Episode 29 : Accelerate Your Sales Growth

Welcome to the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This podcast will give you all the tools to grow your business and live life on your terms. Millionaire agents and entrepreneurs think and act differently than others. This podcast will give you a simple, proven three step blueprint to grow your business. Over the past 31 years of research in your industry, Mike Stromso has created a unique philosophy called the three People Process and production Motion. This outside the box thinking and guidance provides agency entrepreneurs just like you the knowledge and tools you can quickly implement to explode your agency business. He has been there, done that, and he's still doing it. Wherever you are today, if you're starting with nothing or are well on your way to the success you desire, with the right people, processes and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromso.

Welcome to episode 29 of the Unstoppable Profit Podcast. This is Mike Stromso coming to you live from the Living Agency Laboratory. And today we will be revealing an extremely sought after training from our Be Unstoppable Boot Camp archives. How to accelerate your sales growth. Hope this helps. Are you guys interested in accelerated sales growth?

Let's go did it with some of our members, our higher achieving members recently. They accepted it extremely well and said it was absolutely business changing for them. And I know what happens when your business changes. What changes after your business, your life.

That's all we want. Okay, so let's talk about accelerated sales growth. The greatest tragedy.

Of all is that too many salespeople invest their entire lives in sales and it never occurs to them that they should commit themselves to becoming excellent at it. Self assessment. To reach the next level of success, you need to look in the mirror and occasionally assess what's working and what's not working.

We've already talked about that a little bit. Let me help you with the platform.

Are you know it alls or learn it alls nice. James talked about this last night and I didn't even know he's going to say that because I had this done long before. It's what you learn after you know it all accounts. I probably was reminded from James because he's there and I'm in pursuit what's working and what's not working.

Do we still have the classical music dialed up? Let me tell you what happened to the agent I was working with the other day. Or let me ask you a question first, raise your hand if your working column is bigger than your not working column. Got a few hands. All Right. Hands down, raise your hand if your not working column is bigger than your working column. Okay. We got a few hands. Okay. The agent the other day, the not working column was long and the working column was two items. I folded the piece of paper in half and I said, why don't you forget about what's on the other side of this piece of paper.

Got it. Why didn't you invest all the time that you were investing in the not working column and invest it in the working column? Got it. Okay, good. That's your tip for that. Okay, let's get to the next one. Action plan for improvement.

Now.

The what's not working column. I know what I just said. There may be some things there that are worth saving. There may be some things there that are not worth saving. Here's your opportunity to see if you're going to invest one ounce of energy in them or you're going to throw them out the window. Got it? That gives you a starting point and hopefully you at least started it so you can finish it if it needs to be finished. Next page.

I know we did a hard exercise this morning on your. Why didn't we? Did anybody get benefit out of that? Yes. Put your hand in there. Okay. Look at that. Don't look at me, look around. That's where all the answers are. Okay. Yeah. That's why we run through this. Because you're here. Right here, Supergirl. Thank you.

And you're here now and you're in the moment. So we want to help you. Okay? So sales. This is about sales. Get more clients, not keeping more clients. Get more clients and keep more of the clients you get. This is about getting more clients. Got it. Okay, good. List your most rewarding successes so far in 2016. Okay. List your biggest disappointments.

Alright. Know what they are. Awareness is a very powerful thing if you use it. Was there anything you could have done to lessen or eliminate these disappointments? Is a quick yes or no. Okay. To be a successful life, career or business, do they all work together?

Life, career, business. Life, career, business. Yeah. It's synchronicity, isn't it? You need four things. You need a crystal clear.

Transparent understanding of what it is you want to achieve. You need a passionate, burning desire.

You need a passionate desire. Forgive me. And burning. Why? That improves massive action. That's why we did that earlier today. I hope that over the last couple of hours you've been able to identify what that why is. Need a plan of action which points to how the success will be determined.

You need A specific deadline.

