Be Prolific
Be Prolific – Yesterday I had a conversation with somebody who writes multiple blogs, including for business, a personal blog and for a charity. I asked her what her number one tip would be for engaging the most people and making a decent living online. Her answer..
Be Prolific
Citing Allan Pease’s book – Questions Are The Answers, she explained that a lot of problems in business can be overcome by simply increasing your activity, your output. (Simple idea but maybe not easy, of course. Most things worth doing are a challenge).
Early in the book is a paragraph where Pease tells of selling sponges door to door as an 11 year old, to raise money for his scout troop. The scoutmaster had told the young Allan Pease a “secret”, which he went on to name the law of consequence. It is this:
“Success is a game – the more times you play, the more times you win. And the more times you win, the more successfully you’ll play”.
Be Prolific – the consequence of asking more times for what you want, is that you will get more of what you want. This could be in terms of marketing, sales or anything else where you are looking for a result from a certain effort. The more times you ask, the better you will get at asking.
Be Prolific – In Questions Are The Answers, Allan Pease’s 1st rule is: See more people. His 2nd rule is: See more people. His 3rd rule is: See more people. A lot of people bumble along and never reach their potential in their endeavour. They think it is because of the people they didn’t convince, but that is not true. It is because of the people they didn’t see.
The 4th rule is: Use the law of averages. All repeatable actions in life are subject to the law of averages. Under similar circumstances, if the same action is repeated over and over, then a ratio will appear. A set of results will occur that will not change too much.
An example is that Allan discovered an average early on in his insurance sales career. If he stood on the street and asked a negative question such as “You don’t want to buy any life insurance do you?”, then 1 in 56 people would say “yes”! Knowing this average and sticking to the activity meant that he could be in the top 5% for his company just by asking that one question in that way 168 times a day! (Most people will not work their averages out though, will consider it all too difficult and give up before success comes).
Recording the ratios – Writing the averages figures down is a powerful motivator. For Allan it meant that soon he did not care if somebody would not listen or not answer the phone. As long as he kept going and made enough presentations, then his success was assured. He could just relax and let the numbers work their magic.
The 5th rule is: Improve your averages. If you know your averages, what the ratios are, then you are able to remain positively on track. This is because it is easier to sustain motivation and deal with rejection if you are focused on the numbers instead of what happens to you next.
Suddenly, what happens next doesn’t matter, being rejected has a fraction of the impact it had before because you know that it is doing the numbers that brings the results. You are more likely to be motivated to get to the next one, to be prolific, instead of dwell on what just happened.
Keeping sane by recording ratios allows you to see the potential that there is in the activity and highlights where improvement can be made at a glance.
Improving averages (the ratio of prospects to sales conversions is an example) can be done by better qualifying your target market/prospects/demographic and also by improving on certain skills such as communications and marketing. The recorded ratios will point out where the improvement is needed.
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