Keeping Your Eye on the Right Numbers

In my business planning classes, I've often advocated knowing how much money you need to make in any month to reach your goals, and that's fine as it stands. But there is a danger when you think that you directly affect those numbers. By force of effort, you cannot force people to do business with you or to work on your schedule. What you can control, though, is the amount and quality of your effort.

To be successful, you don't keep saying "I have to sell X to this client." That feeds a sense of neediness which can actually drive customers away. Your target number is supposed to be a goal that you can use to see how your progress goes. But if you're hiking, you don't get to the summit faster by thinking, "I have to get to the summit faster." Rather, you put one foot in front of the other, concentrate on keeping your cadence, and continually look for the best route.

In business, and that's what we're all in, the equivalent is that you focus on making another sales call, on generating another idea, on following up with another client. You can't compel someone to send a check your way, but you can make yourself work for another hour on efforts that to go marketing and sales. When you do that, you get on the right side of statistics and have the law of averages working for you. You take care of that one extra thing to keep a client happy or call one more source to set up a greater chance that a client will ask you to do more work in the future.

So, there are two numbers. There is the goal that shows you the way, and then there are those numbers you can directly influence. Know where you want to go, keep directing your efforts where you can effectively, and eventually you will succeed.