The purpose of a deadline is to dictate when you want to reach that goal or what your intended deadline is. Goals linked to a time frame create a practical sense of urgency. Okay. Some things you could put a goal on, like my why that I was talking about this morning. That's been going on for years. It was hard to put. I could have put a deadline on that, but maybe that's why I didn't achieve it sooner. Right.

So this is recommended from the best of the best out there. Okay? So you should be doing these things.

So what about obstacles? Things that you need to overcome.

When it gets its hardest is when you must persist.

Through things. Okay. When it feels resistance, we must persist more. I still didn't get that. Right, but you know what I mean. Okay, so what I want to encourage you to get started with today and you can transition this to whatever goal system you have, because I want you guys to always be in the mentality and never be in the complacency chair. Because my old adage is complacency kills. It will kill whatever you want to achieve. So do not, please, become complacent. Don't be settled. Don't ever arrive however you want to classify it. Okay? So I want you to write down one goal.

I want you to write down three obstacles that may prevent you from achieving that goal. And I want you to, underneath each obstacle list three possible solutions to the problem. I know that's hard after lunch. You guys all in? Good. All right, now we'll get into some more detailed stuff. The nuts and the bolts of. Everybody clear on a profit loss statement.

Especially those leaders. Really simple, isn't it? Income, expenses, and profit. How does it make you feel when the bottom number is in the black?

How does it make you feel when it's a lot bigger than you expected it to be?

Right.

So we're going to dive in a little bit here to this little device called the mirror of truth. Because the only thing standing between you and all the success you want, right there. Okay? It's detailed sometimes, so you have to be clear. And it takes a little bit of work. The only time success comes before work's in the dictionary. So just brain sprint for me. Jot down real quick. I would hope. And if you're a team member and you're producing, I hope that you would have some kind of idea what you're going to produce per month at your desk or what kind of, you know, premium your desk is generating or something similar to that. Or your department, if You're a marketing person. What are you trying to help your entire company achieve? Got it. Whatever your position is, you can be doing this. You should be doing this. Okay, so what is your revenue or premium goal for whatever it is you're responsible for in the organization? What is your monthly revenue premium goal? Okay, so that top one is. See it says 12 months in the second column. So it's asking for the 12 month goal and then break it down by monthly because it's easier to chew in bite sized pieces. And if it's not a small enough piece yet, break it down by week. And if it's not a small enough piece yet, break it down by day.

I've gone down to days. Sometimes I've never gone an hour. But why not? Whatever you need. Okay. Projected revenue from your current book.

New clients needed to reach the goal. How many do you know? Your average premium per new client that you write in your office. We use a buying hit ratio that reveals that number within our team in a mastermind concept in our third monthly meeting every month. Retention goal. If you're at 89, how are you going to get to 91? Or what do you want? What's your closing ratio? Do you know what that is? We have a buy and hit ratio sheet that helps us with that too. We share it as a team. We're at 39 last month. How are we going to make sure we're at 45? What do we need to do? What kind of support do we need from the entire team? What's our minimum account size? Do you know what are you going to say no to?

And refer to somebody else who likes it and does a better job with it so you can focus on that. What's working column? Proposals, quotes per month. I don't like quotes. I should remove that. How many proposals are you going to present per month?

Qualified appointments per month. If that's your sales model. Some people you know go out and present. I know an agent in this room who writes large clients. Multiple people likely go out on the appointments because they all have iPads with them, including an iPad for every decision maker at the table. On the prospect side with a dedicated tested, ever changing presentation via electronics.

Is that a good idea? They're higher end.

So it's investment.

Okay.

Referrals, introductions. How many do you want per month? First contact dials, if you're doing any dialing at all. Okay. May or may not be part of your makeup. If you want to reach 100% of the marketplace, it's not bad to Call people. Your best test for there might be your existing book of business.

