Greg's Right FIT #357

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Momentum
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Momentum

• Sales managers thinking about momentum look for trends in their people's behavior. Daily and weekly check-ins become less important for details, more for overviews. 
• To get good at using overviews, take notes. Pencil to paper works well. Auto-formatted cells in Excel spreadsheets work better. Seeing a series of cells highlighted with green next to non-highlighted cells gives you something to talk about. 
• Tracking momentum requires trust because it's easy to game the system when you know what's being measured. As a matter of fact, we humans are almost hard-wired to game anything we know is measured. Trust helps fight the urge.
• Streaks of momentum have a compounding effect. Small streaks strung together over time lead to gains that go beyond what you might expect by adding them up. 
  Use streaks to your advantage by tracking them.

Being Human - Stringing hits together

“You have to string together hits." baseballer Aaron Rowand

What is more powerful than seeing progress? I think about this as I watch Major League Baseball's World Series. Two of the best teams in baseball trying to string hits together, or prevent the other team from stringing hits together. 

The grid above is from Weight Watchers. In 2021, as a beach vacation approached I took a particular interest in keeping my weight in check. If you're unfamiliar with Weight Watchers, it essentially asks you to answer one question each day: "Did you eat your recommended amount of food today?" In October of last year I didn't have a lot of good eating days in a row, but compared to months earlier I strung some hits together. And it worked. 30% of the month eating well versus 0% (or worse, an unknown %) helped me slim down. We're not talking miracle weight loss, but my belt loops noticed. 

One of the keys to using momentum in sales is the idea of small streaks. Trying to get your people to string a few good days together each week to make progress for the month. My October measures may not show many streaks, but I was consistent every week. It works. 

Baseball player Aaron Rowand's full quote is, "You have to string together hits. You can end up with 16 in a game, but if you get two per inning you might not score a run. It's about stringing them together."

String some hits together. Good stuff. 

Random Stuff

"You 

Some time ago I mentioned reading the article about voices people give their pets. Since bringing it up I've learned that a lot of you have some very creative, very funny voices. Old Spanish men, proper English matriarchs, and a lot of voices suggesting your pet is um, well, a simpleton is the nicest way to say it. 

This week we sent one of our simpletons on to the next world. I may have mentioned Ajax the cat before. He was our neighbor's cat, trained to be a mouser/killer of things, and when the neighbor left, Ajax stayed. He was semi-feral for most of his years, and when summer arrived he disappeared for nights, or weeks at a time. Only to show up and crash sleep for like a week. (see picture above) One year he was gone for so long we assumed he was dead, only to find him our doorstep nearly three months later. 

He hated his collars. We'd strap them on with their little bells to warn the birds, mice, rabbits, and other critters of his presence only to find them tangled up in a bush. A few times it was in distant neighbor's bushes. They'd call sounding concerned, "We, um, found your cat's collar. . .but not the cat," and we'd reassure them he was fine. I took to calling him Driftwood, an alias more befitting his wandering nature. 

The most interesting thing about Ajax is a few years ago we learned one of the neighbors took to kidnapping him. It turns out his summer sojourns weren't so mysterious after all. The neighbor would trap him in their breezeway between their garage and house, because "they liked him" according to a source. The neighbor moved, and Ajax resumed spending summers with us, but we had questions. Questions eventually answered by one of my son's friends who bought their house. They sent us a picture of the breezeway wall where the previous homeowner had used a permanent marker to write, "Ajax" and my wife's phone number. 

I thought about trying to find the kidnapper's new address to let them know about Ajax's passing, but screw them! Kidnapping someone else's pet? Who does that?  

Peace out, Ajax.