HOW HAVING A GOAL WILL HELP YOU

In this chapter, you are going to set your sales and marketing goal for the twenty-eight days of the Get Clients Now! program. We will be using goal-setting techniques many times throughout this program, so let’s take a moment to examine the system’s core philosophy about goals:

1. Set goals that will stretch you, but that you believe are realistic.

2. Try your best to meet them.

3. When it becomes clear that a goal is unrealistic, change it.

4. Reward yourself for effort, not just results. Punishment is not allowed.

Rewards are a key element of the process. Marketing is unpredictable. Sometimes you do everything exactly right and still don’t get the results you want when you want them. If you reward yourself only when you get results, all the challenging work that led up to the result often gets discounted. And in the meantime, you feel as though you aren’t getting anywhere.

Get into the habit of rewarding yourself for effort, regardless of your results. To do this consistently, you will always need a goal. If you decide, for example, that you will make ten follow-up calls on Monday, and you make them, you deserve acknowledgment even if none of those people agree to buy today. If you hadn’t set a goal for the day, you would have nothing to reward yourself for, and no cushion for the disappointment you may feel.

This approach is particularly important where Success Ingredients are concerned. These are the missing ingredients you need to be successful in your marketing and that you plan to create during the program. A blog, for example, could be a missing Success Ingredient. Having a blog might be important for the success of your business, but the blog by itself will not bring you clients. You will need to let people know about it, build a subscriber list, make some posts to it, and so on, before your blog starts turning into sales. Therefore, you need to reward yourself up front, as soon as you launch the blog, for all the effort that went into creating it.

While rewards are essential, punishment is strictly forbidden. When you don’t meet a goal you’ve set, acknowledge it, see what you might learn from it, then move on. Don’t consider it a failure, beat yourself up for it, or allow it to discourage you from trying again. Expecting that you will reach every goal you set is unrealistic. Just try your best to do what you intend, reward yourself for all you accomplish, and learn from what you don’t.

Setting marketing goals on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis can provide you with a number of significant benefits. The first one is an improved focus. Looking at your goals each day will keep them in the forefront of your mind. Knowing that you have only twenty-eight days to achieve the results you want will tighten your focus on marketing and help you to ignore distractions.

Second, your goals will produce evidence. By regularly measuring your level of effort and comparing it to the results you create, you will get a constant reality check on your progress. You will discover right away if you are not working hard enough or are spending precious marketing time on activities like cleaning out your desk drawer. You will also be able to tell when you have done enough and can take a day off without feeling guilty.

Your goals will also provide you with direction. For the next twenty-eight days, you won’t need to worry as much about what you should do next to get more clients. Your completed Action Worksheet will indicate exactly what to do. Whenever you feel uncertain about your next move, ask yourself, “Which choice (action, decision, and so forth) is more likely to lead me in the direction of my goals?” Often that reminder is all you will need to stay on the right track.

Finally, your goals can help you with motivation. Post your Action Worksheet on the wall where you will constantly see it. Run a contest with yourself to see how early in the day you can complete your Daily Actions, and then try to beat your own record. Set up a reward for finishing each Success Ingredient project, or reaching a certain percentage mark toward your program goal. Invent a marketing or sales game and make up your own rules. The more fun you can have, and the more rewards you can collect, the easier the next twenty-eight days will be.