Your newly minted annual plan has some big goals. The only way to get there is with small steps. You should just start moving.
New years usually begin with new plans. Admittedly, 2021 brings with it many unknowns, so grand strategies are likely tempered this time around. There may be things that have carried over from previous plans, and there are likely new ideas and goals arising from new realities. Either way, there is much to be done.
As such, achieving those goals can seem daunting. The hill is steep. The trail is long. The paths are many. Which one should you do first? Are their any dead-ends on the road ahead? How can you make the most of your limited time to spend on these big plans?
My advice? Just start moving.
What to do
Big plans typically have big ideas and big numbers wrapped up in them. If it hasn’t been done already, an important step is to pull those big plans apart into manageable—and achievable—activities. Big plans need small steps.
And they need to be the right small steps. If, let’s say, you have a sales goal of increasing revenue from existing client accounts, you need to be talking to your existing client accounts. My apologies if this sounds a bit patronizing, but we often loose track of this while chasing after the latest RFP or hot lead that came across your desk. Or maybe you’re planning to attend a conference to gather business cards from people you’ve never met. These things are fine, but they aren’t helping you with that specific goal of yours. They are small steps, but they are not the right steps.
If, by chance, that big goal ends up being the wrong goal, you’ll find that out soon enough. But you need to make a focused effort and start moving towards it with small steps to find that out. So you should just start moving.
When to do it
The short answer is… early and often. This gets a big nod of approval from all the A-type personalities out there and an eye-roll from the B-types, but we’ve all learned through experience that success rarely comes from a last-minute effort. Sure, we can get things done in the 11th hour, but the results often fall short of our expectations. And most of those big plans you and your team have laid out cannot be accomplished if you wait until the fourth quarter of this year.
Big plans require time, but if you’ve broken them down into smaller bits, the effort required is best spent a little at a time. Weekly steps, whether they are meetings or conversations or focused time, must be taken to ritualize the small moves you must make on your path to achieving those goals. Block some time out every week. Shut the door. Don’t look at your email. If you are in fact trying to grow your revenue from your existing clients, schedule time to have specific and focused conversations with your best clients about their business, plans, and dreams… and how you can help. Don’t do other things.
Focus on Activities
Those big numbers and big ideas in your big plans are, well, big. You and your team may have created beautiful dashboards and systems that display one of those thermometers showing your progress. It’s quite nice, and those charts and graphs pop up on your computer screen every day. They highlight those big numbers and how woefully behind you might be in achieving them.
Having a system to monitor progress is important, but constantly staring at the big numbers can be daunting and defeating. Your focus should be on the small activities—the small steps—you undertake and accomplish each week.
And you should be celebrating each small step you take and every small win you achieve. This builds momentum and energy that accelerates your progress. Two successful conversations with existing clients will give you the energy—and the experience—to have four more.
Just start moving
Whatever your goals may be, you need to starting taking small steps forward. As you likely realize, my focus is typically on sales and ultimately revenue. That said, I rarely sit down and discuss the big numbers with individuals. That can be a frustrating conversation, because “growing revenue” is not something and individual can just up and do. What an individual can do is pick up the telephone and have a conversation. Or send that important sales-related email. The small steps are always the focus.
In addition to making progress towards your goals, those small steps are also incredibly valuable practice. To use our previous example, one needs to have many “conversations with existing clients about their plans” in order to get better at having these conversations. There will be bad conversations, but the only way to improve is to reflect on what happened, improve, and to do it again. Fear of failure is a powerful barrier, particularly when it comes to something like sales. Nevertheless, we need to keep moving forward. But just one, small step at a time.
Wainwright Insight provides fractional sales management and consulting to organizations who want to take control of their pipeline and build future sales leaders—but could use a little, part-time expertise. I work with professional services firms, and the experts in those firms, who need to get better at chasing and winning big deals when the stakes are high.