Does that sound scary?
Yes, and that’s the risk you take. Most of us don’t take that leap of faith to do only 1 thing for a lifetime, a decade, a year or even a month. I have chosen to do 1 such thing for this year. It’s talking to 200 new prospects for this year. I have never done something like this in my past. It literally means every business day I need to speak to 1 person and this month my books are only 2 people till now.
The easy and yet most hard thing to do is declare it to the world, to your team and the people around you. This is my way of doing it. You can check my LinkedIn and Twitter banner and you will see the below image.
Its not so challenging a goal on paper however when you are in a niche where your target is to achieve 25 clients and you are in business for over a decade then there is some gap to fill.
Even though the target seems a bit off because of what will happen after speaking to 200 new prospects. The idea is I should be able to find 10 new clients. that is 5% conversion rate. The merit here is about the old game of sales (numbers game) and the new idea of the infinite game of serving people I connect with. Thus building a good personal brand with quality content and spreading word of mouth. I know that we are always 2 connections away from a potential new client.
Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
James Clear
It helps me to make all my other work link to this target. Here are my other 3 sub-target this year
- Create 24 content for my 100 active member community gets atleast 100 reads per content
- Make sure that each episode of our podcast Sustainability Scorecard Stories gets atleast 100 plays
- Global Sustainability lists of 600+ intitative gets 100 views per month
Even my personal project of 100 internship program has all the activities lined up to achieve the above goal. Thus the quality of the work I do in my sub-targets will help me achieve the main goal easily. I also have my team and system to do outreach but in the past best months have given me 4-5 calls per month which is way less than 17 per month. That means that if I am able to build a community and add value to 100 people I will definitely get some word of mouth to get more calls booked.
Does that mean I won’t be working on other responsibilities? No that’s not the case. I will have to work on building our team, doing some consulting work, making technology advancements to our Product, setting up automated SEO and marketing, hiring new team members among other things. I will have to strongly depend on my team and delegate a huge chunk of work. I need to focus on my ultimate outcome for this year. It does not matter how many activities I do.
Sell the OUTCOME of your activity, not the OUTPUT of your activity.
Jonathan Stark
Vikram Shetty 