It’s the end of the week. Depending on how yours went, you either have 20 pounds of sand and a 10 pound bag and you’re wondering how your going to get it done, or maybe you are at the end of a long week and wondering if you have the steam to keep going and finish strong.
Either way, here’s an idea: Make it a 10-point day.
Give yourself a weighted value for key activities accomplished. Specifics may vary here, just make it a stretch. For example: 5 points for a contract, 3 points for an executive meeting, 2 points for an executive phone conversation, 1 point for any buyer touch-point like a nice email/voicemail combo. Now, try to reach or beat a total of 10 points today.
Hope you need a calculator!
A mentor once told me that ”Sick companies are internally focused – Healthy ones are focused on their customers.” Wise words from a wise man. Thanks, Larry.
With the economy slowly crawling out of the funk, where are the leaders in your company focused? It’s easy to become entranced with YOURSELF. Think about it. Do you spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy looking at your own company’s Operations? Alliance Relationships? Cost Containment/Reduction? Organizational Structure? Market Segmentation? Inventories? Corporate Branding? If so – STOP!
These are all necessary concerns. But they are also a very - dangerous - distraction from your most vital area of focus in this moment - The Client!
If you take your eyes off the client right now, you run the risk of buying your stock high and selling it low. How so? You burned a lot of calories keeping clients during the downturn (never worked so hard for so little myself). If you focus internally now, you may have burned them in vain – only to have a competitor snatch the client away from you as you focus inward and miss the first signs of the recovery.
Instead…Spend as much of your time as possible with clients. Have progress report meetings to brag about all that you did for them in the past year, hold peer-to-peer executive lunches with them, bookmark web articles of interest and share them with clients, make twice the cold calls than you did last month, do a speaking engagement, double your contacts at a given account this week…
…However you want to…
…FOCUS ON THE CLIENT right now!
I was at a client site today and was offered a the $.05 tour of the facility. Besides being extremely cool (the client is a forge who makes parts for mining equipment and other heavy industries so it looks like 10-ton Legos being pounded out of pure metal!) I learned an invaluable amount of information from my tour-guide ranging from: their business, competition, pricing, staffing, assets, market positioning, strengths and weaknesses, future plans, go-to-market strategy, corporate pains, and a 30-year history of the company. You can’t buy information like that. ALWAYS take the nickel tour!
It’s the end of the week. Depending on how yours went, you either have 20 pounds of sand and a 10 pound bag and you’re wondering how your going to get it done, or maybe you are at the end of a long week and wondering if you have the steam to keep going and finish strong. 
