Are You Hanging on to Dead Prospecting Tactics?

I have a question for you today. Are you hanging on to dead prospecting tactics? Is it killing your business or are you getting zero results doing the same old same old?

I really want you to think about those questions for a minute because when you can honestly answer yes, you’re taking the first step toward success.

Prospecting can be tricky for two main reasons – 1) You have so many avenues and some are more costly than others; and 2) It’s hard to know if a promotion (marketing) tactic will work until you execute it.

So, how do you know when it’s time to hang up an prospecting tactic? Here are a few ways to evaluate a tactic before you retire it. 

1. How much time and money are you putting into a tactic? What’s your return? To determine this, you need to look at a few numbers: 
   
   
   • Cost of tactic/No. of leads developed = Cost per lead
   • Time spent on tactic ÷ No. of leads developed = Time per lead
   
   The first question leads you to the real numbers behind a tactic and your time spent. If the numbers don’t add up, you may want to consider something new.  
    
2. How long have you given a tactic to work? If you just started a lead calling campaign and you’re only 20 names into a list of 200, you won’t know the results until you finish that list. You’ll want to evaluate the returns mentioned in the first evaluation factor before you purchase new leads. Expect to get a 1-3% (1-3 appointments out of 100) success rate with a lead list. If you average that, it’s probably a good tool to keep.
    
3. If you find you’re losing money on a tactic, it may not be worth your time or money. Especially if it’s time consuming – like a networking group that has a required meeting schedule. If you’re time-strapped and money-strapped (who isn’t when they are starting out?), then it’s time to consider whether it’s worth your time, energy and money.
    
4. What is the learning curve? For instance, I received an invite to connect on LinkedIn with a guy from my local area. He runs a nonprofit and has a network marketing business. I usually accept LinkedIn connection requests (if we know someone in common or have a shared group). Well, about two weeks later, I got this message via LinkedIn: 
   
   Subject: Hello there
   Personal invitation to my networking event, sponsored by [his company name] Oct 25@7:00p, Thurs and/or Oct 27@4:00p. Door prizes, free refreshments. Bring business cards and friends. RSVP by email or call XXX.”
   The lesson of this example is that the guy misused the tactic. LinkedIn is a professional networking site. That means all communications need at least three elements: a personal greeting, context to how we know the person and a personalized invitation. Not just the words “personal invitation,” when it’s clear you’re sending this to a list of people. This borders on spam.
   
   And it contains a great lesson: If you’re not going to use the tactic properly, you’ll get ignored, or worse, reported for abuse. So, unless you’re willing to take the time to learn a tactic and its best practices, it’s time to hang it up.

Before you get frustrated and say nothing works in the Ambit Opportunity, I urge you to go back to business basics: Look at the numbers, time and learning curve. When you analyze your promotion tactics, you’ll see which ones can be killed off and which ones to focus on.

Your Turn

Did you ever have a promotion tactic that was just draining your bank account or energy level? How did you deal with it? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Where to Start with Finding Prospects

Here's a brilliant question from Chester:

”Where do I start with finding people to talk to about the business? How do I advertise the business to obtain qualified prospects?”

Thanks, Chester, for a valuable question. It’s our most common question and one that needs constant revisiting.

The thing I want to focus on today is the first part of your question – “Where do I start?”

The first thing you need to do is sit down and figure out “who wants or needs our service” and “who wants or needs your business.” This is a step every business must take – even those outside Ambit & network marketing.

In order to let people know about your business, you must first find a need that your business fills for an individual, whether it’s the service or business opportunity.

I recommend you spend a little time with our company information and figure out what the unique selling propositions (USPs) are for our service (HINT: FREE Energy) and business opportunity. Then, put yourself in your customers’ and potential team members’ shoes. Think about why they would need our service so much they would be willing to trade money to fill that need in their life.

Once you’ve figured that step out, it’s time to figure out where you need to promote your business. I have a number of resources including our free training blog and my lead program source (where you buy pre-qualified leads) to get you started.

You may also want to check out my new webinar & training system – Meetup Magic for Ambit Consultants. I host this webinar with my special guest Jackie Ulmer. Jackie has developed a large downline and starts with finding people who she has something in common with through groups at Meetup.com. In-person networking is my favorite way to find prospects because you get to see them and build rapport.