Just to start, just to see what you get. Okay. Know what time of day to call them. Know day of the week. Networking meetings if you're in. If you do that as part of your sales program, how many networking meetings per month? How many new qualified leads per month are you looking for? Because you gotta have enough leads in order to convert the conversion ratio that you're looking to achieve. Client visits per month. How many times you gonna go out to your clients that have been with you since 1975? I know that was extended. Great job, Lee and team. Okay.

We talked about yesterday. When is the last time you got in your car and went out and personally walked into a client business and say, you know, thank you so much for continuing to. Or thank you so much for doing business with us. Say, sorry to interrupt your day and then just leave? How is that going to make them feel? How is that going to impact them? Now, obviously, you want to make the situation warranted, right? It should be somebody influential, maybe a pretty bigger client who knows a lot of people. A maven or a connector or something like that. How many marketing campaigns are you going to be running per month? In my humble opinion, it should be multiple, multiple, Multiple per month. 3 to 5 to 8, depending on who you are. What kind of latitude do you have in that? Personally, we're so blessed and fortunate to have multiple people working in our marketing department all the time. So they're able to get it out. That's part of the investment of 28% of total revenue and marketing.

Ready for the next page?

No. Okay. Oh, you're writing it down. Good. Okay, let's give them 30, 60 seconds, Rog.

Okay, let's finish this up. Important stuff.

All right. We're not going to do all 10 of these, but we'll get started on this. Your top 10 targeted account for the next 12 months. What's their potential revenue? What I'm trying to help you with here is a mindset, if you're not already doing it, because all of these things should be in your mindset in the sales team environment.

We have multiple sales team meetings going on now. Thank you very much, kdp.

Who assists us with that. Kelly, you rock. So, you know, to make sure it happens, if I can't get to it myself. And it's my responsibility to make sure it happens. And that's what's happening.

Hire gifted people in an environment and make it happen is the bottom line. Okay.

So who are those accounts and what's the potential revenue?

Be thinking about that if there's, you know, I'm working with some newer salespeople now, and I told them just within the last week, I said, you know, back in my early days in the first 11 years, I don't know how many times I worked my tail off on a $500 minimum premium surplus lines policy.

No, no, no, Grandpa, don't be doing that. I mean, think about it. $50 in commission and then the premium because they couldn't pay it all at once. So they had a premium financer. Right?

Be thinking like that if that's where you want to get there. Sales plan for the next 12 months. This is what it should include.

Your client contact information by city, state, region. Back to your list. The most important part of any marketing program is the list. The better the list, the more complete the list, the better your results will be. If you're not getting the results you want, there's a number of factors involved. One of them is the list. The rest we'll pass on for now. Okay. Executive summary of the pipeline opportunities. What do you know about. The executives? Went out on an appointment with the new sales team leader recently. I said, when we got there, I said, oh, crap. We were getting ready to go, and we forgot to look up the executive team's profile. She goes, hang on just a minute. Because she's this good. She goes, dit, dit, dit, dit. I said, here it is right here. We're going down. We found out that he likes. He's a boy scout leader and these various things, but that's the kind of stuff that you want to dial in on in the appointment. Got it. Then we bring some of our passion in, because I'm the president of an organization that leads the field of honor in our local community, which is amazing. And one of the things we do on a Friday night is flag burning ceremonies to properly dispose of the flags. So I was able to convert that. Who does that? The Boy Scouts. See how the conversation goes. That's why this is important. Territory. Swot. We talked about SWOT yesterday, I believe, and I gave you the mind tools area where you can get that for yourself. But understand also what the territory, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are. External factors that will influence, can or will influence production results. Your sales projection for the next 12 months, which you think you can do. Resources required to produce those results. Deep stuff right here. It's just kind of surface. So see through it. Because vision is the art of seeing things that other people can't see. And then the reporting requirements. That is, you're going to be reporting back to somebody. If you're in the sales game, who will that be? What are the requirements? Is it daily, weekly, monthly, whatever, and what day of the week? Everybody's like a kindergartner. Make it crystal clear. And it should be in writing. Got it? There you go. And it doesn't hurt to have them ink it. Don't think it. Ink it. I like that. My 12 month sales plan. Next page. What I will do to achieve my goals. What I will do to achieve my goals. Do you guys want 30 seconds on this? Raise your hand if you get to one to three. That's fantastic. Thank you, Roger. Okay, goal setting behaviors.

