Whatever your goals are for 2021, there are seven essential steps to streamlining your business cycle that you can take right now. While many people are still stuck on the election results and all the news (good or bad) about COVID-19, I’m living in the NEW YEAR. If you’re going to get ahead this year, streamlining is KEY. Here are the seven steps to help you do it.
Remember that while you’re perfecting, your competitors are promoting and taking your customers.
1. S2M: Speed to Market
Generating awareness of your products in the marketplace is more important than anything, even more than creating your product or service. That’s right. Create the desire, the excitement and the buzz first – then, when you’re ready to deliver, your customers will be not only ready to buy, they’ll be in a hurry to buy. I announced The 10X Rule, one of the many books I’ve written, before I typed a single word. That book became a best-seller. Moral of the story: announce now and deliver later.
2. M.O.: Multiple Offers
People have always shopped around before buying. Now, technology makes it even easier for them to do it without even going anywhere. If you want to be the customer’s first, last and only stop, you need to have an inventory and price structure which allows you to make multiple offers. This includes
a free offer at the beginning of the sales cycle. How successful do you think car dealerships would be if they offered just one car at only one price? Think of it this way: would you rather pass up a sale because you couldn’t fulfill the customer’s needs or wouldn’t budge on price … or would you prefer to make a little profit this time around and gain a loyal customer who you can upsell in the long-term?
3. B.O.: Be Omnipresent
No, this is not the kind of B.O. you’re thinking about. B.O. stands for BE OMNIPRESENT. My main objective above almost anything else is to be everywhere. If people don’t know me, they can’t follow me and I can’t help them. That’s why you see me on just about every social media platform; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Tik-Tok, you name it, I’m on it because I want to reach the whole world. The market makes it critical to be omnipresent but thankfully, technology makes it possible to do so.
4. D.D.: Double Down
This is a no-brainer, but so many people ignore it and make things harder than they have to be. It’s simple: if something works once, it’ll work twice. If it works twice, it’ll work four times and then sixteen times, and so on. Even in my company, people are always trying to reinvent things that work. It’s unnecessary and counterproductive. If it stops working, then you stop doing it – until then, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
5. P.N.P.: Promotion Not Perfection
You’ve heard the expression “the devil is in the details.” I say, “the devil is in the delay.” If you wait for “perfection,” you’re going to be waiting a long time and while you are, your competition is going to run circles around you. Not following me? If you know me at all, you know that I don’t get hung up on spelling, grammar, punctuation or anything like that. One of my first books was full of errors but that didn’t stop it from becoming a best-seller. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection stop you from moving forward. Remember that while you’re perfecting, your competitors are promoting and taking your customers.
6. A.N.S.: Automate ’N’ Scale
“A.N.S.”… nope, once again, it’s not what you think it is. Once your business is up and running, you need to shift into expansion mode immediately, because if you’re not growing, you’re dying. But how do you transition from handling the day-to-day operations in the trenches to expanding? You need to put personnel and procedures in place so you don’t have to sweat the small stuff and can instead focus on the massive goals you want to achieve. In today’s technology-driven service economy, it’s easy for any business to automate and scale.
7. A.B.A.C.: Always Be Acquiring Customers
Streamlining your business starts with The Golden Rule – Always Be Acquiring Customers. You’ve gotta keep your pipeline full at all times. That means constantly going after leads, and if at first they refuse, you go at them again and again. The acquisition process means cultivating prospects into closed deals. Finally and probably most important, it means following up with current customers to maintain the relationships. That leads not just to repeat business and the possibility of an upsell, but also to referrals. Keep your pipeline full with A.B.A.C. in mind and there will always be a deal on the table.
Moving forward, as you set out to streamline your business, you’ve got to have this mantra in your head at all times: “Form an idea, create an offer, promote the offer, push the offer, sell it, close it, collect the money … and when it’s time to deliver, you OVERDELIVER!
That’s how it’s gonna get done in 2021!