However, there are numerous ways to find prospects, but you must first understand how our service/business work and how they help a prospect. You need this valuable info to get started on the right track. I know you can do it!

Your Turn

Give Chester some ideas of how you first started promoting your business in the comments below. What worked? What didn’t?

Spooky Time Thief No. 5 – Bad Communication

Do you remember playing the game called “telephone” when you were a kid? You sat in a line and one person whispered a piece of information to the person next to him or her and it passed from child to child until it reached the end of the line. The kid sitting at the end had to repeat what he/she heard out loud.

The result? The final statement rarely ended up being the same as the first. It’s fine when it’s a simple story or something nonessential. But it becomes a spooky time thief when words are twisted and bad communication results.

And in this day of multiple channels of communicating – text, email, phone, chat, etc. – bad communication is shared even more than ever. And it can cost you time and money.

It’s not an easy task, but it starts with good listening. Here are a few ways to ensure you catch bad communication before it catches you in a time warp:So, how do you catch this spooky time thief and reduce bad communications?

1. Reply back to the person who sent you an email and confirm the dates, times, etc. 
2. Relay back what you just heard on phone calls and in conversations. Take notes and review them when you are adding items to your calendar or prospect file.
3. Keep emails, texts and other e-communications short and to the point.
4. Always confirm appointments, get directions and clarify questions before meetings.

These four tips won’t save you from bad communication all the time, but they will greatly reduce the chance that you encounter bad communications. And any time you can do that, you’ll save time.

Action Item: Plagued by bad communications in your business? Check out two training resources – Ambit Pro Inviter Series and Brilliant Communicator Series. 

Get Organized for Ambit Success

How can someone be effective and make a lot of money with their Ambit Business if they can’t organize their life so that they are productive? They can’t!

Organization Worth Millions

It’s come to my attention through working with some new consultants that what is really keeping them from success is their lack of organization. After sharing with them what I’m about to share with you, they said, “that information was worth millions of dollars!”

Defining Organized & Productive

Organized means someone who plans their work activities efficiently so as to produce a desired result. Those who don’t plan, don’t have time to plan – nor be productive.

Productive means producing a specific result. Anybody can be busy. In fact, most people are. But are they producing their goals?

The Four Steps to Organization & Productivity

1. Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs.
2. Predicting or estimating what needs to be done in order for the outcome to occur.
3. Seeing that each item that needs to get done does get done and in proper sequence.
4. Writing lessons learned so that you improve.

Seeing or Visualizing Outcomes

Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs. A simple example of this would be that I’m organizing a business meeting (business opportunity meeting). So, I’ll start with the desired outcome(s):

• I see or visualize or, even better, diagram the event on paper.
• The event is in a professional and convenient location.
• The meeting is very professional and valuable to all that attend.
• I see 250 people attending with half of those as guests.
• I see the room full of energetic people having fun.
• I see the guests very interested in the meeting’s content.
• I see 100 of the guests becoming customers and/or signing up for the business after the meeting.
• I see the consultants excited and ready to do another event.

That’s the first step to being organized and productive – fully seeing the desired outcome BEFORE the event occurs.You get the idea of how to visualize?

Predicting or Estimating Projects & Tasks

Step 2 is to predict or estimate what needs to be done in order for the desired outcome to occur. This is the step where you break down your vision into projects and tasks that get done.

So, let’s continue with our example of putting on a business opportunity event. I break my vision of this event into three main projects.

• Project 1 - Hotel meeting location.
• Project 2 - The meeting content.
• Project 3 - People buying products and signing up.

See, I just broke my vision into 3 main projects.

So now that it’s broken into projects, let’s now break each project down into doable tasks that we can check off. By the way, that’s how you test whether you’ve simplified your project into a task or not – whether you can check it off as done. Tasks get the project done. Projects get the vision or goal done. Here are some sample tasks for each of our projects:

Project 1 -  Hotel meeting location 

• Contact 3 hotels in desirable locations and check availability and price.
• Decide on one location and a date.
• Get contract signed; make deposit if necessary.
• Email the hotel a list of items I want in the room – # of chairs, the room temperature, chair arrangement, etc.

