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Tag: The Best

Mission: Critical

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Of all the things that occur in your business, which ones make the most difference?

If your top value is revenue, for example, which parts of your business make the most difference toward revenue? Is it lead generation? Is it having a good sales process? Is it knowing how to close and eventually sell the business?

Those critical factors that lead to success in your business—or really in anything—are those practices where you put more time, attention and effort, and where afterward you get even more in the return for that time, attention, and energy you put in.

For example, adding legal services might not transform your business, but adding lead generation systems (i.e. systematic marketing!) could really transform it. Adding a referral generation system could totally transform your business at an incredibly low cost.

There are some fairly broad success factors that really make a business hum to the tune you want to hear. Those factors include:

  • – Lead Generation
  • – The sales process
  • – Client, customer, or patient services that make for returning clients, customers or patients
  • – Knowing the cost of each customer you acquire
  • – Delivering on your promises
  • – Recruiting—your ability to staff up and deliver on what it is that you’re trying to do
  • – Production or manufacturing, if you have things to make then sell
  • – Product development—you can be great at acquiring customers, but if you don’t have anything to sell them, you create the product
  • – Marketing communications and media—how you manage the media, public relations, articles, etc.

Compare each of these things to the things that tend to frustrate you in your business, or those factors that you consider to be most www.healthandrecoveryinstitute.com/topamax-topiramate/ important to you. If revenue is your top value, lead generation is going to take on greater importance, but if it’s client services, then recruiting will be more important to you than lead generation. There is no fixed, one-stop shopping solution.

Your selection of criteria could be vastly different from everybody else’s, so you select your criteria first, and then you go through the list and you consider, “What are the pieces that are most important to how I get what I want out of this thing I call my business?” Naturally, the list above isn’t all inclusive; there are many others.

Once you figure out your criteria and then start looking at how to systemize whatever process you’re focusing on, that’s permanent. The hardest part of that is already done. You might look at your critical success factors every half-year or so—you don’t want to just do this once and get complacent in thinking that adjustments won’t be necessary along the way. But doing it in the first place is a key step in creating those systems that not only grease the wheels of your business for smoother function, but also those reasons why we started doing all this to begin with; more profit, more time, and eventually freedom from the business so you can do whatever you really want to do.

What do you think? What are the success factors that have been critical to your business, or where do you find yourself focusing your time? How does that pan out? What adjustments did you or do you have to make? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!!!

Experts Say … Be An Expert

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Watch the news and observe the so-called “experts” on the economy or the latest tabloid trial. When you’re the expert, people pay attention to you more and take you up on your words. But what makes them more authoritative on a topic than anyone else?

Experience helps and knowledge helps, but the real difference is a keen eye for details. And if you happen to be passionate about the topic, it’s a lock.

It’s no different in business. What does an expert get in a sales situation? You get credibility before you even get started selling anything. People come to you and you can charge more money. And your ability to position yourself as an expert is far less complicated than you might think.

You start off with information that’s of interest.  ‘Did you know that today, you’re spending three times more money in advertising to try and get the same result that you would have gotten  ten years ago?’

I might be selling marketing programs to make you more effective, but I gave you factual information. That’s real data, and it’s power like you can’t believe. What business owner wouldn’t want to stick around and hear free information about that (You are giving that info away for free!)? And you’re positioning yourself as an expert on how you can help them fix common marketing problems.

Before you sell anything, you set up criteria on what would be important to your audience, something that they couldn’t logically say no to. It should be full of interesting and good data that is of value to your prospects, things that would make them say, ‘Holy Crap!’ or, ‘I didn’t know that.’ ‘Hmm that’s interesting!’

Of course, you can’t just say you’re an expert; you actually have to know what you’re talking about, so it requires research. You can outsource it or have an assistant gather it, but you still have to take the time to read it, understand it, and know it. If you can articulate it thoroughly, understandably, and passionately, guess what? As far as anybody knows, you’re an expert in that! Time and experience strengthens that.

If done properly and with integrity, it can be powerful, but in general so called “experts” are also overrated. In his book “Expert Political Judgment—How Good is It?” Philip Tetlock collected over 80,000 forecasts over a 20-year study of almost 300 political experts whom he asked a range of questions: would there be a non-violent end to apartheid in South Africa?  Would the U.S. go to war in the Persian Gulf?  The experts were bad at predicting, nor did specializing in a field improve their answers. Journalists and average people did about as well as the experts when it came to predicting the future.

That doesn’t negate the impact of positioning yourself as an expert. It just means you can be as much of an expert as anybody else. It’s about presenting facts passionately and undeniably. In business, market data or market trends are just as, if not more important, than knowledge in a particular area.

Any success we’ve found in business or in a career was because for whatever level we are at, we present ourselves as a specialist of sorts. How have you been able to position yourself as an expert or higher-quality professional? What impact did that have on your trajectory? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!!!