Generating Leads

Your aim is to generate leads and opportunities and convert these into increased revenues to your business. This article outlines some of the challenges you may be already facing and highlights some quick simple steps of how you can generate more leads into your business.

In my experience one of the fundamental challenges most business owners face is not being able to generate enough leads into the business. Without a consistent supply of leads into any business, the business is usually faced with poor cash flow and finds it difficult from one month to the next.

You may have already experienced this and you now can be in a position where you have the opportunity to change what’s going on.

If you want to create amazing results in your business, and want to turn your vision into reality, the only way this can happen is if you are fully accountable for your success and are responsible for the actions you take on a daily basis.

Leads are prospects or potential customers.

It’s important though to attract quality leads into the business and not just any lead as this can waste your valuable time and money.

Your marketing efforts will determine the quality of the leads you bring into your business and the challenge businesses face in this area is 80% of all marketing doesn’t meet the expectation of the business owner.

Try not to limit yourself when it comes to advertising and marketing your business.

Traditional marketing methods include local paper advertising and emailing.

Opportunities let outside the square and can include strategies such as, building your referral networks.

Ads and direct mail are only the beginning!

They are important, however they should not be the only source used for generating leads for your business.

Not all lead-generating techniques are created equal either. Some techniques will work well for a certain business, and those same strategies won’t work for another. Much is dependent on your type of business, your location, timing, how well you apply the lead generating strategy, and a host of other variables that tend to make marketing an inexact science. Therefore it’s important to test and measure each strategy to find out what works, and make it work.

So here’s a brief look at what you can do to start bringing more quality leads into your business.

Firstly start thinking WHO, WHERE, WHAT, HOW & WHY when it comes to marketing your product or service.

Who are my ideal clients / market?

Understand who he/ she is and why.

Where are we going to find our clients?

Why will they buy from me? What makes us unique? Remember people shop on value and emotion.

Now you know who you want to target,

Create a Lead Generation Action Plan for the month

  • Listing at least 2 to 6 different lead generating strategies,
  • What steps you need to take to implement the strategy.
  • Who will complete the task/s required  to complete the strategy, and
  • Be sure you also have a Due date for the activity so you stay on track for the month.

Daily Consistent Action will produce results in your business that you need!

Here is an example of a lead generation action plan. (Click the image for a bigger version)

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Increasing Your Personal Effectiveness and Revenues

If you want to grow your business revenues much faster than you are now, it’s important to start focusing on the right activities in your business.

The key in achieving personal effectiveness is to focus the majority of your time on high- impact, revenue-generating activities that are most essential to your business. To increase your overall effectiveness, it’s important to know and understand how to accurately identify where you spend your time.

The 80:20 Rule

I’m sure you have heard of Vilfredo Pareto or at least Pareto’s Law. Pareto came up with an economic principle that said 20% of the people typically own 80 percent of the wealth. Two decades later, management guru Joseph Juran introduced this “80/20 Rule” to the business world, calling it Pareto’s Principle, or Pareto’s Law. Over the years, Pareto’s Principle has been applied to many areas of business, concluding that 20% of our efforts produce 80% of our results, or 20% of your team produces 80% of your results.

For you, this means that to increase revenues it’s important you focus on the right activities in your business and then hire, barter or outsource people to do everything else.

Multiply your business revenues and personal effectiveness many times over using the 80:20 rule.

Suppose your business has 25 different activities, such as sales, marketing, operations, finance, customer service and more. According to the 80:20 rule, 20% of those activities will generate 80% of your revenues. Conversely, 80% of those activities will generate only 20% of your revenues. Doing the math shows that 5 out of the 25 activities will produce four-fifths of all the income your business generates.

Now, assume that your business takes in $50,000 a month. According to the 80:20 rule, 5 of your 25 activities would account for $40,000 of your monthly revenue, which works out to $8,000 per activity. Conversely, 20 of the activities would produce only $10,000 each month, which works out to be just $500 per activity. Sixteen times 500 equals 8,000 so your top 5 revenue-producing activities are 16 times more effective than the bottom 20.

Suppose you took it even further and moved the 80/20 ratio to 90/10, so that only 10% of your activities produced 90% of your revenues. That would make you 81 times more effective than you currently are now. Merely by focusing your time and attention on the five or ten activities that have the highest impact on your business, you can increase your revenues and income by 16 to 81 times!

