Elevate, Acclimate, Accelerate: Planning for the Success of Your Team

As we approach the end of the year, it’s time to think about business planning and take a moment to stop and assess where we are and where we’re headed for 2019.

Many of our teams and elite coaching clients will close hundreds of transactions in 2018, and have to decide what’s next. As a coach, you’ll often hear me tell a client that they should set their goals to double. While this is fun and exciting to talk about, it’s a lot easier to double your production when you’re doing 20 sales a year than when you’re doing 400.

In order to accomplish this “double” goal, you have to build a business plan and then execute that plan. Whether or not you’ve heard it said before, “For a ship bound for no harbor, no wind is favorable,” it’s a statement that I couldn’t agree with more. Set your goals just beyond your grasp, then start to execute.

During the elevate phase:

Set high goals just beyond your grasp.
Be clear on four pillars of income, and make sure each pillar is capable of hitting 100 percent of your income goal.
Look for new opportunities, and make sure you’re focused on low-hanging fruit with your database, as well as the repeat and referral side of your business.
Get your operations in order and complete systems for everything you duplicate three times.
Spend an hour of focused energy each day on your business, rather than transactional activities.

As you elevate your sales, as well as your production, training, lead generation and prospecting, you’ll begin to get busy. Keep in mind that the most important part of the climb to success is to know when it’s okay to take your foot off the gas and acclimate, or evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Oftentimes, in growth mode, we don’t take the time to make sure our clients are receiving the ultimate experience at every level of the interaction.

During the acclimate phase:

Look at your transaction workflows and scripts and dialogues.
Always under-promise and over-deliver.
Make sure you’re receiving five-star reviews.
Double-check with your agents to make sure they aren’t hitting burnout or having success at the expense of family or other important personal things.
Evaluate lead sources and ROI. Keep in mind that six times the spend should be the minimum level of return on marketing dollar for lead-generation systems.
Review your operations manual to make sure all systems are documented and duplicatable so that no one person can control the success or failure of the business.

Once your plan is in place, and you’ve taken the time to execute and review the progress of what’s working and what isn’t, it’s time to kick it into high gear and accelerate—or perform at a higher level of speed with a higher level of ease.

In this phase, we know what works and what doesn’t, so we can simply turn up the systems, expand the marketing to new markets and bring on the talent required to follow up and close the opportunities created by execution of our plan.

If you follow this formula, the road to “double” becomes very clear and very real.

Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems (385-282-7112), an international speaking, consulting and coaching company that specializes in performance coaching and building successful power agents and teams. Contact him at Verl@WorkmanSuccessSystems.com. For more information, please visit www.workmansuccesssystems.com.