In the last post I talked about the risks of trying to launch or fiddle with multiple marketing strategies at the same time. I personally believe this is an essential lesson to embrace, so I want to make sure I am communicating this concept well.

If my stalled car analogy left you scratching your head, please call, e-mail or click on chat below. I sincerely want to help you understand the benefits of putting your energy behind one thing at a time – this lesson alone has the potential to transform your business.

I feel so strongly about this that I am devoting a second post to the same idea.  So (assuming that the whole stalled car idea made sense), let’s take a closer look at the downside of jumping from one project to another – The Calendar Effect.

Let’s say you have just 3 different projects (marketing strategies in our case) that you could work on, poke at, fiddle with, whatever your favorite term.  Your tasks may include things like:

• doing research to purchase a list or find alliance partners you could work with
• writing new copy to describe your product or service
• working with someone to help put together a flyer
• preparing a series of communications that will be used in e-mail or social media

And of course, you have to plan time to follow up with your initial leads from this new strategy, make adjustments to the marketing you put in place, measure results…  When you break down what it takes to launch and properly follow up on just one marketing campaign or new strategy, it takes real time and effort.

Moreover, we all know the world doesn’t stop while we put together our marketing. Often a series of tasks that in theory might take a few days of work can truly take weeks to complete.

For simple numbers, let’s say that each of our 3 marketing strategies would take 4 weeks of effort to research, implement, and properly evaluate. If we were to give into temptation and switch from idea to idea each week, rotating from one project to the next, this is what would happen:

We’d be working away for 10 weeks before even one of the strategies was producing good results! 

Have you picked up on the other flaw in this plan?  Think about my prior post (and the reason I say “in theory” on the table above).  Coming back to each project every 3^rd week means we’d be pushing on a stalled car every time – attempting to figure out where we left off, questioning decisions that seemed clear before, trying to coax others (vendors, friends, partners) who were previously helping us to move off of their project-of-the-moment to pay attention to our project-of-the-moment…ugh!

In the real world, the 3 “4-week” projects handled in this momentum-killing, juggler fashion, would take many more weeks to complete.

Now let’s look at how a focus on one project at a time would look on the calendar:

So would you prefer to have momentum work against you while business-getting strategies remained hidden from the light of day for weeks and weeks?  OR would you like to have momentum work for you, with business-getting strategies out in the world working on your behalf as soon as possible?

Do you feel a baseline of doubt – a constant level of anxiety – about your efforts to generate more business?  Do you wonder if you need to change or add to your strategies, but aren’t sure what you should be doing instead?

Perhaps we all experience this fear from time to time.  So what can we do about it?  It can be tempting to just get busy doing “more” by kicking off a completely new campaign or changing a bunch of existing programs – hoping to stumble across something that works.

While we should absolutely use multiple strategies to generate new leads, it is important to recognize that each one is not going to work the way we’d like right out of the gate (sorry to say).  We must be prepared to:

• take focused action to get it off the ground
• adjust our plans as we go
• ultimately automate, delegate or outsource it (so we get the benefit of the leads, without huge personal effort )

Recently I helped a new client uncover that he was not only experimenting with multiple strategies to get new customers, but he was pursuing multiple customer types with differing needs – spreading his efforts way too thin.  In order to explain the pitfalls of this I used an analogy that seemed to help – so I wanted to share it here.

Picture each method for generating leads as a car that is at a standstill.  Getting a car rolling takes a lot of effort in the beginning, right? 

Once you’ve got it moving along things get a little easier, but you can’t totally stop pushing. It requires continued effort to keep making forward progress.

Now imagine that instead of keeping that car rolling along, you leave it alone to go get another car moving.  You’ve got to expend an extra amount of effort once again, because the 2^nd car is at a dead stop.

When it is time to come back to that first car, what’s happened to it?  It’s come to a stop and you need to start all over – with your maximum effort required.  Try to get 4 or 5 cars moving together and you spend nearly all of your time pushing with your maximum effort, to make minimal forward progress.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

How does this relate to marketing?  Again, each strategy for getting more business requires focused action to get off the ground, adjustment to produce positive results, and a process for automating, delegating, or outsourcing it once it’s working well.