Here’s the million-dollar question: what specific activities should you be focusing on?

Here’s a brief three-step process to help you work more effectively in your business.

Step 1. Identify your Passion and Purpose

Passion is a very powerful emotion and is infectious. When you express passion, people are automatically attracted to it. When you’re passionate about what you do, your product or service speaks for itself. So the first big question is: what are you passionate about. What do you love doing?

Next, look at your purpose. Are you in business merely to earn an income, accumulate wealth or do you have a strong desire to help others and be a service to others?

When you can match up your purpose and passion, magic happens. It puts you in front of all the others who have lukewarm enthusiasm for what they do. What is your purpose in business, how does it match up with your passion, and how do you combine the two to make the world a better place?

Step 2. Identify Your Strengths

The biggest mistake business owners make is thinking they have to do everything themselves. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. In order to succeed in business, you must get very clear about your unique abilities and then focus on them almost to the exclusion of everything else.

You will become a better business person when you identify your strengths and spend most of your time using them to perform the highest-impact activities in your business.

Step 3. Manage Your Time

When you’re a business owner it’s difficult to manage your time. What you can do is manage your activities by tracking where you spend your time on a daily basis and using that information to help you focus on high-impact activities.

One of your most important tasks is identifying the highest income-generating activities in your business and devoting a minimum of 80 percent of your time to those activities. This principle works whether you’re a “solo-preneur” with one product or service or a larger operation with a larger product or service offering and a team to support your daily efforts.

Monitor & Measure Your Activities

You can’t manage what you don’t monitor or measure so your first step is to identify where and how you spend your time. It’s important you identify what you are currently doing and what you should be doing, based on your highest income-producing activities.

For the next two weeks write down every activity you do in all areas of your business and how much time you spend doing it.

High income-producing activities include making a sale or something that leads directly to a sale. High-impact activities include producing a great website or making sure that your ad copy is properly written to make sales for you. These activities don’t directly make a sale, but they play an important role in generating revenue. To determine whether an activity represents one of your unique abilities, ask yourself two questions: What drives me crazy when other people don’t do it as well as me? What do I play at that other people consider work?

Track all your activities over a two-week period, noting how much time you spend on each activity each day. Before the two weeks is up, you will probably begin to see that you need to be spending more time on some activities and less on others. You will also begin to see that there are lots of activities that you should not be doing. This doesn’t mean they don’t need to be done, only that you should not be doing them.

What activities should you be doing? For the entrepreneur and small business owner, the highest income-producing activity is generating revenue. Every day, your primary focus should be on how your company will generate more revenue. If you’re not spending a minimum of 80% of your time on income- generating activities, your business will struggle to grow and increase revenues.

What about all the other activities that are just as crucial to your business? Here’s the challenge: For a small business, generating revenue must come first and management second. Otherwise your business will never grow to the point where management becomes as important as sales.

Revenues are consistently increased when the owner leverages his or her personal strengths through the use of other people’s unique talents and abilities. In other words, successful business owners focus on their highest income-generating activities and then build great teams around them to do all the other important activities they don’t do well.

It’s a fact, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Start focusing your efforts away from working in the business and focus them toward working ON it.

Make a commitment to yourself to spend one hour each day to identify which activities you need to be doing and tracking how you spend your time. Over the course of 365 days, that adds up to the equivalent of nine 40-hour weeks, or two solid months of working on your business rather than in it. Just imagine what you could achieve with that kind of concentrated effort!

Time to Take Action

  • Keep an hourly log for two weeks of your business and personal activities during your working hours
  • Determine which are the real high income and high impact producing activities vs. the tedious menial few
  • Take consistent action and maintain focus every day to ensure you are focusing on the high income and high impact producing activities.

To receive an expanded whitepaper on this topic including a full worksheet on increasing effectiveness please email tania@vision-alliance.com or call Tania on 1300 76 49 20.

Smarter Networking

Ten years ago or more there was a well known phrase that was used among business owners and individuals which was: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Today, owning and operating a franchise of any kind requires you to go beyond this, if you are to continue to create and maintain the “top of mind” awareness among peers, associates and the larger local marketplace. Networking today now goes beyond who you know….. 

It’s all about who knows you!

