Growth Newsletter #323 – This week: Opportunities, Yellow lights, Communion

GREG’S BUSINESS GROWTH NEWSLETTER #323
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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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• When developing opportunities, in addition to evidence, (How do we know this to be true?) we’re looking for impact. (Why bother?)
• Referrals are great. The best referrals are peer-to-peer, but the next best come from sources of funds versus recipients of funds. For instance, a customer referring you to their supplier versus the reverse. Something about money I think.

• When looking for impact, the client is either going to be looking to alleviate pain, or intensify gain. For pain we ask, what is this preventing you from doing now? For gain we ask, what would this allow you to do you’re not doing now?
• Ever wonder who is talking to your clients? I focus on finding new clients and so do your competitors. An old saying goes, “if you don’t treat your old clients like new clients, they’ll become former clients.” Worth noting.

Being Human – Yellow lights
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“Quicker by taking more time.” –Traditional Proverb

When you see a yellow light what do you do? (For a few of you the answer is “speed up!”) In business development we will run into yellow lights, or situations where we need to proceed with caution. For instance, if our product is $100,000, but the prospect has never spent that much on anything, it’s a yellow light.

Yellow lights aren’t good or bad. They are simply areas we need to address before moving on and investing a lot of time and money on a problem. To keep with the stoplight analogy, we need to recognize yellow lights and turn them either green or red.

For example, I worked with a group selling tax credits. The first yellow light we have to deal with is in order for you to invest in these particular tax credits, the organization needs to be paying a lot in taxes. Not high wage earner Dr. Megan at the country club griping about her medical practice’s high taxes type of taxes, but a corporation paying hundreds of millions in taxes. Dr. Megan approaching you about tax credits presents a yellow light. Does her practice pay enough in taxes for your products?

Asking questions about their tax bill, giving a range of tax liability amounts, or other gentle querying helps take a yellow light and turn it either red or green. Maybe Dr. Megan’s practice is bigger than you imagined.

We want to recognize yellow lights quickly. This lets us invest time and effort on the right opportunities because needlessly committing our company’s money or personnel resources is the most expensive part of business development.

Random stuff

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“Don’t judge.”

A semi-normal return to my past social life took place this last week or so. There was a basketball game, a networking event, a fundraiser, another basketball game, a movie with friends, and a concert. All sorts of pre-pandemic-like activity.

It was good to see people again. I’m a little out of practice though. It is hard to maintain eye-contact, challenging to make interesting conversation, but much fun to be in communion with others. Sports and music do that well.

As you might expect, along with the good comes some bad. For instance, I forgot what it’s like to be in a crowd near someone with intestinal issues. Do you just suffer through? Do you try to figure out where the stench is coming from and scream, “Somebody check their pants!” for a laugh? I don’t want to humiliate a stranger, but I don’t want to be blamed if others catch wind.

In the end I decide to do nothing. We’ve all been there, I think to myself, some of us more times than others. No judgement here. It’s human. Stuff happens.

As I smile to myself, basking in my act of generosity, the woman in front of me whips around, looks me straight in the eye, and with a scrunched up face mouths, “Eww. Is that you?”

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