Business Growth Ideas #265 – This week: Meetings, Goals, Sleepwalks

GREG’S BUSINESS GROWTH NEWSLETTER #265
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Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue:

– Techniques for FIT
– Being Human
– Random Stuff

Techniques for FIT
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• Because we are in a pandemic, sending an email, DM, or text has become the default communication style. Read your note out loud before sending it. If you hear yourself using inflection, pick up the phone or schedule a video call. It saves time and lessens misunderstandings in the long run.
• Every sales rep on your team should be looking to match your comp plan to the customer’s needs, maximizing the payout to everyone involved. All great relationships have this give and take, it’s what partners do for each other. Win-win as they say. Design your comp plan accordingly.  

• Calls without a clear definition of the problem being solved or result being pursued are hard to sit through. “We can do this, or that. . . or this. . .or that. . .” Shoot me now! Combat this by either defining where you are now or where you want to be. Define the opportunity, as you’ve heard me say.
• Are you feeding your brain the good stuff? The little robot that is our brain can be programmed by the volume and type of content we throw into it. Make sure you’re the one doing the programming. All brain food is not created equally.

Being Human – Goal setting
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“If you don’t set goals, ​​you can’t regret not reaching them.”
– Yogi Berra

Goals are useless. 

The problem with setting goals is they tend to be too high or too low. Or worse, you and your people get derailed on the path to the goal without knowing. When you ask successful people how they ended up where they are they will tell you a story suggesting it’s been their goal all along. However, if you ask them to go back to when they started and describe where they thought they would end up, you realize they didn’t know. At best, their goal at the time was an abstraction.

Should you set goals then?

Yes, because they are incredibly useful for focusing your process. The mental work you go through to imagine getting to a goal sets your direction and forces you to take the first steps.

Those steps build into momentum, carrying you closer to your destination. So, do your goal setting, but focus on the process taking you there. Apply your energy combined with talent and strengths to the process. Good things will happen.

Swear.

Random stuff

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“… there is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep.”
– the Odyssey

When temperatures dip into the teens, air in the house gets dry. Over the years we’ve tried to combat this by replacing the whole house humidifier, adding another in the bedroom, various gels, lotions, and, of course, drinking more water. As I get older it’s the latter causing the most disruption to my sleep schedule. Gulping down gallons of water before bedtime guarantees I will have to make a trip to the bathroom at least once in the dark of night.

I’ve developed some strategies to keep these midnight runs from being too disruptive to my sleep. For one, I check the path to the bathroom before my head hits the pillow. It’s a trick I learned when the kids were young, because nothing wakes you more fully than stepping on an errant Lego left in the hall. The days of Legos are behind me, but the habit remains.

Another strategy is the single eye. Going from the pitch black into a well lit bath is like shooting spikes into your head. Worse than that, however, is leaving the bathroom to stumble back to bed. It’s like entering a darkened movie theater. Disorienting and dangerous, waking every sense in my body. By keeping a single eye closed in the bathroom, then switching open eyes on the trip back, I hold on to that sleepy feeling.

Of course, none of this matters if you step on the cat. That gets the blood flowing. Fast. May as well just stay up at that point.

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