For much of my business life I have known the importance of networking. Although I knew the importance of it, I avoided networking as much as I could in the early days, and back then always described myself as a poor networker. The thought of going to a networking event created more nerves in me than meeting my mother in law, and literally scared me to death. I have always been a very confident person, passionate about what I do and believe 100% in what I and my company stands for, however unsure of how to start conversations, trying to overcome the fear of rejection and not knowing exactly what I was supposed to do once I met someone and got their business card, kick started a journey of learning the secrets to successful networking.

I have been described as a great networker by many of my associates and now with more tools in my toolbox, networking is something I look forward to rather than something I shy away from. The most important thing I focus on is making networking as efficient and effective as possible, ensuring I get maximum results in a short amount of time.

Let me share with you some great tips that have helped me along the way.

Networking is about building relationships.

Networking currently accounts for 87% of business in the marketplace. Yet many people neglect networking and fail to see it as a vital business and career building skill. Networking should be part of your daily, weekly or monthly activities just like any other business development activity you currently undertake.

Anyone can network with the exception of those who just don’t like people at all.

Referral marketing is the best way to build your business.

 

Networking Well

Your approach to networking is just as important as what you actually do. Starting with the right attitude and with minimum expectations will help you start off on the right foot. Like anything the more practice you do, the better you will eventually get.

For networking to work I have learnt that it’s important to do these three things.

  1. Prepare
  2. Connect
  3. Strengthen

If you’re not getting the results you want from networking, first check that you’re really doing all three of these steps properly, then work on ways to maximize your results within each one of them.

Prepare

Before you even shake one hand, it’s important you prepare yourself, both mentally and verbally.

This one is about your attitude about networking, your mindset.  Always be upbeat, positive, enthusiastic and realistic.

Making Connections- Introducing Yourself

Once you’re prepared, you’re ready to start making connections with people and there are multiple ways to do that. It all starts with introducing yourself.

You will have a limited time to get your message across so it’s important to create an introduction that will grab peoples’ attention enough for them to remember you. Not only do you require the skill to accurately describe who you are and what you’re looking for, it’s important to say it in such a way that other people can understand it enough to be able to tell others.

How to Introduce Yourself

Remember, you’re not going to make the sale and close the deal with your introduction. All you can really do is capture enough attention and interest to keep the conversation going. So stick to the basics and keep it short. You can go into much more detail after you’ve gotten someone’s attention, when they ask you for more information. But to get there, you need to get across three things first:

  • Your name (and company name if appropriate)
  • Your specialty and its benefit (how it helps the person hiring you)
  • And your target (who ideally you would like to speak with)

Unless you are a natural networker, networking can seem like alot of work.

Consistent efforts will eventually produce results.

Strengthen

Networking doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve made those initial connections, the next thing you have to work on is strengthening them. The best opportunities come from people who know you, trust you and like you. It’s difficult to get to that point after a 5-minute conversation at an event. You need to follow up and meet with contacts offline, then you have to stay top of mind.

Be sure you collect as many business cards as possible

 as the networking event is just the beginning!

Following Up

Events are good for the initial connection, but you have to build on that. You don’t have to follow up with everyone you meet, but there are three easy categories to focus on:

  1. Follow up with anyone who could be a client. That’s a no brainer.
  2. Follow up with people who are in your target space, maybe they’re in your field, but don’t do what you do. Or they target the same target audience. Perhaps you can help each other out
  3. Third, you may want to follow up with anyone who just plain impresses you. It’s good to know those kinds of people and have them in your network.

Get a business card. The best way to do this is to combine it with a conversation ender like mentioned earlier. Say “By the way, before I go, can I have your card?” Then email them the next day. Say you enjoyed meeting them and wondered if they’d like to get together for a coffee to learn more about each other and explore ways to help each other out. Position meetings this way you will find no one ever says no, because the meeting is about the two of you and not just about you. That’s important to remember when you’re asking for meetings.

Remember, you need to follow up with people if you want to build a relationship with them. Speaking to them for 5 or 10 minutes at an event is not enough time to form a lasting bond. Until you follow up and meet one-on-one, you’ll just be a business card to them and not a real person.

