Success or Excuse? Can't Have Both

Here is a true statement: "You can make money or you can make excuses, but you can't make both."

Many have heard it, but it's become a #sales cliche over the years. But the wisdom is in understanding the math. ?? The reason you can't do both, is because the cost for each is equal to the other. Let me explain -

?? The cost for making excuses is lost income potential

?? The cost for creating significant income is eliminating excuses

Here's an example to help drive the point home:

Premise Assumptions: You are tasked with booking 10 meetings with prospective accouts for yourself in a given day through various methods. You typically close 50% of the deals you engage in. Your average commission is $1000 per deal. On this day, it is rainy and cold outside - a gray day. Your technology that you use for your job is having issues. You forgot to pack a lunch. You didn't sleep well the night before. You have 2 current customers that have issues they're expecting you to solve.

Scenario 1 - Excuse Wins

You come into the office late because it was rainy and traffic was a bear, you go back and forth with #IT to get your technology working which eats up a bunch of time. You see the emails from your current customers and immediately go into panic mode and start chasing down every possible solution and blaming everyone for the problem, which causes stress and sucks away time. Now it's lunch time and you're hungry, so you leave the office to grab a bite and take a break from the stress. You get back to the office and didn't prepare well for your calls, so you focus on "research" instead of action, meanwihle being interrupted by people following up on your customer problems. The end of the day comes - you managed to squeeze in a whopping 10 phone calls resulting in 1 appointment being scehdueld. $0 income potential generated today.

Scenario 2 - Success Wins

You know the weather is rough and traffic will be difficult, so you get a bit of an earlier start to make up the difference. You start your day by grabbing an extra cup of coffee and briefly reviewing your list of accounts to call on. You put in a ticket to get your technology working properly, and assess what resources you have to figure out a way to make the most of your time while they work on it. You see the messages from your two clients that have problems, send them a note saying that you'll pull in necessary resources to get the problem addressed and schedule a time on your calendar for later in the day to follow up with those resources to make sure progress on a solution is being made. You focus on getting started with your outreach efforts. Couple hours go by, you've had your no's and yes's, managed to schedule 5 meetings, and now it's time for lunch. Your forgot lunch, but need to focus on the task at hand even though you're tired and hungry - so you order doordash and put it out of your mind while you take a 20min power-nap and then refocus on prepping for the second half of your efforts for the day. Lunch arrives and while you eat - you follow up with your resources to make sure your customers are taken care of and communicate the status back to them. Then, it's back at it. You get another 5 appointments scheduled. The day ends and you've hit your goal of 10 meetings set. $5000 income potential generated today.

In both scenarios, the person, task, and circumstances are the same. The mindset is different - which makes the approach to the day different. Finally, the results are different. Very different.

Which one will win today for you?

#wintheday