The spirit of becoming your best is one of continuous improvement. In other words, how do we become better at everything that we do? Now, this applies in our personal lives. It applies in our relationships. But it also applies within our professional responsibilities. Now, the first four of the principles of highly successful leaders have to do with transformational leadership. In other words, how do we take things and improve them? And that might be revenues, sales, our bottom line, the relationships with our employees, building our culture.
Well, I’d like to just illustrate how “Lead with a vision and manage with a plan, specifically having clearly actionable goals,” can help every single one of us. We have the opportunity to work with organizations that are having a difficult time in getting their sales to move upwards. We also have the chance to work with companies that are absolutely best of class, that have had continual excellence in their revenues from year to year.
One of those examples is a company I had the opportunity to visit with the president last week. Last year, they had their best year ever. This is a company that is 25 years old, and we’ve had the good fortune of working with them a number of years.
And so as we talked about this principle: “Lead with a vision, be best in class in our industry, and then setting clear, actionable goals,” so we set up this strategic rhythm. And these are goals that are clearly written. They’re smart goals. And as I talked with this CEO, he said, “I’d like to share our application of having these clear, clearly written goals, and the impact it’s already having in this year.”
And they have seven major sales reps, and they simply sat down, and remember, this is coming on the heels of a best year ever. And they sat down and they said, “How can we do better?” See, that is the mindset. That’s the spirit of becoming your best. How do we maintain real growth year after year?
And they came to the conclusion that one of the things they’re doing, in addition to everything else they’re doing from previous years adding new business processes and services, is simply this. Get this. Here is the clearly written, actionable goal: Is to add two new clients per month. That’s it. And they all looked at one another and said, “We can do this as an organization.”
And so, they’ve already started doing it. They calculate the impact on their organization with this change alone will add $300,000 more in revenues per month. And that’s already taken place.
So this is an illustration, as we start thinking about how to become our best in every level. That as we have clear, written, actionable goals, the impact that they can have. And they’re already on their way to having another great year. They’ve already finished the first month of the year. They’ve got 11 more, but it also was another best month. Way to go team!
Best wishes,
Steve Shallenberger