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Elaine Thompson, who at Rio in 2016 became the first woman in nearly 30 years to win the 100m and 200m Olympic finals, wasn’t born fast, but she made a choice early in her life to do everything she could to become the top performing woman sprinter of her time.
This world beating athlete understood the benefit of taking the best first step and then building on that with proven advice and actions to get the most out of her natural ability and reach the goal she was dreaming of – consistent high performance.
Some will rightly say that her rise to success was aided by her natural aptitude and genetics, but without the right guidance and input it would have been harder for her to achieve the greatness that she has.
What greatness are you aiming for? What does ‘consistent high performance’ look like in your business?
I’d make a calculated guess that growing your revenue and profit is high on your list of goals, if not number one. And you know that this target needs a consistent stream of sales from new and existing customers that are a pleasure to deal with.
What’s the starting point then? How are you going to take the first stride out of the starting blocks on your journey to getting these customers and reaching your goal?
You know that like Elaine Thompson you have the aptitude to reach your goal, but what guidance and input will help you along the way?
There’s a lot of helpful information at the end of a Google search, but you need to make sure that you don’t get bogged down by many of the sales books, marketing blogs and articles that champion the success of big corporations and make a bit of an assumption that you have marketing and sales teams with 10’s and 100’s of people working with budgets reaching into the multiple millions like them.
Yes you can learn many things from these resources, but dissecting all the advice can feel like climbing a mountain and the danger is you’ll be overwhelmed with information and find it hard to put together a simple action plan that you can realistically work on and deliver.
You need to remember it’s better to start small and simple than to not start at all. Doing the work to reach key milestones will help you build a solid foundation, but it’s not about reaching the ultimate goal immediately. Elaine Thompson’s rise to glory was a journey that took her to The Champs, an annual inter-secondary school completion, onto the World Athletics Championships in 2015 and then Rio 2016.
So for you and your business, looking at your 6, 12 and 24 month strategy and goals, what are the first simple steps you need to focus on to build a solid approach to generating a more consistent pipeline of high quality sales leads and to reach your milestones? Because, when you’ve got these steps outlined and you know the actions to take to get a return, you can be confident about investing time and money.
Well here’s a simple approach to take. There are 5 simple steps you should work on, the first of which is your ideal customer. The detail around this and the other 4 steps are in my free “Launch manual for out of this world marketing campaigns”, but a quick and important note on this first step, identifying your ideal customer, is to be realistic about the time you have and to also make sure you get your approach right before you try and tackle your whole target market. Take some of the pressure off yourself by focusing on 1 or 2 target customer types first and making sure you’re getting it right for this small group, rather than overloading yourself trying to build a marketing plan and campaigns for every type of customer you have. Once you’ve got these initial segments sorted, you can move on to more.
Remember, it’s better to start by quickly getting results from a small segment of customers than spending much more time getting everything in place to try and attract every type of customer and possibly not finishing what you started.
The five steps to work through to build your campaigns are:
- Your ideal customer
- A clear proposition
- Great Customer Journey
- Engaging campaigns
- Great content
When you get these steps right, you create trust in your company during the early stages of the buying process and can use nurturing marketing campaigns to build your ideal customer’s preference to buy form you.
Start now by downloading your free launch manual for out of this world marketing campaigns.
Good luck and make sure you keep reminding yourselves of the saying Elaine Thompson inspired across Jamaica “Wi lickle but wi tallawah“. (Translation: We are little but we are strong and we can do anything we set our minds to).
I look forward to hearing about your successes.