Today, after leaving the office I asked myself, "What have I done to grow my business today?" This started me thinking....
How can I determine if what I did today actually pushed me forward to my goal and was worth repeating? I know that a lot of the time people have a hard time not just doing what they should do to grow their business, but was it effective? Of course you can measure a degree of success by increased sales figures, but sometimes a relationship or contact developed may not mean immediate business that you can measure monetarily. So how do you measure that type of success?
I never end my business day without asking myself that simple growth question, and if the answer is nothing, then I make a phone call or contact someone on my List of 10. Now my list of 10 is actually much longer than 10 now but I have never removed anyone from the list since I started it, and I was just considering trimming down the list as a time management exercise since it takes many weeks to cycle through my list at 5 contacts per day.
I was glad to learn that they were talking about me with their friends. I have a client that I haven't received business from in a long while even though I always ask for referrals. So when I received a call one day asking for a prequalification, I asked how they heard about me and was shocked to hear that he was referred by someone I had spoken with just that week from my list. When we talked, my previous client never mentioned they had a referral and when I called to thank him, I asked him why he didn't tell me about his friend then. His response was quite simple, I've done loans for friends of his before. He even named a few clients that I had closed loans for recently but had never mentioned his name. While I may have wished he had called me to give me the contact information, it was still a nice way to determine that my actions were worthwhile. And since I had just been thinking about trimming down the list to only people who send me regular business, well...lesson learned.
I may not always get business from these people each time I speak with them, and that's ok! As long as they aren't giving the business to someone else.
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