The Art of Planning
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If you want to set yourself up for a great 2017, now is the time to start planning for it. Our most successful clients use this time of year to reflect on goals they’ve set, assess progress and create a plan to help them succeed in the coming year. Planning is one of the most important tasks you’ll do in your business. It allows you to focus on your priorities throughout the year and lessens the chance of being sidetracked by setbacks or challenges along the way.
3 Steps for Planning Your Year
1. Create a strategy. A strategy outlines what you want to accomplish during the year and how you’ll try to do it. Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” A business plan is a type of strategy for your business. It features your goals, a working budget and a list of daily, weekly and monthly activities you’ll need to do to achieve your goals and reach success.
In 2017, we’re bringing back The Blitz. We’ve improved it to help you generate more leads, get more referrals and close more deals to make you unstoppable in 2017.
2. Tactics. What are the activities you have to do to achieve your goals? It’s your calls, personal notes and Pop-Bys, as well as client parties and lunches. These are the tactics you use to serve your clients and set the stage to ask for referrals. Whenever I worked with a client, my minimum expectation was to get two referrals by the end of the transaction. How would I do this? By staying in touch with a phone call or delivering a Pop-By, writing a personal note or inviting them out to lunch or to a client party. The more you connect with your clients, the easier it will be to ask for referrals.
Coming soon in your monthly kit is the 2017 Marketing Calendar. Tack it up in your office and use the stickers that come with it to plan the date of your client parties, remind you when to send your Marketing Flyers and eReports, and much more. Seeing your whole year will help you plan for your success.
3. Tracking. Lord Kelvin said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” If you don’t track your numbers, you’re running your business by your feelings, and your feelings will always let you down. One of the first things our Business Coaches, work on with new clients is their numbers. More often than not, the client won’t know what they are – they simply haven’t kept track. They may feel they’re not doing as well as they should (not closing as many transactions as they want to, or not getting the referrals they think they need to succeed) and often are put off by how much work they feel it will be to track. Luckily, we’ve made it easy.
We developed Referral Maker to take the guesswork out of working by referral. All of the core activities are loaded into the system; you just have to sign on and look at your dashboard to see what you have to do for the day and week. Once you complete the activity, check it off and Referral Maker will track your activities for you. Once you set your goals, Referral Maker will not only tell you how close you are to achieving your goal, it’ll break down how many contacts you’ll need to make each day in order to get the number of referrals you’ll need to close your target number of deals. It’s that simple!
If you want to achieve success in 2017, it’s vital to start planning for it today. While you’re planning your year, be sure to include personal development as well. Whether you plan to come to the Success Tour in person or tune in from the office, remember to visit our website to find out where we’re heading to next. Hope to see you there!
Brian