So to produce whatever your revenue goal is in the next 12 months, you must have so many appointments. Now it's going to be different for everybody, but you have to have so many appointments. Could be a phone appointment, could be face to face. You make the decision. Compute sales appointments to close ratio. Factor in the average dollar amount of any size of scale. To set X amount of qualified sales appointments. I must have how many conversations.

So you might need to have 50 conversations to set 10 appointments. Just know what that is. If you want to have a sales organization, you've got to be in the sales mentality. What is it that you want? Mirror of truth. Figure it out. Okay. I must have X amount of conversations per month. I must have X amount of conversations per day.

Got it. Do the important things first, please. The priorities. It really doesn't matter how much we do if what we're doing isn't what matters most.

Set your priorities. Every day.

I try and write down what I'm going to do on a day the night before.

Because when I ink it the night before, guess where it goes. Goes right up my arm to my brain and I get to sleep on it. That works out a lot better. Doesn't happen every night. I do my best, though. Okay, schedule time in your calendar, outlook, whatever. We talked about that, I think earlier today. I block chunks of time on Sunday for the entire week. Treat your appointments with yourself as you would treat an appointment with anybody else.

If you can't manage yourself, how can you expect to manage anything else?

I'm sorry, I'm being very candid here. You guys okay with that? Okay, good plan around your appointments. It always works out. Channel other activities and requests to different time blocks if you need to. Your appointment has to be changed. Reschedule it immediately and give yourself the same consideration you would give anybody Else, treat yourself with respect because what's coming from you is coming from within you. Got it? Good. Right? High Pay sales activities. Rog. 60, please. Just do the best you can. 1, 2, 3. To get you started, what are your highest paying sales activities.

In your own world, in your own business? Right now, identify them.

I learned long ago that most of us have three kinds of days.

We have highly productive days.

Where we have lifetime days, highly productive days, and then what we call maintenance days. Okay? Lifetime days are those days that are always in your memory bank that you'll never forget. You know what I'm talking about? Vacation days.

Then high achievement days. It's those days, you know, probably a lot of work or, excuse me, a lot of business activity involved. It goes really well. You're playing in the area of your top three personal gifts, which is where you want to play in at least 80% of the time. Because the 8020 rule is always in effect, right? And you come home at the end of the day and you're going, yes. And your spouse says, honey, how was today? It was absolutely unbelievable. Those are good days, right? Don't we want that the majority of the time we can pass it on to somebody else and let them handle it so you can do what you do, right? Then there's maintenance days. My world maintenance days are Mondays. As I get older, I'm just not a huge fan. And I just get, you know, kind of grunt work done on Mondays. Just get it done. I know it needs to get done one of these days, so I just do it on Mondays. Okay, Lifetime days, high performance days, and then maintenance days. Okay, so what is your high performance day? Because the lifetime days are going to come that they're going to come. But the majority of your days, 80% of your days should be high productive days. And if they are not, we'll make a note somewhere. We're going to get rid of that stuff and delegate it to somebody who's better at it than you do. Everybody's got three personal talents which they're really, really good at. Mine is, I believe, and I'm told.

Leadership and training, marketing and selling. I love, love, love all three of those.

And I love, love, love to do it as much as I can. Everything else I try to give to somebody who's better at it than I do. So that's where you should be. What does yours look like?

We'll give you 30 seconds. I saw Rog isn't there. Where is he? Thank you. Thank you, Roger. Steve.