Project 2 - Meeting content

• Decide length of content.
• Decide what content will be presented.
• Decide who will do each section of the content.
• Decide rehearsal date. Get all presenters’ agreement to attend.

Project 3 – People becoming customers and signing up for the business.

For Project 3 to occur, my consultants need to be trained to invite guests, gather customers and sign people up to the team.

• Set up six team calling dates to ensure 375 guests. If you want 250 people, one half or 125 are guests, and one out of 3 actually show up, you need 375 confirmed guests.
• After the first team calling event, do one hour training on how to customer gather at the event.
• After the second team calling event, do one hour of training on customer scripts of what to say to promote FREE energy.
• After the third team calling event, do one hour of customer gathering rehearsals.
• After the fourth team calling event, hand out customer signup forms, sales aids, and customer  agreements each needs to have at the event in case a computer is not available  Ensure they understand why each is necessary.
• After the fifth team calling event, have consultants team up and walk each through how to sign up a new consultant.
• Ensure each consultant knows to have customer signup forms,  sales aids and consultants agreements at the event AND knows how to properly sign up a new consultant.
• Plan a fun dinner after the sixth team calling event. Make it light and fun. Give awards for most dials, most appointments and most improved.

So what have we done so far? We’ve put our vision on paper. We’ve broken our vision down into three projects and broken each project down into doable tasks.

Getting Tasks Done – In Proper Sequence

This is a quality control check. The person who writes these projects and tasks does not have to do each of these items but should quality check each item to ensure it “looks” the way they have envisioned. You are the “visionary,” therefore hold the responsibility that everything occurs as you envisioned.

If during this step, you see a bunch of problems and it is not at all looking like you had envisioned it – DON’T THINK IT’S A DISASTER! Examine what specific thing isn’t working correctly and rewrite the project or the task to change its direction.

Reviewing Lessons Learned

Here is an example of reviewing lessons learned. Take out your project list and write down the lessons learned.

 

Project 1 Meeting Lessons 

• JW Marriott Hotel in the Galleria is very professional and is in a great location. Use them again. Build relationship with general manager; then negotiate a better rate.
• We need to warn guests of the $8 parking fee or give them an alternative to park at the diner across the street.

Project 2 Meeting Content Lessons

• Train John better on introductions. Specifically, he needs to look at the audience more and not bounce back and forth on his feet.
• Sue was great at each point of the presentation. Slide 7 has a typo in the headline.

Project 3 Customer/Signup Lessons

• Mark, Paul, Jane didn’t bring customer forms and FREE energy bills. Retrain them on why this is important.
• Too many no-shows. Drill confirmation script for next event.
• Chuck is a closing MASTER! Have him teach at the next team calling.

Use This Organization Structure for Anything

What I’ve just shared with you is completely scalable. This means that you can use the format for an in-home where you’re planning on having 10 of your best friends over. You could also use the same format to host 5,000 people at a regional event with speakers from the corporate office. You could use it to build a kitchen table or even to teach your children a foreign language.

The Missing Piece in Organization

If you ever find that you feel stuck, overwhelmed or you don’t want to do it anymore, the cause is normally that you’ve not broken the project down into small enough chunks yet. So make each task something you CAN do.

I hope you can see the value in what I’ve taught you in this post. Many leaders think that building their Ambit business is “event coordinating.” It’s not.

The missing piece is that the event coordinator’s job is to ensure the event goes well. The consultant in contrast, who puts on an event, must make sure the outcome goes well. The event coordinator’s job is Project 1 — only.

A consultant’s job is Project 1, 2, and 3. Many leaders miss this. They have events every week, sometimes twice a week and big events every month. But they never do 2 and 3.

Next Steps: Instantly access FREE First-Class Ambit training and to learn how you can grow your Ambit business and long-term residual income.

Spooky Time Thief No. 4 – Disorganization

Where does the time go? Is it spooky time thieves or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

Are you constantly losing your keys? Or is it your phone or glasses? Are you spending more time looking for your lead list than you are actually calling leads?

These are all symptoms of a spooky time thief known as disorganization. This thief is elusive and hard to catch, but when you do – it’s a huge plus for your life and your business.