Instead of frantically moving from strategy to strategy, with haphazard attempts to transform them into productive methods, it is best to:

• get your team focused on launching or improving just one strategy at a time
• stick with it – monitoring and adjusting – until it starts producing the results you want
• determine how you will measure its effectiveness
• automate what you can and make it someone’s responsibility to keep it going

Now it’s time to ask yourself – am I running around spending a lot of  energy giving insufficient shoves to each marketing strategy, or am I investing the time and attention necessary to create momentum?  Today is an opportunity to pick one and commit to doing what it takes for it to deliver great results.

There’s another nifty effect to focusing on one strategy at a time – a bonus benefit that may be just as valuable as the momentum effect.  I’ll cover that in the next post.

You may have heard this statement before — “luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”  Profound.  These six words offer incredible clarity about a complex question — “how can we create luck in our businesses?” 

Like many, I use this time of the year to reflect on how things have gone over the past year and make new, bigger plans for the coming year.  This exercise can be exhilarating, but it can also be frustrating.  Why is that?  I believe part of the answer is in the fact that…

We can’t control all of the factors that stand
between where we are and where we want to be. 

Herein lies the freedom to be exhilarated by planning, not frustrated by it!

A plan created to simply prepare us and our teams to capture opportunity…to create good luck during the coming year…can be short, provide clarity, and be inspiring.  It can even be profound (like the quote about luck itself). 

A plan that attempts to anticipate every hurdle and script every action can become tedious and typically gets tossed aside as soon as reality takes everyone down a different path.

Your whole marketing and sales plan for 2011 in six words?…maybe not.  But a single page that focuses your energy, inspires your team, and prepares you all to create luck?…absolutely.  Any longer and it gets less useful.

For additional thoughts and a secret link (I had to do some hunting to find it) to example one-page plans that could give you a huge head start, check out this blog post.

The Beauty of a One Page Plan

We’ve all heard the phrase “a level playing field” applied to a variety of situations. Whether one thinks the field is indeed level, or drastically slanted in one direction or another, depends on the person and the issue at hand.

One place where the field is inarguably flat (at least I don’t think I would get any valid arguments) is time.  We all have the same number of hours in a day. Those that use them more wisely will do better than the rest. As my business has grown, my to do list has grown with it. Thankfully, as a student of time management, I have been able to stay one step ahead. As you may have read here before, I am a big fan of David Allen and the philosophy he laid out in “Getting Things Done” (GTD for short).

I recently seemed to outgrow my paper-based implementation of the GTD system.  After wading into a few forums, reading reviews, and experimenting a bit, I came to www.toodledo.com.  Wow!  This free online tool has allowed me to get dozens of activities easily out of my head and into an intuitive system.  It also offers an iPhone application (for just $2.99) that will stay in sync with my online list.  If you have read David’s book, or have become proficient in the GTD methodologies through a seminar or other means, I strongly encourage you to check out Toodledo.com.

My second recommendation is something that has been around for some time.  Now that I am a user, it’s hard to imagine why it hasn’t become more popular. After nursing sore wrists and fingers a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to investigate speech recognition software. A quick search brought me to a name I had heard many years ago — “Dragon.”  At only about $40 on amazon.com, I got the standard version “Dragon Naturally Speaking.”

http://www.amazon.com/Nuance-Communications-Inc-A309A-G01-10-0-NaturallySpeaking/dp/B001B5J7T8/ref=pd_cp_sw_1

Another “wow.”  I wasn’t expecting to shave up to an hour of typing off of my day. Even a fast typist cannot keep up with the spoken word.

If you are fortunate enough to have a private office where you can talk at your computer without annoying others around you, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Now replying to a list of e-mails, writing a new blog post, or creating copy for a client can be super fast, making it easier to concentrate on it as a task, not as a way to make hours vanish from your schedule!

Accountability Partners
Have you shared your plan with anyone else?  There’s nothing more motivating to actually achieve your goals than telling others who will pay attention, and you will have to face on a regular basis.  Tell your spouse, your neighbor, your customers (so long as your goals are consistent with delivering greater value to them!). 

However, many of those people either won’t be interested in, or shouldn’t be subjected to the nitty gritty of your progress.  A great technique to keep you focused and inspired is to form a partnership with one or more similarly motivated leaders.  Call it a mastermind group, an accountability partnership, an “I’ll kick your butt if you kick mine” pact…whatever you like. 

