BFO? Brilliant Flash of the Obvious.
Talent and Habit can cost us a lot of time and tons of money.
The last few days we’ve shared some ideas that will save you some time. It stated with a riddle, then Leadership and finally Organized Planning.
Let’s take a look at the time savers that even experienced folks miss. A lot.
TALENT
I came into networking and had been trained in direct sales by the best in the world, W. Clement Stone. I had some talent to go along with world famous training.
Ut-Oh.
If is was not for a very determined, inexperienced young lady this BFO would have been missed and the peace and prosperity may have been missed too.
The best way to tell this story is to turn the clock back to 1995. Davene Grant shows up in my growing but not exploding downline and insisted on 2 things. She was going to be successful and I was going to help her. She was fabulous and is probably why she’s now known as ‘The Fabulous Davene.’
I was making about $5000 a month when some personal coaching started. She said she was short on a names list and asked me where I was getting all these people to talk to, local business owners. I showed her a method I had developed for getting 25 local people to be expecting a call. Davene, who was not yet ‘The Fabulous Davene,’ went out and did what I told her.
“….it’s not working,” she told me.
“It takes a little time to get the pipeline bursting.” I say.
2 more weeks roll by. Still not working.
“I want to go with you and watch everything you do,” she demands. I say fine.
We are working about 15 minutes, this method takes only 40 minutes a couple times a week. She says, ‘You did this….and you did that…..you didn’t tell me this and that.”
“It’s common sense.” I say, sensing I am in for a little scolding. ‘NO IT”S NOT’ she barks.
She explains what she saw. We go over the ‘this and that’ and within a month she is hitting pin levels.
I ask her to look at my trainings. Same thing, me pleading it’s just common sense and the now Fabulous Davene barking that it isn’t. I get hit with a double BFO.
My meager talents had been developed, well trained and fire tested by experience. Here is the BFO ~ inexperienced people just don’t know the nuances experienced people do. Davene improved my trainings 10 fold and created another BFO.
BFO 1 ~ Figure out what someone needs to learn, put the training together then get with inexperienced people, one or two, and train them. See if they understand it ~ the proof will be in the printout. Have the inxperienced help you put things in a lauguage they can understand.
BFO 2 ~ Under no circumstance should you use jargon. People want to be a part of something bigger, jargon makes it smaller. And, they won;t understand what you are really trying to communicate. Upline, downline. crossline and clothesline don’t compare to words like team and partners.
This may seem like along way to say, “keep it simple,” but it’s not.
It’s how to have the mindset to keep it simple.
Oh, by the way, after she ‘pruned’ the trainings my income doubled and I got asked to do 34 Super Saturdays [all sold out*],over then next 12 monthsleading to 4x the income.
Don’t take experience dues you’ve paid for granted.
If you do you’ll block inexperienced people from learning. All leaders make this mistake.
HABIT
Anyone who says they like making prospecting calls has never made them, not really. The habit of calling reps to pick up their spirits, tell them about events, encourage them, ect., is a good thing in moderation. Making these ‘feel good calls’ [you know, pretending to be helping others so we can avoid prospecting calls….come on, you do it] quickly gets picked up by your ego and turns into a habit.
Just as quickly, reps who also WANT to avoid prospecting calls start calling to ‘discuss’ everything from strategies about the marketing plan to who is going to be speaking at the next event to what is going on in their life/lives of the reps in their group who are not making calls…..yada, yada, yada…
This ‘habit’ is a back-breaker.
It’s safe.
Until it’s time to pay the price.
I was “helping” all these peeps and my business was flat. Was I really helping them or messaging my ego?
Rationalizing is what we do. We kid ourselves into believing that they need to be trained. It was getting up to five hours a day on everything but the one thing that would create new business.
BFO ~ 3 Business first, [remember OATS post?] Plan your work -daily tasks- then work your plan? Well, I was missing some of the time I scheduled for prospecting but not missing anything else…go figure. The BFO is when 2 reps are talking to each other we cannot grow.
We are BOTH IN ALREADY!
It hit me like a bolt out of the blue ~ ZING ~ for every hour 2 reps are on the phone, not only am losing 2 hours of production but I am teaching them to do what I am doing. YIKES
NEW HABIT. Get a conference call number if you don’t have one already and no matter what anyone asks, answer with this question. “What are you doing at 8:OO PM tonight? I will go over that at 8. Call me on this number.” [free conference call line, click here]
Now, when they call at 8 into the conference call # you simply make 3 ways with people that want to OR do your own personal recruiting. You are BUILDING and TRAINING at the same time. The more the merrier. Let’s be honest, a few new prospects in the pipleline answers all the questions.
It’s BIGGER that you can imagine. Guess what they will do? Same thing.
I am not saying we never have conversations with reps but we have them in ‘dead time,’ meaning too late to call prospects.
LEADERHIP. BFO ~ 4. Multiply everything you set in motion by 100 [representing 100 reps] then by 2.
1 rep talking to you for an hour x 100 = 100 reps. Use 100x so you can quickly and accurately identify the plus or minus of what you are doing, what you are setting in motion. WHy?
Whatever we set in motion will carry in motion
Do you want 1oo reps talking to each other – that’s 200 hours of production time.
Times 5 days a week. 1000 hours a week.
Times 50 weeks. 50,000 in lost hours.
What would be easier for you or I to get to the next level?
OPTION A: 50,000 hours of training reps ‘how to’ make calls by talking to each other about making calls?
OPTION B: 50,000 hours of reps training people to make calls by making calls and letting other reps listen?
Gee, that’s a tough one, eh?
I am going to go for OPTION B.
Real life? Reduce the 50,000 lost hours to 20,000. OK?
20,000 hours x 20 dials and hour is 400,000 more dials.
Yup, I am going for OPTION B.
So habits…..if you start with this one, other good habits that save time become a necessity because our businesses start booming and we don’t have time for those ego driven, prospect avoiding ‘feel good’ calls and other bad habits.
This type of training duplicates. It is a huge time saver. I have a reputation as a trainer, funny thing, I do almost no training one-on-one. Let ’em listen to you build.
It is a tremendous way to leverage your time, getting 2 things done at once. Recruiting and training.
This will save time and set the correct things in motion.
believe
mark januszewki
world’s laziest networker
