In the Leader Bulletin Every Business Needs Clarity we discussed the importance of Clarity to your business.
If clarity is the mental strength for success, Focus is the physical strength. Focus is the force that enables the leader to sweep aside all the obstacles, problems, excuses and distractions. Focus demands the great leadership characteristics of discipline and courage. Focus requires the application of pressure. When pressure comes two different results can happen. People either focus or fold.
In the short term it can be extremely painful to reduce your business aims to the simplest denominator – a Vision – and then to focus upon that vision, but you’ve got to develop what is known as laser focus. This is an intense determination to achieve your vision.
Intense determination creates high morale. People feel better when you are really determined. Once you have a clear and simple vision, you develop focal points – this is where you link two factors, the date and the result. Focal points can improve your business provided you and your team are committed to them.
Commence carefully. Choose a series of levels. Make sure your date focal point is something you can achieve and something that you will stick with until you achieve it.
Leaders who regularly fail to make good profits each month have forgotten, or perhaps never learned, the importance of Focal Points.
Break Even Point
The first focal point each month should be to reach Break Even Point (BEP) by the 7th of each month – not the 8th, 9th, or any other day in the month: if you do what it takes to break even by the 7th of each month, you have three weeks to make a healthy profit.
Do you achieve this each month? If you don’t, you should review your management programs, paying special attention to your weekly sales meeting. Dynamic and interesting meetings, given by a determined and focused leader who knows how to communicate with clarity, BEP is as certain as sunrise.
Daily Results
All offices should be hooked on the concept of at least one great result per day. One of the best ways to do this is to achieve early results. Encourage the team to bring in the first results for the day before noon. Ask early, ‘What have you got on today,‘ and express genuine disappointment whenever a team member arrives for a new day at work without appointments set from previous days’ work.
Instill the discipline that your office never closes without a result for the day. Your office incurs expenses seven days a week, twelve months a year. Shouldn’t it produce results at the same rate? A business has daily expenses. A business must have daily results. Your team should be aware of this and treat this mission with the respect it deserves. You can’t get any simpler than that.
Clear and Simple Actions
You must have management systems that tell you your current number of listings on any given date, and a Profit Ready Reckoner that tells you how many sales equals how much profit. All leaders need to know how profitable their sales department is. An accurate Profit Ready Reckoner makes it easier to focus.
You know how many Listings and Sales you need each month if you are to achieve your goals. Focus is simple when you clarify what you want, reduce it to what results you need if you are to get what you want, and then determine a date (focal point) when you will get what you want.
All you need to do then is communicate to the team the company’s mission, and break the mission down into individual team targets. Each team member then prepares a plan showing you how he or she will produce the results you expect.
Now this is a big point: if you have salespeople who continually fall behind target, why do you continue to allow them to work without a daily plan?
Winners don’t need to be forced to plan provided they continue to reach respectable targets, but for everybody else, there should be no option. Salespeople who don’t constantly reach target are not focused.
If they cannot discipline themselves to do the necessary daily activities to reach their targets, they should be encouraged to plan their month and then follow that plan. We spend a lot of time on planning in our three-day seminar Winning Ways – Real Estate Sales.
Like everything you do, be sure that your team members’ plans are simple. Each plan should be no more than one A4 page. It clearly shows from which sources each salesperson’s Listings will come. It shows where the buyers will come from and how many Listings will be appointed each week for the discussion of adjustments to the Asking Prices.
It’s focus. This is what a lot of us don’t do.
Clarity makes focus much easier. Reduce to the simple what needs to be done for you and the company to achieve its goals. Do only those actions. If you want high achievement, work on results-producing activities, which for the leader is hiring, training, and motivating team members. Nothing else!
Learn clarity and focus. Teach these skills to your people. Change your world, and theirs.
Lead the way.