Greg's Right FIT #443

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

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Ease
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Ease

• Dancing and singing, they say, releases dopamine and makes us feel happy. So, this weekend, sing and dance. Get some dopamine flooding the zone, flush away bad vibes.
• No management technique get results like helping people feel like they are using their strengths in their job. It reduces turnover, increases job satisfaction, and lifts sales. Easy.
• Sales prospecting is easy – talk to people about what you offer. Preferably people who can buy it.  
• Buyers in companies are people. People move from company to company over time. Make it easy for your people to stay in touch with those people, not just their companies. Sales will grow over time.

Being Human - Solutions creating problems

"Everything is hard before it's easy." – JWv Goethe

There is a particular lead generation problem I bump into from my earliest days of management. It's not unique to sales and business development, but when it happens there, it threatens momentum and growth. 

The problem? The new thing stops the old things from happening. 

An early win in my management days was splitting an inbound focused sales team into two. An inbound team and an outbound focused team. The problem I was solving was when salespeople answered a call from an interested prospect, they started waiting for those calls instead of making new calls. The inbound calls were so seductive, and so disruptive, we ended up having to put our outbound team in a different section of the building and changing their phone system. The joke was that all it took was one inbound call to sneak through and, like Pavlov's dog, they'd sit and stare at the phone until it happened again. To the point of missing the quota! 

Working with some lawyers, I see similar behavior. The partner who gets four new clients a month gets there by having two lunches a week, attending networking events, and speaking at meetings once a month. The firm wants a little bit more, so it invests in marketing. The marketing gets the phone ringing. At first, the calls are bad, so the other activity continues, but with time and feedback, the calls get better. Four clients a month becomes five. Five becomes six. More dollars go into marketing and then something interesting happens. 

Six a month, six a month, six a month. Then five a month. Then four a month. Panic sets in. What's happening? The leads must be bad. 

What's happening is the same thing that happened to my inbound salespeople thirty years ago. The new marketing is meant to be supplemental, but ends up replacing the previous activity. Business isn't growing, it's just getting more expensive. 

If you've seen this, you can fix it. You don't have to split the roles into inbound and outbound like I did, but you do need active management. And in a firm of partners and junior partners, that's not easy. But it's not impossible. 

(another Simple but Not Easy solution brought to you by Greg Chambers and the fine people at Chambers Pivot Industries.)

Random Stuff

"When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.' " – Marcus Aurelius

I listen to a fair number of podcasts. A feature of the people on podcasts is they tend to have accomplished something. It makes sense, right? Do a thing and people want to know how you did it. 

Inside these conversations something caught my ear. At times, the person who accomplished the thing will say, I'm luck/blessed/fortunate that it happened. When they say this they are almost reflexively asked, "but you worked hard, right? It wasn't all luck, was it?" 

The reason it caught my ear is that I had just heard another interviewee say, "all my hard work came together and is paying off," but the interviewer didn't say a thing about luck. 

Because, of course, hard work gets results. Nothing works like work. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work, and everything else we say around these parts.

I think about this as I consider our peach tree. Five years of bountiful peaches and this year we'll get zero. A late freeze came around when the tree was in bloom and stopped the natural order of things. Maybe next year I'll be luckier.

The loss of blooms before pollination happened to my apple tree last year. When it bloomed early this year, I took extraordinary measures to protect the blooms, and as a result, we'll have apples this fall. Dozens. My hard work paid off.

The wheel of fortune spins on. I will bear its results worthily. (Or something like that.)