Brian Tracy answers how entrepreneurs can handle financial insecurity. He says most spend only 11% of their time on sales and marketing, when they should spend 80% on prospecting, presenting, and closing. Double your activity in those areas and you'll double your income.
Hi there. Throughout the year, I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences, and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.
David from Facebook asks, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs struggling through the financial insecurity of a new business?
Well, the biggest problem with entrepreneurs is that they don't spend enough time selling their product. They think they do, but the studies are pretty quite exhaustive. They've asked new business owners, entrepreneurs, how important is sales and marketing to you? And they say, oh, it's very important. Most important thing of all, it's the lifeblood of my business. Well, that's good. Well, the next question is, how much of your time do you spend each day on sales and marketing? Contacting customers directly all day long. All day long. That's all I do all day long. Send out emails, phone people all day long. Well, great. Third question is, do you mind if we sort of do a little time in motion, study with you and follow you around for a month with a camera and a stopwatch and see how much time you actually spend in direct contact with customers? No problem. No problem. After a month or two, they come back and they say, we've got our results. Well, what is it? 11%. The average business owner spends 11% of their time on sales and marketing. And all the rest is playing on their computer and talking to their friends and working up their plans and having coffee and lunch with their buds and masterminding and brainstorming and things like that. Spend 11% of their time selling. So here's a very simple technique. Spend 80% of your time face to face with customers. You have only three things when you start a business. They're called the golden triangle of success. They are prospecting, presenting, and closing. That is all you do. If you are not face to face with a prospect, face to face or in direct contact with a person who is interested in buying your product or service and is capable of paying for it, you're not working. As I say, if you're not doing that, you might as well stay at home and pull the covers up over your head. When I work with entrepreneurial audiences, I'll ask them sort of two questions. I'll say, why do you get up in the morning? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And they'll say, well, blah, blah, blah, and I say, well, you get out of bed so you can make more money. You don't get out of bed so you can earn less money. You get out of bed so you can make more money. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. So you go to work or you get to work. Now how do you make more money? So we call make more money. Mmm. That's why you get up in the morning. Well, how do you make more money? It's sms and that means sell more stuff. You see, there is no way to generate revenues aside from selling more stuff. You can't borrow yourself or cost cut yourself into financial success. The only way you can succeed is you've got to sell more stuff. And so the only time you're working is when you're selling more stuff. If you're not selling more stuff, you're not working. Now if you say, well, what about my Internet and what about my website and everything else? You do that when there are no customers available to be seen or to be spoken to. I learned this at the beginning of my career. So do that stuff before 7am and after 7pm, unless you have customers you see in the evening, then you do it after that and you do it on weekends as you do not do any paperwork, you do not do anything that is not sms. Selling more stuff, prospecting, presenting and closing all day long. Unless you have so much business that you're throwing up with money that you're having to go to the bank two or three times a day to deposit enormous amounts of cash because you're selling so much of your product. If you are not selling huge amounts of your product, it means you're not calling on enough people. So I say to people, they say to me, how do I double my income? I say, simple, double your activity rate. It's true all over the world. What do you mean? See twice as many people sell more stuff. That's the only way you could do it. Remember Peter Drucker's wonderful observation, there are no results inside the business. All the results are outside the business, all the results are out there with the customers. No results inside the business. And I could talk about this all day long, but it's a pretty simple thing. You want to solve your financial problems, sell more stuff. Want to sell more stuff. Prospect, present and close. And do that 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time should be traveling between prospects. And don't think you're going to send out email messages because everybody's favorite button on the keyboard is the delete button, you send out an email message, they go, di ti ti ti ti ti ti, including yours. The only thing they respond to is personal contact on the phone or face to face. Good luck. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas, so the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you? Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.
