Aaron Hoos

Happy New Year!

I’m a huge goal-setter — I love to list goals, break ‘em down into smaller objectives, and rock them out each day and week and month and year. To help me aim for the right things and make better goals, I’ve listed 5 success principles that I want to apply to my life this year. (Some are new for me, some have been in place for a while now). I hope they inspire you, too:

1. Do the hardest thing first: This is something I really tried to adopt in the last half of 2011 and it made such a HUGE difference to my productivity and how much I enjoyed what I do. I want to make this an even more intentional habit this year.
2. Persevere without quitting: I always have a million projects on the go — many for clients, many for myself, and many for family and friends. I love being busy but there’s a drawback: It’s easy to get distracted when a project starts to slog. I need to learn to push through in these times. (Confession: This is a HUGE failure of mine… it’s not that I don’t finish things; it’s just that I stop for a while when they going gets really tough and that makes it hard to pick it up again later).
3. Find a balance: I love to work and I work hard. But sometimes I work too much. There was a while when 7 days a week for months at a time was the norm… and then I’d burn out. I can’t do that. My productivity and my profitability plummet. I find I’m at my best when I take one day off each week. (Obviously I can take more if I want but I need to make sure I take at least one day! That’s a practice I’ve started to become strict about in the past couple of months and that day to recharge really helps my ability to produce good, consistent work.
4. Add value to every relationship: This is a new one for me. I have clients who I sometimes wonder if they’re just clients because it would be too much trouble to find someone else to write for them. Obviously I don’t want that! I want someone to be my client because they find my contribution to their business to be so invaluable that they would fight tooth and nail to keep me. (I said “every relationship” instead of “every client relationship” because I think this is probably a good thing to do with my friends and family as well).
5. Go further. There are two components to this fifth success principle. The first “Go further” component is related to accomplishment — I like to think that I work hard but then I hear about people who somehow manage to accomplish so much more than seems humanly possible. They somehow find the time to start several businesses all at once PLUS become champion shot putters… in between the time that they earn a degree and run 2 non-profits. I want that (but I want to do it while achieving the balance of #3). The second component of “Go further” is related to effort — I want to look back on everything I do and see that I went to the limit on my work and then pushed beyond. Did I go further and add something extra to each client project? Did I go further and add something extra to my blog post? Did I go further and add somethign extra to each chapter in my book? I want to be able to answer “yes” every time!

In the comments below, please tell me the success principles that are inspiring you for 2012!

[Image credit: Gareth du Plessis]

When I was a kid, I watched “Family Ties”. Yeah, I’m that old… or young. Whatever.

One of the occasionally recurring characters on “Family Ties” was deadbeat Uncle Ned — a guy who struggled with alcoholism and periodically ran afoul of the law. The actor who portrayed him was character actor who had only started his on-screen acting career about 3 years earlier.

Recognize him? He appears about 3 seconds into this clip:

Yeah, it’s Tom Hanks. By the time this aired (in 1983 or 1984), Hanks had made appearances in episodes of “Happy Days”, “Taxi”, and “The Love Boat”, and he had a regular role in a show called “Bosom Buddies”.

And before all that, his very first on-screen appearance (according to IMDb.com) was in a 1980 horror movie called “He Knows You’re Alone”. Check out his appearance here:

For his role in “He Knows You’re Alone”, Hanks was paid a whopping $800.

Today, Hanks earns a little more than $800 when he makes movies.

Eight years after his on-screen debut, Hanks brought home $1.7 million from his role in “Big”. And it just went up from there. With the exception of his work in “Toy Story” and its sequels, he consistently makes $15 million to $20 million (or more from gross profits and participation) in his movies.

I find Tom Hanks’ success story inspiring and instructional. Here’s why:

• Hanks is just a regular guy who is good at what he does. He’s not famous because he has an outrageous personality or rugged good looks or muscles that stick out everywhere. He’s an average guy but he’s a great actor. (Interesting note: In a Vanity Fair interview, Hanks himself admitted that his acting wasn’t good in the beginning but he improved over time). I think I’m a regular guy. That tells me that talent lasts, and it inspires me to constantly get better.
• Hanks is now known for (and made a ton of money from) his dramatic roles (and sometimes has a romantic comedy roles). But he wasn’t always known for that. Throughout the 80′s, he was a goofy guy who usually got the comedic roles. He did okay there but he has successfully reinvented himself as a respected dramatic actor. We all go through different phases in our work. The successful ones are willing to reinvent themselves until they find something that works.
• Hanks slogged for more than a decade before he achieved what most of us would call “success” — he worked tirelessly in live theater and then on television shows and movies. Hard work and thankless sweat are a prerequisite to success. If you want success but aren’t willing to work for it, success will elude you.

