EDITING YOUR SHOPPING LIST

If you chose three Success Ingredients or fewer, you can skip to the next section, “Setting Target Completion Dates.” If you selected more than three, it’s time to prioritize. To ensure you are choosing the most important ingredients, first look at the marketing strategies you have decided to use. Since you will be using only those strategies for the present, you can eliminate any ingredients that you don’t actually need to implement your chosen strategies.

For example, if you are working on filling the pipeline, but did not choose writing and publicity as one of your strategies, you should not be selecting “publicity venues” or “blog theme/topics” as Success Ingredients, no matter how attractive they sound. You have spent quite a bit of effort already in diagnosing the area that needs more work and picking the right strategies to address it, so don’t second-guess yourself now.

If you eliminate those distractions and still have more than three Success Ingredients, ask yourself which three you need first. During your Get Clients Now! program month, you will be acquiring or creating the one to three ingredients you choose. As you complete your first choices, you can cross them off the list and start work on others.

Let’s say you are focusing on following up, and are considering the Success Ingredients “model marketing letter,” “contact management system,” “30-second commercial,” and “e-zine.” It would make more sense to begin with the first three, since the model marketing letter, contact management system, and 30-second commercial would all help you follow up with hot prospects you already know are interested, while the e-zine would be more helpful with contacts you know less about or with whom you need to build more trust first. If you complete any one of the three within the month, you could then start work on the e-zine.

The Success Ingredients you choose don’t necessarily need to be completed within one month; you are just deciding to work on them during that time. A 30-second commercial is something you might knock off in a couple of hours, but building a website could take you six weeks from start to finish.

If you’re still not sure which ingredients you should choose, skip to Part III, which has a chapter for each stage of the Universal Marketing Cycle. See what the chapter for your chosen stage has to say about the Success Ingredients you are considering, and then pick no more than three to start with.