Key elements of a Good Networker

A Good Networker:

  • Has two ears and one mouth.
  • Asks questions and gets to know the other person.
  • Gives without expectation
  • Has an aim to add value
  • Has an abundant mindset- there is plenty of business out there for everyone.
  • Can form meaningful relationships and communicate their ideas.
  • Carries business cards at all times

Tips for Successful Networking

  • Limit your memberships to two or three groups. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Maximize your experience by going for depth of involvement.
  • Attend meetings and events regularly. Build a base of support with regular members and position yourself with new members as someone in the know.
  • Build great bridges! Every day people are missing chances to do business, largely because they don’t take the time to build a relationship with or even get to know the person.
  • Listening and asking more questions.
  • Arrive at meetings and networking events at least 15 minutes before the actual starting time
  • Introduce yourself with your name and the company you are from
  • Ask about the person first and listen intently. Most people want to talk about themselves.
  • Make sure you get as many business cards from all those you meet
  • Speak with one person at a time or at least a small group of no more than three
  • End conversations gracefully
  • Make sure you follow up with the contact soon after the event
  • Do something with the cards you collected…..put them into your database
  • Always thank people for sending referrals
  • Manage your time well

Making Continuous Improvements

When I first started networking to build my business, my efforts were slightly unfocused. I spread my memberships across a numerous organizations, rarely attending more than one or two meetings, if that. I’d attend random networking events because friends had invited me. In hindsight, all of those activities were necessary to help me build my skills and understand how to network smarter today.

With networking, I’ve found that it’s not the one big event that changes the course of a business. It’s the small steps that are taken consistently.

Think of all the steps you’ve taken, along many different paths to connect with all the different people now in your network. Some of those paths led to business, to friendships, and some have yet to reach a destination. Take one of these 5 steps listed below, down one of those unfinished paths, and see where it may lead

1) Make that follow up call.

2) Forward an article.

3) Warm up an old connection.

4) Spend more time with one of your networking groups.

5) Find someone in your network to collaborate with.

Strive for continuous improvement in your networking.  One small step for you could mean a giant leap for your business or career.

 

Attracting Your Ideal Customer

If a business isn’t growing, it’s dying. And the only way to make sure your business is growing is to identify and engage a steady stream of new customers.

Identifying your ideal customer & generating more revenue

Let’s begin with the end in mind. As a small-business owner, you want more customers, which translates to more revenue.  However, the only way to attract more customers is through effective and compelling marketing.

Unfortunately, marketing can be expensive, so it’s important you make sure you’re getting the right message out to the prospects who are most likely to buy what you sell. If you get the right message to the “right” prospects, they’ll not only buy from you, they’ll keep coming back, buying from you forever. They’ll tell their family and friends about you and they’ll spend more money with you than your typical customer.

So your number-one priority is to find out exactly who your ideal customer is.

 A massive volume of customers is not nearly as important as serving the right customers. When you match your business with the right customers, you’ll increase customer loyalty, decrease complaints, and have fewer returned items from dis-satisfied customers.

Here are three areas to look at when marketing to your ideal customer:

Wants vs. needs — why they buy

Attracting your ideal customers through marketing requires you to discover the specific wants and needs of these customers. These wants and needs are often referred to as “hot buttons.” Keep in mind that there is a big difference between wants and needs. They may sound similar, but they’re as different as black and white.

As a business owner, it’s important to distinguish between the two in order to attract more customers and grow your business. By learning the specific wants and needs of your customers, you can learn how to better market your product or service in a way that speaks to your ideal customer and leads them to buy from you.

A want is something you would like to have. It is not absolutely necessary, but it would be a good thing to have. A good example is a new car.  You may not need a new car but you when you want a new car you somehow find a way to get it.

A need is something you have to have, something you can’t do without. A good example is food. If you don’t eat, you won’t survive for long. You might not need a whole lot of food, but you do need to eat.

The fact is, wants are much more powerful than needs. When marketing your product or service it’s therefore vital you move away from promoting the need for it and start to identify with why your customers want your product.

There are two primary categories of information that will assist you in determining your customers needs and wants.

The first category is called demographics. These are the characteristics that identify the ability, need and interest of a customer to purchase your product or service. Demographics define those customers who need what you sell.

The second category is called psychographics. These are the factors that identify the motivation or reasons why someone wants to buy your product or service. Psychographics define those customers who want what you sell.