All right, thank you. Let's move on. Daily 10 step action plan.

I've got two of them in my hand. They're laminated on one side. Is this daily 10 step action plan. I'll put them back at the table if you want to go to it and feel it back. Excuse me. Back on that table where all the samples are. Go touch them and feel them. Just leave them there for your friends. Here, our daily 10 step action plan. This is to be used as what you need to do. Block a minimum of one hour of uninterrupted time in your calendar. Make five teleprospecting calls before 10am Send three emails to prospects in your pipeline. Mail two letters to prospects in your pipeline. Make five telephone follow up calls before 3pm Meet talk with one new qualified prospect. Reach out to one potential referral source. Mail one thank you card to either a prospect or a client. Review your goals and sales prospect. I might move that up to number one and take care of your clients.

Got it. Brian. I don't know where he is and it doesn't matter. He's the one I most recently talked to about this. The most. These next few pages would be a good starting point until something else comes along. Do this every single day. Make it a habit.

The back page is this. And so we bought these dry erase markers for the back page and we bought these very cool smiley face erasers. Everybody's got them on their desk. They're magnetic. They're attached to their cowbells.

Your daily 10 step what your goals are. Your dry erase, your eraser and your cowbell. The cowbell is to use when something good happens. It's really that simple.

Got it. And this is where you list your daily goals, your weekly goals, your monthly goals and your total. In order to be self accountable, you want to transition it to something bigger like an Excel sheet.

Company wide. Fantastic improvements. In order to keep my 12 month goals, I'm committing to make improvements in the following areas.

Commitment is the thing that you said you were going to do long after the mood that you set it in has gone away. Like after you go out the door and get home. Right. In order to achieve my 12 month goals, I'm committing to make improvements in the following area. This is sales still. What kind of improvements do you want to make? What kind of action plan do you want to take and what's the time frame? One day, One week? One month? One quarter or three months? One year? I don't know.

I hope you know. All right, did you get started on that? The improvements.

To help you reach your goals.

We're a work in progress. Right.

Make sure you set a time frame. And one of the things that I encourage people to do, if you're a member that's been on our member calls or a new member, welcome, we're grateful for you.

We encourage people to be accountable. Anything that you do, like this, make a copy of it and hand it to somebody else that you know love and trust and ask them to come back to you one week later and ask you how you're doing with it. That's an easy accountability option in house right now that you can do now and you can start it here today. Got it?

All right. Proven steps to overcome the P word. Not profit either. Procrastination.

Anybody succumb to that.

We'Re all among friends. Recognize it's happening.

Recognition and admission is the beginning of better results. Be reasonable in your expectations of yourself.

And we're talking about sales here in the sales game of yourself, not your overall mindset. Do you guys see the difference?

Yes or no? Yes and yes. No.

So in other words, be reasonable in your expectations of yourself. Yesterday we were talking about in the S growth curve.

Audacious, unreasonable, and all of that. Got it. Okay. Outrageous in our thinking and where we can go after we reinvent ourselves. This is more a consistent sales mentality. Okay.

And we're talking about ourselves, not our goals.

Because if you think you can make X amount of dials or X amount of appointments every single day and if you, if you can, theoretically in a good eight hour day, you know, get 10 done, don't say 20.

Because it's not fair to yourself, does that make sense? Be reasonable. You know the eight. You guys know the 888 theory? Ever heard that by Napoleon Hill? I don't think you have because I said somebody who's a very long time entrepreneur, successful guy, you should sleep eight hours, you should work eight hours and you should spend the other eight hours doing something that you're passionate about. Or is your bigger priority like your family or a hobby, like playing guitar or something like that. But that's the general thought process. Obviously it gets skewed by life.

All right? But you want to have that balance because if you don't have balance, you're going to get burnt out.

