If you are starting a business or are in the process of investing further into your existing business in order to take it to the next level, it is important that you keep the faith and keep moving forward until you have created enough momentum to keep your business moving into the black.
If you have a viable product, a large enough targeted customer base identified that needs your product, you know where to find and market to these customers, and you have the correct marketing message for these customers; then if you and your sales team have the proper sales skills, it is usually a matter of time, effort, and persistence until your hard work pays off.
The problem is that many business owners give up too soon and don’t prime the pump long enough and hard enough to become successful and therefore fail, sometimes just before they were going to make a big breakthrough. Therefore, when the business owner is not successful right away, they sometimes “drop the clutch too soon”, which only de-motivates, wears out, and frustrates the business owner. To illiterates my point I will give you a story that makes the point, and then I will give you an actual example from industry.
When I was 16 years old, the first car I bought was a 1971 Ford Pinto with a 1600 cc 4-cylinder engine. It had electrical problems and continued to run the battery down, therefore it stalled a lot. At the time I was broke and could not afford to fix it or buy another car, so I nursed it by continuing to push start it.
Now there is an art to push starting a car. You have to start by pushing the car from a dead stop and this is the hardest part because you have to strain to get the car in motion. Then you need to have a friend in the driver’s seat steering the car and holding the clutch in until exactly the right moment when the car has enough speed and momentum so that when you yell, “drop the clutch”, the engine starts and the car continues on under its own power.
The problem is that if you drop the clutch too soon by either not pushing the car hard enough, fast enough, and long enough to get sufficient speed and momentum to start the engine; or you yell “drop the clutch” too soon before the car has sufficient momentum to get the motor started, then the car will lurch to a dead stop; in which case you as the pusher will end up slammed against the back of the car.
Then, you have to start pushing the car again from a dead stop, and go through the whole process once more.
If your goal is to get to the end of the block with the least amount of effort, you could do it right the first time by pushing the car hard enough, fast enough, and long enough until the car starts on its own. Or, you could waste a lot of energy, and get very frustrated, by continuing to drop the clutch too soon, and therefore continue to push start your car many times within the same block.
The point here is, if you are starting a new business, a sales push, or bringing out a new product you need to stay the course long enough for the momentum from your continued effort to pay off. So many times I have seen business owners give up too soon as they were just about to start creating some success. Then they back off and stop their efforts (drop the clutch too soon); only to restart from scratch again in a few days, weeks, or months after they have lost all their momentum from their previous efforts.
Here is an example of how this can happen in the sales arena, but this can also happen in almost any type of business endeavor. For a sales person, if they want to increase their level of sales, they will have to fill the proverbial hopper or funnel. The funnel is wide at the top and very narrow at the bottom. The bottom is where the closed sales come out, but to get closed sales to come out of the bottom of the funnel, you need to fill the much wider top with many potential buyers.
Let’s say your an insurance salesperson, or real estate agent, or in some other type of sales position or business. You get started with your leads. You are prospecting, sending out letters, doing cold and warm calling, contacting the decision makers, qualifying the potential buyers, giving the sales presentations, conducting the follow-ups. You are doing it all.
You know it takes a few months to really get a solid flow of new business, so you are cranking it for the first week, the second week, the third week, and so on. You are filling the hopper. But after a few weeks or months, you have not closed a sale or maybe closed just a few. You get discouraged. You then do the absolute worst thing you could do. You back off before you have the sales you desired. You stop adding new potential buyers to the top of your funnel, and the flow at the bottom of the funnel (closed sales) slows to a trickle or stops. What you have done is dropped the clutch too soon and your sales stop or never get started.
As a result, your self-confidence and posture decrease making you less effective. Now you have to start all over again from scratch with an even worse attitude, and remember the hardest part about push starting your car is at the very first when you have to lean heavy into it by pushing to get the car moving from a dead stop. In the same way the hardest part of the sales process is the very beginning when you are doing the prospecting, sending out letters, cold and warm calling, etc.; but because you dropped your clutch too soon, you have to do that all over again with lower self confidence and energy then you originally started with.
Let’s say you dropped the clutch too soon and stalled your car when you were a block away from your destination. If you had not dropped the clutch too soon you would have already been at your destination with much less effort. However because you dropped the clutch too soon, you are much more worn out when you get to your destination or maybe you never even get there because you wore yourself out in the push starting process.
In the same way if you would have continued filling your sales funnel and not backed off too soon, in a short time closed sales would have started pouring out of the bottom of the funnel. But because you stopped too early, those sales are now far away. However, if you would of not backed off and continued putting more potential buyers into the top of your hopper and kept moving them through your sales funnel, the more sales you would have made, the more confident you would have become, and your sales process would have become much stronger. Then because you stayed persistent and consistent, your potential buyers start to realize by your confident posture that you do not need their sale because you have many potential buyers that you are dealing with. In fact your posture becomes so powerful because your confidence has grown so much that you start to come across to your potential customers as “I know someone is going to buy but I don’t know who and I don’t care who, I just know someone is going to buy”. Buyers buy from confident sales people, and they don’t buy from needy sales people.
In creating a business or starting a sales cycle, going through the numbers persistently is very important and has several benefits. First by going through the numbers you increase your odds of finding the right buyers that need your product or service. Secondly, buy going through the numbers you get better at what you do. Thirdly by going through the numbers you develop a much more confident posture for selling because you know you have a lot of potential buyers in your hopper. For instance if you are only working with 2 potential buyers and one of them tells you they are not interested, then you have lost 50% of you working market at that time.
However, if you currently have 20 potential buyers that you are working with, and one of them tells you they are not interested, then you have only lost 5% of your currently working market. When you only lose 5% of you working market your confidence is much stronger then if you lose 50% of your working market; therefore enabling you to have a much stronger selling posture and subsequently being able to close many more sales. Fourthly, by going through the numbers and therefore gaining more confidence, the more empowered you will be and the therefore the more effort you will put forth. It almost becomes like a self-fulfilling prophesy, because the more effort you put forth, the more success you are going to have.
Selling is a lot about attitude. The more confident you are about your selling efforts, the more your potential clients are going to be attracted to your confident attitude and the more success you are going to have. Then the more success you have the more effort you are going to but forth with a stronger selling posture, which will translate into even more sales and success, which creates an uphill spiral of success. This is the result of NOT dropping the clutch too soon, and by staying the course you create momentum that drives you forward to success.
However, when you DO drop the clutch too soon you create exactly the opposite result; you get worn out and lose confidence which decreases your selling posture and the efforts you put forth to sell. This then creates a self-fulfilling prophesy of making less sales which decreases your success that creates a downhill spiral of putting forth less effort, having less confidence, developing a weaker selling posture which can eventually lead to your defeat.
Therefore, if you are starting or expanding your business and you are a little frustrated and the money is not coming in fast enough; if you have done your homework, you have the right product, the right customers, the right marketing message, and you believe strongly in what you are doing; then don’t drop the clutch too soon
Terry Strom, The Business Optimizer, is an executive
business coach that takes business owners through his 5
step process to optimize their businesses. He is also a
nationally known motivational speaker that teaches sales
and communication skills to sales teams across the country.
He is also a co-author on 4 books with Steven Covey, Brian
Tracy, Jim Rohn, Dr. John Gray, Dr. Dr. Denis Waitley, and
Les Brown. You can learn more about Terry at
www.thebusinessoptimizer.com, and may email him at
terrystrom@thebusinessoptimizer.com.