Hot buttons — what they want 

Depending on your industry, customers will have different wants and needs, called “hot buttons. Hot buttons are the problems, frustrations and concerns that most customers consider when they do business with your business. Many business owners feel that price is always the number one hot button that impacts their customers. In reality, price is one of their last considerations. Most customers are more than willing to pay a higher price if you offer enough value to warrant the higher price. Unfortunately, most marketing and advertising looks exactly the same, using common phrases such as, “We’re the best” We offer the lowest prices, the best service and so on. If you market this way, as most businesses do, your customers can’t determine the true value you provide, so they default to lowest price as a differentiator.

Whatever you do, don’t fall for this trap! Fortunately, the idea that price is most important exists only in the mind of the business owner which can be retrained. On an operational level though all you need to do is provide more value than your competition. When you do, you can actually increase the price you charge for your product or service.

Below is a short list of industries and their corresponding hot buttons.

Select the industry category that your business belongs to and then prioritise your customers’ hot buttons in order.

This exercise will help you identify your ideal customers’ wants in order to create the proper messaging that will appeal to them.

 

Common Hot Buttons for:

Service Industries – Fix it right, Fix it fast, Be on time, Provide quick resolution, Be honest

Professional Industries– Expected results, General customer service, Price of affordability, Guarantee results, Trustworthy

Retail Industries– Product options, variety, selection, Product quality, Product results match expectations, Customer service, Advice, Knowledge, Price

Opportunity/ Entrepreneur Industries– Make money (return on investment), Easily transition into ownership, Validation, Proof of support, Resonates with beliefs and values

Wholesale Industries –Make more money and higher margins, less hassle, easy to do business with Low risk, Reliability, Receive it on time

Overall, these hot buttons apply to most businesses in each industry category. Occasionally, other hot buttons may be more appropriate than those listed. If you honestly believe your specific hot buttons need adjusting from those that are listed, make those adjustments now by either rearranging the priority sequence or removing and replacing any hot buttons you feel may be more appropriate for your business.

By using these guidelines, you can create persuasive marketing messages that address your ideal customers’ needs and motivate them to buy from you. If you do this really well, you will find yourself attracting more customers in a short amount of time.

Decision makers, influencers and users — who to target

There’s one more area that needs careful consideration. In most business transactions, there’s a decision maker, an influencer, and a user. Here’s a typical example. When eating McDonalds, the parents are the decision-makers, the kids are influencers and in most cases they’re all users. Think about your business, your users may not be the influencers so it’s important to direct your marketing to the influencers to drive an increase in sales.

A point to consider is the end user of your product or service may not be the only person involved in the buying process. This is especially common in business-to-business transactions, where you may find that there are influencers or decision makers that are not the user.  Once you understand this and identify these three roles you will have better control over your marketing and notice a significant difference in your revenues.

By using these guidelines, you can create persuasive marketing messages that address your ideal customers’ needs and motivate them to buy from you. If you do this really well, you will find yourself attracting more customers in a short amount of time.

Time to Take Action-

Take some time over the next week or two to consider

  • Who your ideal customer is
  • What are their HOT Buttons
  • What future compelling marketing strategies will you create in order to attract your ideal customer and not just any customer

4 Simple Ways to Build Consistent Success

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 4 areas you can focus on quite effortlessly to ensure you build more momentum over the next 12 months.

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. Well 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 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 so as you begin the first step of wiring down your goals, make sure your outcomes meet the CREATE criteria

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 etc.

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. 

Take Consistent Daily Action & Improvement

They say success is in the follow through and therefore Action is an essential element to success, but 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% or 50% or 100% 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 1% – but do this every day. At the end of every year you will be at least 3665% 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.

Develop a prospect mindset & keep them 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 solution 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.

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”

In short:

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 & Show Them How Your Solutions Matches Their WANTS!

  • I help people become financially successful
  • I help people with all their plumbing needs
  • I bring joy and happiness to peoples 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

ü  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.

  •  adds value and removes pressure as it places a deliberate focus on the needs and feelings of other people first.
  •  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 in in the Follow Through so take some time right now to

  • Decide what you want & create your outcomes for the year.
  • Commit to consistent daily improvement
  • Match your solutions to your customers wants
  • Become an automatic smart networker

Hit Your Targets and Maximise Your Potential

Hit Your Targets and Maximise Your Potential

Have you set a revenue goal for the year? Have you prepared a cashflow forecast for the next quarter, six months and twelve months? Whether you’ve formalised your revenue goal or not, you would have by now a number in your head for where you want to be at the end of the year.

