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Why these next 4 weeks are crucial to making 2021 a business success!

If you take into account that the business community doesn’t ‘normally’ kick into gear  until the 2^nd to 3^rd week of January each year, I think it’s fair to say that this on top of everything that’s happened in 2020, most people in the SME world are going to have a very bumpy start to the 2021.

Which is why it’s absolutely crucial that we create as much momentum as possible during these next 4 weeks by which I mean being absolutely strategic about what we spend our time ‘doing’ from now until the end of the business year.

“So what’s the plan”?

From a personal standpoint I normally begin working on the new year’s business goals in early November, the reason being that once I’ve calibrated what has and hasn’t worked from this year and then gone on to create income and sales goals for the next 12 months’, I generally have a strong idea about just how many people I need to attract and engage with in order to make next year’s goals become a reality.

By knowing exactly how many clients I need to purchase each of my core revenue streams (before the the year end), I can then systematically review my data base of clients and connections to begin compiling a list of people to call ‘NOW’ before the end of the year, the mission being to connect and lay the foundations for doing business next year.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in business these last 4 decades it’s that all success is reverse engineered i.e. begin with the destination so clear in your mind that you can viscerally see it, feel it, taste it and use that visceral vision as your driver to make that goal a reality.

The reason so many people struggle is not because they aren’t really knowledgeable of their subject or stunningly good at what they do, it’s because they simply don’t know how to make their dreams a reality!

I’ve learned that ‘HOW’ is a stationary word, a paralysing word, it drives people crazy because they end up in a constant brain loop, replaying the same scenarios over and over in their mind (sound familiar?)

In reality there are only two ways to solve this conundrum once and for all, either

1. Get a mentor to show you the way or
2. Replace the word ‘how’ with the ‘WHAT’

In regards to getting a mentor the bazaar truth is that most people won’t invest in on one because they see it as a cost instead of an investment in their personal business development which is a shame because they simply shortcut the journey to success; most would much rather work it out for themselves which of course is why such a massive percentage of businesses fail, but that’s another story for a different day.

So let us work out plan B and the difference between the words how and what when it comes to working out a plan.

The word “WHAT’ is a motion word in the English language and one that when starting a sentence always leads to a constructive set of options.. as an example, consider the following 2 questions

1. How do I going to get more customers? (questioning tonality)
2. What have I got to do, to get more customers? (motion tonality)

Notice that the latter causes the mind to go into construct mode.

By having a strong visceral vision of what it is that you want to achieve in the year ahead and asking yourself a quality question i.e. what will I ‘do’ first on my journey to achieving that goal, you will consciously begin putting together a plan of ‘action’ that will transport you to that goal.

So let’s return back to the subject of the next 4 weeks and why it’s so crucial to the success of the year ahead.

I think it’s fair to say that if you’ve worked out how much you want to personally earn in the next 12 months, and knowing what your 3 top signature offerings are, and the average sale value of each, it becomes fairly easy to work out how many customers you’ll need in total.

Once you know this, it’s a case of dividing down those numbers in to 4 quarters and then into your monthly sales targets for each key offering.

With this all written down, you now know how many customers you’ll need for the period of January through to March.

We can now begin tactically segmenting our data base of connections to create a list of people to start ‘talking’ to right now and over these next 4 weeks so as to line up customers for the first quarter of 2021.

While it’s true that most of the people you will call will possibly be in dormant mode, especially given that we are a week away from coming out of lockdown and 4 weeks away from the festive break; by picking up the telephone now you will have ‘begun’ the rapport and qualification process to potentially serve those connections in the new year while all of your competitors are remain in dormant mode until new year.

By doing this now, you will be a whole month ahead going into a brand new year!

As the old saying goes, ‘the early bird catches the worm’…

All the best

John F K

25 way to get more customers

John Kettley

John F Kettley is the founder of the Sales Masters Guild

 

A serial entrepreneur from his teenage years, John and his companies have sold a vast range of products and services across just about every market sector and medium there is, both here in Europe and the USA.

 

Find out more about John on his Sales Masters Guild profile page

 

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