A phrase I’ve been using lately in my teachings is “sharpening your saw,” meaning that you should be honing your skills. However, in order to keep it as sharp as possible, you’ll need to catalog all of your best practices and systematically design a sales process that follows suit.
Why do you need to do this now? Because it forces you to work on your business rather than just in your business. It's an aphorism that successful entrepreneurs swear by. One example of this is Trulia, an online real estate service that had a pitiful closing ratio with brokers as they entered the Great Recession of 2008 to 2010. Realizing that they were now facing even more challenging headwinds to widespread adoption of service, they reexamined every part of their value chain and prospecting approach and made some major fixes. By the end of that recession, just two years later, they had elevated their prospect conversion ratio ten-fold to 20% rather than 2%.
This isn’t a fluke. 50% of Fortune 500 companies were started in either a recession or depression. And you might be surprised to learn that many of today’s tech giants including Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox all started in that same Great Recession. How do so many people start successful ventures in bad economies? For one thing, the cost of capital is lower. Labor is more plentiful. Office space is less expensive, and so is advertising. Perhaps most importantly, society is yearning for change, which welcomes even radical new ideas, mostly because the current situation isn’t working. It’s time to pivot to something more interesting and effective.
So, let’s fast-forward to the present. This is the time to “sharpen the saw,” taking the time to work on your business. Collect everyone’s best strategies and make no exceptions - it’s time to implement the best practices for your entire team! And not only that, put the extra work in so there are boundaries, checks and balances, templates - all of the things that will help keep you accountable.