The key!
Here’s the key that only recently came to light for me.  Your team, your partners, are not there to beat you up over missing your goals or falling behind.  Stuff happens to get in your way.  Your group is there to hold you accountable to tracking your own progress and focusing on what YOU said was important.  I am part of a great group of leaders that meet twice per month.  We hold each other accountable for attending our meetings, share are successes and setbacks, and help one another stay focused and productive. 

So your accountability team is not there to ridicule you for falling down; they’re there to remind you to get back up.  The fact that you have associated them with how much you will pay attention to your commitments is what makes it work. 

Want to do a better job “working your plan?”  Find a couple of like-minded, success-oriented friends or colleagues and commit to sharing your goals, developing a list of daily/weekly actions that will get your closer to your goals, and report to one another regularly.

You can’t tack a 3″ binder to the company bulletin board, or review it with your team in your monthly meetings.  That would be about as feasible as lugging your desktop computer on to BART just so you could keep an eye on email during your 45 minute commute.  You wouldn’t do that — that’s what PDAs are for. 

Having a concise way to articulate your business vision, mission, goals and plans brings your strategy into the everyday work life of you and your team.  How cool is that?  What good is documenting your strategy and translating it into plans if it only gets looked at once a year?

I have become a huge fan of the One Page Business Plan.  While I am not affiliated with the organziation, there are good examples to work from on their web site [Sample Plans].

It may sound backwards, but I submit that it is relatively EASY to pick something — a topic — and “discover” something unique by drilling down into incredible detail.  Decide to study some particular kind of insect and spend all of your life on that subject, and I would guess you have a good chance of finding SOMETHING no one else has found.  A unique species, recognition of a certain thing existing species do, catching some never-before-seen event on tape, SOMETHING.

I am not belittling people who operate in the realm of details by any means.  But I submit that it is HARDER to find or create something unique, powerful, and useful on a BROAD scale.  The idea below is one that I don’t think I can take full credit for, so I will err on the side of precaution (and not tout it to the world as “mine”).  I am not sure where the idea came from, but I would bet it is the amalgamation of tips I’ve read and a little of my own secret sauce.

A Simple, Yet Powerful, Way to Stay “On Track”
One of the ways I help my clients be more successful is to act as an “accountability partner.”  It is not just a matter of being a nag…that’s no fun for anyone.  It is a function of helping my clients devote more time and attention on the actions that will move them toward their business goals, and less time and attention on the other stuff.  Here is a tip for doing just that:

1. On a monthly basis, remind yourself of what the “end game” of any of your big projects is.  What will being “done” look like?  You may find that you’ve begun working on stuff that is nowhere in the final picture, so is a waste of time.  I call this the “where are we going?” question.
2. After you refresh your memory about the end game, ask yourself another question — why are we shooting for this goal?  Will it help you provide better service to your existing clients? reach a new market segment with your message? improve employee morale?  Why are you spending time, money and energy on this project?
3. With refreshed clarity on the goal and the purpose it will serve you, your clients, or employees, it’s time to look at your actions.  What do you need to do now to take the next step toward the end goal?  In the words of one of my favorite authors, David Allen, “what is the next action?”

Simple stuff I realize, but regular application of such simple techniques will take you and your business to places you never thought possible.  Where are we going, why are we shooting for this goal, and what is the next action.

Creating a Vision is Simple. The tough part is setting aside the time to do it. Save yourself some anxiety — don’t overthink it. It is o.k. to alter your vision over time. The important thing is to have one, and to keep it around and visible in your daily activities. Be sure to write the statement in the present tense. If you write that your business “…will be…” then that will forever be the case. You will always be reaching toward that vision, instead of actually arriving. Here is a hypothetical example:

“XYZ Plumbing is the recognized leader in residential plumbing services in the Tri-State area through an unparalleled on-time record, quality practices that ensure problems are ALWAYS fixed on the first visit, and a commitment to employee development that makes XYZ the most desirable place to work in the industry.”

Try writing several statements for a couple different points in time — 1 year, 3 years, 5 years from now, etc. If you are struggling, that’s good! That means you haven’t thought about this yet, and the exercise will provide you with dramatic benefits!