The biggest obstacle for disorganization is where to start. Some of you probably have a shelf of books on how to organize your life and business. You’ve tried the “systems” or even enlisted some help. And it probably works for a while. Until you get sick or take a break. Or get tired of being organized.

Being organized doesn’t have to be that hard. You also don’t have to organize everything in one day.

In a recent post, I gave you my system for organization. You can use it for everything from organizing your cleaning list to your business project list. In this article, I give you a map for how to break projects into manageable tasks in four steps. Here are the overall steps (read the post for details):

1. Start with seeing or visualizing the desired outcome before it occurs.
2. Predict or estimate what needs to be done in order for the outcome to occur.
3. See that each item that needs to get done does get done and in proper sequence.
4. Write lessons learned so that you improve.

When you structure your projects like this, you’ll find more organization because you know the outcomes and you’re tracking it every step of the way. And you’re training yourself to be even more organized when you review the lessons learned.

But what do you do about the lost items? The searching for this or that?  I recommend that your first project be – get personally organized and use these four steps to do it. Take it room by room or start in your workspace.

Action Item: Capture this spooky time thief with the Performance Tracker and you’ll really start to see results in your business.

Spooky Time Thief No. 3 – Procrastination

Where does the time go? Is it spooky time thieves or is it a lack of something else? Over the next few days, we’re going to focus on who our time thieves are and how we can get rid of them once and for all.

Everyone knows the danger of procrastination, and it can really steal your time. Putting off what you can do today until tomorrow is sometimes necessary, but it also creates stress and a pile of to-do items.

The result of this time thief is often inaction. Why? When you procrastinate, you get to a point of not knowing what to do next. Or you get in a pattern of only doing the tasks that you enjoy.

Then, you get stuck wondering why your Ambit business is stuck.

The solution to procrastination? A list of activities broken down into tasks with an outcome.

Action Item: For more training on this, I recommend you check out Performance Tracker. It will help you break down your activities and track your progress. It may be just the thing you need to capture this spooky time thief once and for all.

How to Salvage a Scattered Day When You Work Your Ambit Business

Ever felt like you started your week late? Or a hurricane named Sandy gets in the way? You know the days. You don’t have your ducks in a row and everything is Manic Monday. Remember that song from the Bangles?

The laundry’s not done. The dishes are piling up. And you have this Ambit business that needs your attention, but all these distractions are adding up. How do you clear up the mind clutter and get on with your day and business?

How to Salvage a Scattered Day

This plan is for salvaging the days when nothing starts off right. If most days start off like this, you’ll need to spend a few days really focusing on where your time is going. Maybe you really do just have too much to do and need to let a few things go. I recommend you read my free report How to Build a Huge Ambit Organization Part Time for more help on this.

Here are three steps to getting your day back after it gets off track. I do recommend that you feed anyone (including yourself) and get any kids off to school before you tackle this exercise. You’ll need just 15-20 minutes to save your day.

1. Take five minutes to review your daily schedule. You do have one of these, right? If you don’t, you need to start one. Map your day in 30-minute increments and put in the big rocks (or big tasks) you need to accomplish. Don’t try to do them all at once. Schedule a time to promote your business, a time for admin work and a time for talking with your team, etc. You can see how to do this in this previous post – Get Off to a Great Start with Your Business. 
   
   If you don’t have a schedule, spend five minutes filling out this free template (PDF file)  to plug in all your must-do activities. Add in everything –personal care, exercise, kids’ homework and playtime, meals and meal prep, phone calls, etc. You can get a much more detailed one in Performance Tracker that helps you track your business activities in more detail.
    
2. Set 1-3 priority goals for the day. These are the things you have to get done. Everything else doesn’t get a priority. Put these on the top of your schedule. 
   
   
3. Write down a reward for the end of the day. Maybe it’s a relaxing bubble bath while Dad reads a bedtime story. Maybe it’s a chapter of that new mystery book you’ve been dying to read. Whatever it is, write it down on your schedule. Nothing helps you stay on track more than a reward at the end of the day.

Your Turn

What do you do when your day starts off all wrong? Share your tips in the comments below.