A full two weeks, if not more, left to work your sales magic in 2009! Today’s post is to help illuminate your way 🙂  through these last couple of weeks.
We started on the 2009 countdown six weeks ago and if you have been following along, I hope you are finding success. We are – as of this morning, our proposals and sales are now 13% higher than in November – a great step on the sales road!
As I look at the preceding actions in this year-end process, I think the biggest ‘oh my goodness’ came in Weeks 1 and 2 and now we are in execution mode! Here are the links to the first weeks’ posts:
- Take a hard look at where you are and answer questions that helped you identify and diagnose potential roadblocks.
- Set specific targets and plans for reaching them.
- Focus on accountability, activity, and action!
- Your tool check up.
- The 4Rs to Hit your Target.
- DO it.
Today we took the time to take a momentary stop in the action to lift our heads up and look again at how we are doing. I knew it was time for a process check – sometimes I can be so singular focused on moving forward  that I lose track of the bigger picture and take short cuts. I was reminded of this tendency this weekend.
Ever have your Christmas tree decorated and then days later notice a part of the tree is no longer lit? Diagnosing why and which lights are really burnt out is always tricky – we need to be careful not to ruin the other decorations on the tree as we try to get to the light strand. It is a delicate process – and painstaking to test each bulb to find the culprit (and this with lights that are not supposed to go out when one bulb burns out).
I tackled this process on Friday night. I determined the outage was just part of a long strand on lights. Then I started the process of testing each dark bulb – only to get to the end and find that even after replacing the only bulb that was burnt out, the strand did not light!
My husband told me to change the fuse. I humored him though I didn’t believe that could be the problem – and changed the fuses which took a while because I didn’t have the proper tools – and still no lights.
What to do? I started at the end and worked backwards this time. Know what I found? That a few of the bulbs at the beginning were not pushed in all the way – when I corrected that – voila’ – lights!  How much quicker I would have discovered that if I had followed my process and started again at the beginning!
What does that have to do with our sales countdown and what we should do this week? Sometimes we need to step back and look at our process to make sure that we are moving forward effectively and efficiently. Ask yourself these questions:
- Am I taking shortcuts in my process right now? Are they smart-cuts? Or just short-cuts?
- Â Is that going to get the results I need today AND in the long-run?
- Who else is pointing out things I should do that, without thought of process, might detract me and delay me from the goal?
- How am I using the tools available to help me work through my sales process?
What did you discover as you considered these questions? Now, on to what to do with your answers!
- Identify the adjustments you need to make today to ensure processes that work are working for you.
- Eliminate the “noise” of others telling you what to try different (this blog post exceptioned).
- Use your tools! These might be tech tools or people ‘tools’.
- Work your process!
After this illuminating review, spend this entire week working your process-make your contacts, do your followup, etc. Action, action, action.