Its very important to start the year off knowing exactly where you finished last year and exactly where you want to be by the endof the year . Without knowing this number if will be almost near impossible to deliberately set your course of action on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.

When we speak of goals we at Vision Alliance speak holistically, so that you include your business and your life. There are six areas in your life for which you must define goals:

  • Finances
  • Relationships
  • Contribution
  • Health
  • Spirit
  • Business

Most people don’t achieve the goals they set not because they lack motivation, but because they don’t know how to define attainable goals and keep working consistently to get there. As every successful business coach will tell you, that’s the difference between successful people and the ones who must struggle to survive. Successful people know how to define and attain goals. Surround yourself with successful people and you will see the patterns unfold before you. I am forever remind people that over the past two decades of helping businesses grow, I have found there are two types of people in this world. Those who are committed and those who are just interested. Which one are you?  If you haven’d heard me speak of this let me expand on this a little. Those who are interested will do what is convenient to them. Those who are committed will do what ever it takes to achieve their outcomes. So are you interested in success in 2011. or are you truly committed?

Goals setting starts with setting SMART –A Goals. Im sure you have heard of SMART goals but how many of you have heard of a SMARTA goal. A SmartA goal is one that is

  • Specific
  • Measureable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Time Bound and
  • Actionable. 

That’s right it’s absolutely no use setting SMART goals if you don’t take the necessary ACTION to get you closer to where you want to be.

It’s always a good idea to start off small. Remember you eat an elephant the same way – in bite size chunks so don’t start with increasing revenues by 200% when you haven’t yet reached a 25% increase. Once you get to 25% start reaching for 50% and then 100%. Most of us think we have to increase our results by 100% overnight. You can no more double your revenue this year by simply saying you’re going to work harder and sell more than you can lose 10 kilos in a week or two by saying you’re going to eat less and exercise more.

You need a plan and you need to follow that plan daily. By focusing on the small bite size chunks and on improving just 1% every day,  you will dramatically increase your overall results over the course of one year.
As a friend of mine always says, nothing changes if nothing changes. Keep doing the same things you did last year and you will be guaranteed to produce similar results. Do something different, take consistent action, test and measure your results, make changes when and where necessary and you will be guaranteed to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be in a shorter period of time.

Here are the six requisites one of my mentors taught me that every successful person meets to attain his or her goals:

  1. Know Your Why I added this one in here as it’s so important. Without knowing your why it will be more difficult to align yourself with your overall vision, values and product and or servic offering. Start speaking a different language by communicating Why you do what you do rather than What you do.  You will be amazed how quickly you can affect change in your business.
  2. Dream big
    Think out of the box and establish ambitious goals. Do not set goals thinking that there is a limit to what you can achieve. The only limit is yourself and the past conditioning you allow to stop you from getting what you want.
  3. Write down detailed goals
    Successful people know that writing down their goals initiates the process. This is why you have to be specific, because what you write down is what will begin to happen. Your achievements will be as accurate as what you wrote, because you are appealing to the universal laws and are setting your mind to work as focused as possible. So don’t write down that you want a new car; explain that you want a new full extras, silver BMW, with black leather seats, a full warranty and full service for life.
  4. Your goals must be in harmony with your values
    You will attain your goals easily if you are working on something you value, because it means you are aligned with your purpose in life, your WHY. First, define your WHY, then define your values and thirdly, base your goals on and around them.
  5. Your goals must include two things:
    a. A specific plan to attain each
    b. The correct beliefs and mindset
    Without these, you will never attain your goals, thus, clarify your beliefs and think about what actions will lead you to attaining your dreams.
  6. Check your goals daily
    Before you get out of bed, before you eat your breakfast, review your list of goals. Visualize your life having attained them: how does it feel? It’s always a good idea to review your goals also before going to bed at night. What you are doing is programming your brain to work on your goals subconsciously, and to expect them to become a reality.
  7. Never lose hope- remember everything is possible if you put your mind to it and then take action.
    You never lose, even if you don’t get what you wanted. In case your dream doesn’t become a reality, remember that you still have what you learned in the process. Experience is crucial to advancing in life. As long as you focus on what you want, you will find the way to get there, in spite of the challenges or setbacks you may encounter along the way.