Total Commitment or Not....

As a business and marketing coach, it’s rare to find total commitment. However, every so often, a diamond-in-the-rough appears. Someone through their own total commitment, hard work, and perseverance creates lasting, long-term success. Here’s such a story. Before I share, it’s important to outline, from a coach’s perspective, the preliminary steps it takes to get one on the right path priming them for success.

Without having a complete understanding of the persons: background, desired goals, challenges, etc, you’ll never be able to determine if the person has the personal bandwidth to accomplish their stated goals. As you read this, I encourage you to make notes, write them down, and be totally introspective. You may find it’s also time for you to seek assistance.

What’s Going On?
I want to understand the total person and what’s going on in both your business and personal life. I find there are so many personal distractions that can potentially get in the way of creating ultimate success, and, while I never approach a situation clinically, (I’m not a therapist in any way and have never made that claim) I do feel it’s imperative to have a total understanding. A person may be a caretaker, dealing with an ailing parent, spouse or child. They may be going through a divorce, have an unsupportive spouse, or personal medical and emotional issues beyond their immediate control or a combination of the things listed above. That’s pressure! By understanding what type of toll that plays on an individual and how much time consumption that takes away from one’s day, are critical factors in determining how much more you can heap on someone before they just give up. It’s best to help the person achieve small wins. Wins that keep them in the game, rather than piling on so much where it overburdens them to the point of quitting.

Remember, there are only twenty-four hours in every day, activities must be dealt out correctly to prevent burn-out, here’s an example:

In a scenario like this, this person’s day is completely full, and with only seven hours of time for work, their bandwidth is limited. During these 7 hours, you must market, sell, follow-up, invoice, run interference, deal with factories, handle disputes, and smile. Just typing this I feel overwhelmed! If a person were to come to me and say, I’m doing 100K a year in sales and I want to triple it, they would be totally setting themselves up for failure – we would need to rethink their entire strategy and create a manageable plan.

What’s the Plan?
Creating the right plan to achieve the specific goals can only be done, in my opinion, after we know what they can handle. I may suggest alternative’s on how they have things structured. It may require for the first six months devoting additional hours on a Saturday and/or a Sunday. For me, this would be the last result, but maybe the sacrifice needed to achieve ultimate success. In the best-case scenario, weekends should be devoted to personal time for family and friends.

Once we understand how many hours will be devoted to business activities, we breakdown their client list. Segmentation and classification are done on each client. I have an amazing report created by our stellar IT team which maps, tracks year over year performance of four consecutive years, and spits out an amazing financial health report card on the person’s business.

The segmentation process determines the vertical market (i.e. automotive, hospitality, health & wellness) and categorizes in this manner. Secondly, we assign a classification code A-F and three additional codes: H=Hold, I= Inactive, P=Prospect, we do this for marketing purposes, so we know where and how much of our marketing budget will be allocated to each area of development.

Once we have done this,  we develop a realistic marketing budget and how that budget will be allocated to each of the three channels: Organic, Resuscitation, and Prospecting. This critical and requires a ton of planning.

How Will It Be Executed & Measured?
Execution and measurement work in tandem. Great execution with established metrics continually monitors the effectiveness of one’s efforts. Through extensive planning for the entire year, understanding the steps, and effectively executing these steps, you WILL SEE remarkable results.

What are the measuring metrics? Many feel sales alone are the measuring components, but I contend it’s much more than that. Consider the following: new clients, reviving of old inactive clients and in my estimation, the number one criterion, PROFITS. It’s not enough to just increase sales. By having multiple metrics, you have a multitude of goals to shoot for and build upon.

Results and Outcome
Results, the bottom-line, are what it’s all about. How did you fare throughout the year? What were the results? Where did you fall down? What did you do right? How could you improve? What will make next year a more stellar year?

Reality is you may NOT fully achieve what you set out to do, but if you’re totally committed, the likelihood is you will accomplish what you set out to do. Now, let me share my diamond-in-the-rough story about Mary.

In one of our many coaching sessions, Mary came to me and said, “this year, I’m committed (I hear that all the time) to grow my sales, be more profitable, and be in the top tier group within my organization.” Mary, like many, had a ton of things going on in her life: divorced, mother of two, dealing with ailing parents, and struggling at some level with the day-to-day “stuff” that shows up in our lives. Mary was doing about $230K in sales at a 41% gross profit. She not only wanted to grow, because of her circumstances; she NEEDED to grow.

We sat down and unmasked her business over a one-and-a-half day, intense coaching session, we:

• analyzed her books, evaluating her expenditures,  

• segmented and classified her clients,

• which vertical markets she had the most opportunity for profitable growth

• developed a marketing budget

• allocated that budget over the three core areas

• created projections for

  • percentage of organic growth

  • number of old client reactivations

  • number of new clients in her core vertical markets

• we determined which methods she would use for outreach

  • Email blasts

  • postcards

  • letters

  • direct mail

  • creative marketing

  • tradeshows

  • networking events,

  • sponsorships, etc.

• We evaluated her bandwidth. How much time she could devote to these activities and tasks – she set the bar (remember this toward the end of the article)

• Goals of:

  • 310,000.00 in sales, approximate 40% increase

  • 1% increase in profits, from 41% to 42%

  • 10 new clients

  • 1 revived old client 

We then put the plan in motion, continued to have our weekly calls to keep her on track and she never missed a call.

At the end of 2018, with her executable plan, Mary ended up as follows:

• $520,000.00, a nearly 140% sales,

• 2% increase in profits, 43%, that represents $10,400.00 in additional profits

• 12 new clients

• 1 revived client

Very impressive.

This is not a one-off situation. I have multiple stories I could share of similar growth with folks of varying degrees of issues and skill sets who were very committed and extremely successful.

If you implement this type of strategy and follow through religiously, you will have these same type of results for yourself. This year, following the same strategy, with a few modifications, Mary is up, year over year by 27%! TOTAL COMMITMENT and she owns HER results! She Owned It!

Until next, continued good selling, Hold Nothing Back! - CQ

Cliff is the Director of Marketing for iPROMOTEu, additionally and for over 30 years, Cliff has been speaking, training and consulting internationally to associations and national business groups on more effective ways to market themselves, their products and services, as well as motivating their personnel. Recognized by PPAI for his creativity, he has won the prestigious PPAI Pyramid award 27 times and the Printing Industry's PSDA’s Peak Award for creativity 5 times in three years. He has also received PPAI's Ambassador Speaker of the Year Award six consecutive years and was the inaugural recipient of PPAI's Distinguished Service Award. Named one of top six industry speakers and trainers, he also was recognized by PPAI in the book, "PPAI at 100," as having a significant influence in education. He has also been recognized by Counselor Magazine as one of the Top 50 Most Influential People in the Promotional Products Industry. Cliff’s BLOG 30 Seconds to Greatness won the Award for Most Passed Around Content in 2016. In December, Cliff will be launching his third book, 30 Seconds to Greatness along with a workbook. Connect with him on LinkedIn or via email at cquicksell@ipromoteu.com