If you are like most business owners, you are striving to do things better this year. You want to make more money, you want more bottom line profits and I can also probably guess you want all this and more without having to work longer hours, with less overwhelm and zero headaches.
So how do you build a more efficient and consistent business? Well, the answer to that question is quite simple. It’s about doing the right things in the right order and taking consistent daily action.
Here are FOUR areas you can focus on quite effortlessly to ensure you build more momentum over the next 12 months.
1. Create your outcomes
Now I’m sure you are all familiar with the tradition of goals setting. We follow the smart criteria we learnt in our management and business training and then we hope that when we review those goals we have achieved them.
If you want my honest opinion, for the majority, goal setting just doesn’t work. It’s a bold statement but true.
Your focus should be on achieving your goals not just setting them, so that’s when I changed the acronym SMART to SMARTA to include that all important element – ACTION.
Unless you take the required action, your goals will simply remain your wishes and desires. So how do you CREATE your outcomes so you can move closer to where you want to be? As Peter Druker once said, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
The first step is to decide what you want. It may sound simple but most don’t even get this far. I believe success starts with a decision. Regardless of whether you have small or big goals you must decide what you want.
How you write down what you want is very important. This is the first step of writing down your goals, so make sure your outcomes meet the CREATE criteria, which follows:
C – Clear and concise: in other words be specific about what you want to achieve.
R – Realistic: remember, we don’t get what we want, we get what we expect. So set your outcomes in alignment to what you expect you can achieve. Once you start achieving your goals, stretch your expectations and yourself.
E – Ecological: running an ecology check on your goals is always a good idea. This simply means looking at the consequences of attaining that goal. You may ask yourself, ‘Is this outcome good for me and good for others?’
A – As If Now: it is vitally important you write your goals in the present tense. This is because once the mind has fully imagined something, it makes it far easier to accomplish. So your goal must be written in the present-tense language, as if you are achieving the last step right now in this moment.
T – Timed and Toward What You want: even though you are going to write down your goals in the present tense, you must put a future date or time to your goal to indicate when you wish to achieve this outcome. The T also stands for toward what you want; this
just means it’s important to express your goal positively rather than including negative language about what you don’t want.
E- End Step (Evidence Procedure): always include the final step that lets you know you have actually achieved your goal. This is the event, situation or result that would occur in order for you to have attained your outcome.
2. Take consistent daily action and improvement
They say success is in the follow through and therefore Action is an essential element to success. So how do we maintain that action on a daily basis and focus only on the high income and high impact activities that will help us move to achieving higher levels of success.?
The average person over-estimates what he or she can do in a day, a week or a month, and they under-estimate what they can do in a year, five years and a decade.
Most of us associate action to taking big leaps and bounds, which is not always possible to maintain every day. So to get started with building more consistency in your efforts, try focusing on achieving consistent daily improvement. We all think we have to improve by 20 per cent or 50 per cent or 100 per cent in one leap.
Why not make the decision to commit to improving your business, your sales, how you interact with your customers, your staff, etc – in fact everything you do, by only one per cent – but do this every day.
At the end of every year you will be at least 365 per cent improved in many areas of your business and your life. Think about how much closer you will be to achieving your goals and outcomes if you are achieving those kind of results consistently.
3. Develop a prospect mindset and keep it for life
When you develop a ‘prospect mindset’, you’ll begin to understand what your customers want… specifically.
You’ll understand how to clearly identify the problems, frustrations and concerns they typically experience when they buy what you sell. These frustrations, concerns, problems and fears are what we call HOT BUTTONS.
If you can discover what your ideal customer wants, and then provide them with solutions to their wants, they will buy from you each and every time.
Once you completely understand how and why human beings make decisions, you can then begin to create persuasive and compelling marketing messages that are so powerful they practically force your prospects to buy what you sell.
4. Become an automatic smart networker
Though it may be hard to grasp, networking is much easier than you think. Forget the myth that you need to be an extrovert to network well. You don’t. Or that you must network nonstop.
Absolutely not. Or that networking is all about working the room at a big event with a big fake grin plastered on your face. Far from it.
You might be waiting for a bolt of confidence to strike before you get up enough courage to put yourself out there, but confidence doesn’t magically appear.
Instead, confidence comes partly through knowledge, being able to see what the process looks like, trusting yourself and taking a deep breath and plunging right in.
It also comes from knowing what to say to people when asked…’What do you do?’
A quick way of telling people what you do includes the following:
AVOID TELLING PEOPLE WHO YOU ARE
• I’m an accountant.
• I’m a plumber.
• I’m a florist.
• I’m a business coach.
TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU DO AND SHOW THEM YOUR SOLUTIONS MATCH THEIR WANTS!
• I help people become financially successful.
• I help people with all their plumbing needs.
• I bring joy and happiness to people’s day.
• I help business owners get more from their business.
Once you have the experience of communicating this well and find that networking is not so daunting after all, you will wonder why you ever waited so long to get started
Remember, you must network the smart way – which will include both face-to-face networking and online social media. Not enough people view social media as a form of networking, but it’s a must if you want to leverage your opportunities through your connections.
SMART NETWORKING DOES THE FOLLOWING:
• It is driven by purpose. It starts by defining your goals. These goals should then determine whom we ought to have in our network, which in turn, should help us decide where best to meet them. This means you are just not wasting time at the wrong events or in following up when it’s not the right fit.
• It adds value and removes pressure as it places a deliberate focus on the needs and feelings of other people first.
• It leverages tools that multiply our productivity. Rather than meeting people and interacting with them one-to-one, smart networking takes advantage of online tools and services that help us reach people on a one-to-many basis.
TIME TO TAKE ACTION
Remember success is in the Follow Through – so take some time right now to:
• Decide what you want and create your outcomes for the year.
• Commit to consistent daily improvement.
• Match your solutions to your customers wants.
• Become an automatic smart networker.
Tania Allen is the founder of Vision Alliance, a business growth and franchise consulting firm and author of Franchise Profits.
Tania is passionate about helping both franchisors and franchisees maximise their potential.
Contact Tania at:
Phone: 1300 76 49 20
0419 481 203
Email: tania@vision-alliance.com
Web: www.vision-alliance.com