Here are some questions to ask yourself that may get you un-blocked:

Imagine you are one of your customers X years from now. Describe your experience in doing business with you (in your customer’s words).
Imagine you are one of your employees X years from now. Describe your experience in working for you (in your employee’s words).
Now imagine a spouse, significant other, or anyone else who is close to you. Describe his or her perspective on you and your business X years from now.

Next week I’ll describe how to “Maximize the Current” — get the most out of your existing customer base.

Any problem or challenge is SO much easier to deal with when you break it down into smaller pieces.  This approach works well at any level:

• got a goal you want to reach in 5 years? set some incremental targets for each year along the way
• need to develop a presentation for an hour long talk within the next week? step 1, create an outline; step 2, assign time estimates to each section; step 3, pick a single section and create a more detailed outline…

You get the idea.  Whether it’s as simple as deciding how you’re going to get your work done AND run the errands that have been hanging over your head or as complex as creating a financial plan for your future, you will benefit by breaking your challenge down into smaller steps first.

So back to the question — How do I grow my business?  What do you think our first step is?  You guessed it, we break it down into smaller pieces.  Remarkably, it comes down to just four steps:

1. Establish a Vision:  you wouldn’t leave your house or office to attend a meeting if you didn’t first know where it will be — your destination.  To have a vision for your business is to have a destination.  How can you set a course for your company if you don’t know where you’d like to take it?
2. Maximize the Current:  Marketing books tell you that step 1 is to set your strategy (identify a need, define your target, determine your product or service, etc.), but if you are already in business, this would NOT be step 1!  Maximize the profits from existing clients and new customers to get an immediate lift in your business.
3. Set the Strategy:  once you’ve increased the profit you get from existing relationships, learned more about your customers, and improved their level of satisfaction in the process, you’re in a better position to create an effective growth plan.
4. Generate and Convert:  with marketing systems in place that maximize the profits you generate from each new customer, it’s NOW time to improve how effective you and your team are at converting new prospects into customers and put multiple lead generation strategies to work.

So what do you do from here?  Well, take step 1 and break it down into smaller pieces of course!  Therefore, I will spend the next 4 weeks detailing each of the 4 steps.  Come back, check it out, and make small changes NOW that will lead to HUGE LEAPS in your business!

It was especially fun given that I was able to meet up with a friend and colleague who I have (until now) only known as a voice on the other end of our monthly teleconferences.   Skip Weisman was one of the keynote speakers and is a member of my network of business development consultants and coaches.  We all share similar philosophies and use monthly calls to share ideas and support one another.

A few take-aways from Skip and the other top-shelf speakers at the event:

Goals
In order to determine your best action NOW, you have to know what goal you are striving for (sounds a lot like my April 28th post — it’s good to know I’m not alone in calling out this priority).

Commitment
Getting “there” takes sacrifice and commitment.  Some great imagery of this came from Paul Kingsman’s talk.  As an olympic medalist in the 200M backstroke, he knows a lot about commitment to a vision.  Imagine having your moment of truth (whatever that is in your business: closing the deal, delivering the product, solving the problem) closely watched by 12,000 screaming fans…all while you go about your craft wearing a Speedo bathing suit!  You can learn more about Paul at his web site.

Action
Getting from where you are now to where you want to be won’t happen by itself.  In Paul’s case it took a lot of sweat and toil — that just can’t be avoided in pursuit of the goal that he set for himself.  For most of us, however, the actions that achieving our goals will require are less about sweat and more about focus.

Of course, the devil is in the details.  There are many great systems and methodologies for helping you reach your goals.  You will notice that they all boil down to a 3-step process. 

1. Set the vision of what you intend to accomplish and keep that vision present in your daily routine so you don’t lose sight.
2. Commit yourself to accomplishing that vision, no matter what it takes.  Obstacles become just tests of your resolve and creativity, incapable of altering the end result you seek.
3. Organize and prioritize your actions, taking care to truly focus on the ones that will get you closer to your vision (not the ones that constantly crop up and are really priorities for other people).

Want a system to help you set goals and organize your actions?  Check out Skip’s End Procrastination NOW program.  He has put together a great system.  Also, you’ll want to check out and bookmark his blog www.ChampionOrganizations.com – a great resource.