These are all things that kind of work in synchronicity. Break down tasks into manageable bites we talked about earlier. Give yourself rewards when you achieve a goal. You set big, hairy, audacious goals to finish the year strong. You blow them away in the first Month. Celebrate and then recalibrate. When you get stuck, try a different strategy rather than stop. Okay. I've been there three times in the last two days. I don't know if you've noticed. Gotten pretty good at moving on. Okay. Except the fact that it's not always possible to complete everything in one day. It is what it is. Regardless of your past, you have a spotless future. You get the hopefully. Hopefully you get the chance to get up again and do it tomorrow. Don't feel guilty if you didn't finish the task. No use beating yourself up. Prioritize by determining what's important. Again. Priorities. Same time. Place less important tasks at the bottom and get back to them.

Here's the key, though. Successful people think and act differently. They think and act different. Differently. Successful people are committed to being successful. Unsuccessful people hope to be successful. Did you know that hope is not a strategy?

Successful people focus on opportunities. Follow one course until success. Focus. Unsuccessful people focus on obstacles. Successful people associate with positive people. Unsuccessful people associate with negative and unsuccessful people.

Successful people are bigger than their problems.

Unsuccessful people are smaller than their problem.

Successful people act in spite of false evidence appearing real. Unsuccessful people let their false evidence appearing real stop them. Successful people constantly learn, change and grow. Unsuccessful people think they already know. Don't be a know it all, be a learn it all. Thank you, James. Thinking and success. The most successful people have one thing in common. They think differently than everybody else. I said it yesterday. I should have been saying it more. Our hope when you walk out that door tomorrow is that we've helped you think differently about one, two, or three things. And then it will help you change. Got it? If it turns out to be more fantastic, put it on the top 10 commitment list. I'll give you a preview of tomorrow morning. We're going to ask you to circle the top three when we give you the envelopes. Because all we want is your success.

Got it? Thinking is a discipline. If you want to be better at it, you've got to work at it. The only time success comes before work is in the dictionary. Good thinkers expose themselves to different ideas and types of people. Good thinkers calibrate with smart people. Do me a favor. Look to the person to the right, shake their hand and say you're smart.

Look to the person to the left.

You're smart. You guys got it. You're an advanced group. Except. What's going on this table over here? Come on, man. Let's go. Good thinkers plan ahead while leaving some room for spontaneity. Please Learn. If you're not to be spontaneous, how did it make you feel Yesterday morning when Mr. Jimenez came out here with his guitar and the fog started happening? He started playing the anthem. Was that spontaneous?

How do you think Lee's client since 1975 felt when they showed up with balloons and a cake and the whole team? When's the last time he did that? You might mount and put that on the top 10 list. You know what will happen to your teammates when you do that? Phenomenal things. It will teach them. You will lead them by doing that. Good thinkers appreciate others ideas. They give other people's ideas a chance. Good thinkers take time to plan out their weeks, months and long term goals. And then they. Oh no. Circle those last two words for me, please. Please circle those last two words. Yes. It's follow through. Okay, guess what? Time for a break. Alright, hold on.

Not yet.

Not so fast. We have a man in the house. A very special man. You're all special. But this man has earned the right of being special because he listened last year and he took action.

Unbelievable. Spontaneously. And he didn't let it die. He didn't stop just because it worked. He did it again. So we'd like to have Mr. Tom Larson stand.

Give Tom a hand. Woo. Way to go, buddy.

Move out of the way.

Back on the table. Well, you go ahead and tell the story here you talk.

Last year I decided to do something special for everybody and went to online, went to Edible Arrangement and had an arrangement brought for afternoon snack. So I thought I'd do it again.

Why did you do it?

Just to get back. Say thanks for the people that participate. Thank you. And really thank you for all you do too.

Well, it's not about me, it's about them.

So there you go.

Thank you for listening. If you would like to listen to more episodes or share this podcast with someone you care about, please visit www.unstoppableprofitpodcast.com. now go out and make a difference. Be unstoppable and leave no regrets.