Success doesn’t land on your doorstep. You need to work for it. You need to get up every day and go do whatever it is that you do and you need to get better at it.

If you’re a real estate professional or a financial advisor (or any other type of entrepreneur for that matter), Hanks’ story can inspire you. There are calls to make and relationships to build and paperwork to do. I can sometimes feel like like a thankless, slogging grind.

But grind it out everyday! Get better everyday! Stop wondering how to be successful and instead start thinking about how to do more of the hard work you need to do. That’s the key to real success!

Every sales funnel looks different: One company might sell services through a lengthy relationship-building effort; another company might sell a product as an impulse item at the cash register of a grocery store. However, all sales funnels share a few things in common.

Below, I’ve listed five of the most important elements you’ll see in every successful sales funnel. And if your sales funnel is struggling, check to make sure that you’ve mastered these elements first.

1. Value: Your potential buyers have problems they want solved or needs they want fulfilled and the sales funnel relationship is your way of telling them that you have the solution or fulfillment they’re looking for. But Prospects are only motivated to buy from you when they perceive value. That is, your ability to solve their problem or fulfill their need must actually make it worth their time, effort, energy, and money to listen to your sales pitch and hand over their hard-earned money. I call this the pickaxe factor.
2. Target market: No business can be all things to all people so every business must have a well-defined target market. It can be a big target market, and it can even include several different markets, but the target market(s) need to be well-defined. When you know who is most likely to buy from you, you can shape your marketing and sales content to speak to that group in a way that will compel a buying response. (Find out why ‘everyone’ is not your target market).
3. Clear next steps: A poor sales funnel haphazardly dumps marketing content in a variety of channels (Facebook, Twitter, a blog, an article directory, etc.) and the business hopes that the sales funnel contact will click around to gather enough information to move forward in the sale funnel. But that’s not how it works. A sales funnel contact has a mindset and that mindset slowly evolves over time. The business’ job in marketing and selling is to speak directly to the contact’s mindset and slowly nudge that mindset to evolve toward full acceptance of what is being offered. (Read a previous blog posts about how mindsets work in a sales funnel and how you use steps to move contacts forward in your sales funnel).
4. Opportunity to buy: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Marketing is sexy and fun and difficult to measure. Selling, on the other hand, is challenging and sometimes a grind, and there can be a lot of rejection. Therefore, businesses tend to do too much marketing and too little selling… and then business owners scratch their head and wonder why no one is buying. A good sales funnel includes moments (in the Prospect stage) where the seller asks the Prospect if they would like to buy. (Read a previous blog post about this very topic — how a lack of selling is causing sales funnel failure).
5. Profitable sales: Successful sales funnels have a track record of profitable sales. Okay, some of you are reading this and thinking “duh! Isn’t that obvious?” but it may surprise you to learn that it’s not. Businesses use a variety of measurements to define success. Things like: “Do we have a great logo?” or “Is our blog being visited by more than 100 people per day?” etc. Even businesses that do strive for profitable sales don’t always measure profitable sales as much as they measure other things. (I confess, I’ve been guilty of that in the past, and here’s an example of a client whose sales funnel was not focused on profitable sales). But the only thing that should determine whether or not a business is successful is: Does the business have profitable sales? If your business does not have as many profitable sales as you’d like, take a closer look at your sales funnel to determine how you can make more profit from your sales.

Does your sales funnel have all 5 of these elements? If your business is struggling, you might want to think about destroying your sales funnel and starting over again from the ground up to make sure that these 5 elements are there. (Here’s a 3-step process to help you or read about how to retrofit the sales funnel in an existing business).

There are other reasons that a sales funnel might be very successful or not successful at all, but these 5 elements are going to be the 5 biggest factors that you can influence to create watershed change in your sales funnel… and ultimately in your business.