Happy New Year and welcome back to work if you were taking the holidays off! 2016 is here which means it’s time to start marching towards our goals! In order to march towards our goals we have to explore our path. The path to reaching goals is built on two principles I believe strongly in.
The first principle is process. Process is huge for any agency and one of the biggest challenges the agencies we work with is process or in some cases a lack of process. As an agency leader who wants to achieve your mammoth goals, you will need to think critically throughout the whole year if you are employing the correct process for everything in the agency. The reason I say this is because you may find that either your current process or lack of process could be costing your agency money, time and customers. When was the last time you sat with your service team to discuss the current process for remarketing? That’s something to consider if your goals is tied to your retention. When was the last time you sat with your commercial producers and discussed using LinkedIn as a sales strategy for developing new business?
Many agencies can be stuck in outdated processes that will ultimately hinder us from hitting our goals or even set us further back. Our goals cannot be approached with the same strategy and process from before because we will likely get the same outcome. My challenge is for you to think about the processes that exist in your agency and examine and rethink at least one. The second challenge is to ask your team what processes they are lacking and appoint a team member to start framing a process around it.
The goal of these exercises, along with adding a fresh coat of paint to your processes, is to create the second biggest challenger to goals and that is efficiencies in the agency. Start by thinking about how you structure your week and begin building efficiencies into your day that you didn’t otherwise have. I have two examples from my own set.
- Goal – Double my outbound sales call volume.
Efficiency Blocker – I work in an often congested part of the city so if I leave to get lunch it often takes me 45 minutes to get to and from and then I’ll wolf my food down so I can get back to hitting the phones.
Efficiency Pledge – Unless completely impossible I’m bringing lunch from home. It will take me 10 minutes at most to put together the night before and now I will save myself at least 45 minutes that can be better suited towards making calls to give myself more shots on goal. I’ll also save some money in the long run!
- Goal – Qualify more opportunities before I call them.
Efficiency Blocker – I don’t like doing pre-emptive research.
Efficiency Pledge – Do the hard work first in my day. We have aspects of our job that are not our favorites and for me it’s doing pre-emptive research. Googling an agency, reading their story, looking at what products they offer, seeing if they have articles written about them etc… It’s my least favorite thing to do as I’d rather get on the phone immediately and start learning about them through conversation. However, this isn’t the most effective strategy. With that being said, I am planning my hard work for the beginning of the day to get it out of the way rather than committing to doing it later in the day where I’m likely gassed out from calling and would rather work on proposals or marketing.
Look at your day to day and critically think about how you can save yourself time without sacrificing the quality of your work. You’ll find that you have the potential for hours of time saved throughout the week which can be better utilized towards achieving those goals!
Have a great start to the year and if you need an accountability partner to help you build process and add efficiencies to your agency give us a call! We specialize in making your life and agency more profitable! We’ve also created a killer Goals Workbook to help you stay on track. You can download it here https://www.agencyperformancepartners.com/workbook-performance-through-goal-tracking/
