, also) and she tries it out with the dancers. The performers help her to know if it works, if it fits, if what's in her mind plays out well in reality. Isn't this true in your organization? If an idea really doesn't work, there is push back and the plan is modified or better communicated. The performers (employees) create reality checks for the business owner (choreographer).

7. When the performers (employees) buy into the choreography (business plan) because they perceive it works, and when it furthers their own personal and professional goals, they will support it and execute it with engagement and commitment. They will become better dancers and better employees because they want to, not because you want them to.

8. Great choreographers (and great business leaders) attract great dancers (and great employees.) Everyone wants to work for the best because they want to maximize their potential and be part of something wonderful and significant. Well planned businesses don't have trouble recruiting or retaining top talent.

9. Choreographers know the talent they need for each role and select dancers for their strengths. Business leaders do the same.

10, Great leaders (and choreographers) mobilize and motivate, set deadlines, handle obstacles and help the employees (performers) accomplish the strategic business plan (dance performance).

Whether on the dance stage or the theater of business, a famous line from Yogi Bera puts it into perspective, "If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."

Do you have a big hairy audacious goal (BHAG)? This is a term coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last and discussed again in Jim's book Good to Great. For a company a BHAG is its reason for being, what it does best in the world, gets passionate about and drives its economic engine. For a person it's a life purpose that supersedes and directs one's everyday actions. Inside every company there are many individuals all with their personal BHAG's. It's management's job to help and inspire employees to dovetail their personal BHAG's with the company BHAG. When this happens, there is very little employee turnover and a great deal of productivity.

In my work I ask people to define their Purpose in Life or BHAG. They mostly all have trouble with this question. In our time together my clients are going to accomplish many goals. Without a direction goal achievement is rather unfulfilling. It's just busy work. Our culture is so activity based that we often 'do', but we don't know why. People often answer that they want to become a better salesperson or a better CEO because they want their sales or business to grow. Then I play the 5 year old who continually asks 'why?' to dig deeper. To have more money. To have a sense of accomplishment and status. Why? Many answers revolve around financial stability for themselves or family. Some say 'to pursue excellence'. Occasionally I hear to 'to help clients and staff be the best they can be.'

Being clear with yourself about your own BHAG is important. It leads to focused and motivated behavior. Envisioning your purpose helps you excel and achieve. Robert Cooper in the book, Get Out of Your Own Way, talks about research done on the forebrain which lies just beneath your temples. Stimulating this part of the brain with BHAG visions mobilizes your inner resources to realign and energize your current actions to achieve the future you envision. Strengthening this brain activity is like strengthening a muscle. Focusing on your BHAG vision, repeatedly sets you in motion because of the reactions of other parts of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. There's a lot more to this analysis than I can go into here. So check out his book. Here are two more inspirational ways to look at the power of a BHAG.

"When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations. Your consciousness expands in every direction. And you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be."     -- Patanjali

 

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? ... And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -- Marianne Williamson