The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success Focus on Activity, Not Just Sales Goals

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So this is something that's very important for people that's in business, because it all comes down to sales. I know you're gonna talk about sales, right? No matter what you're doing as an entrepreneur, you're selling something. You're either, if you're in a restaurant, you're selling food. If you are in clothing, you're selling clothes, items, right? If you are a hairstylist, you're selling your services, which is you're doing people's hair, right? Everything is sales, everything is sales in business. That's the key component. Now I do think this is something that I learned, because I come from a sales background.
When I was in insurance and financial services, I was commission based. So I made a living by selling products, and I got a commission from that product.
So if you're in sales, you know that that's a difficult thing to do because your income fluctuates, right? You have a good month, you have a terrible month, but if you don't sell something, you're not going to get paid. But it's important because it teaches you things that entrepreneurs need to learn. So I used to say my goal was to make $100,000 in a year, right? And I used to get frustrated because I wasn't hitting that goal. 24, 25 years old, I wasn't hitting that goal, right? And there's a book called The 12 Week Year, which I recommend everybody read, right? And when I really started to think about it differently, I changed the way I looked at the perspective. We spoke about this before, where people, I think, go about it the wrong way by saying how much money they want to make, right? So they have a goal of making $100,000 a year, right? And then you just broke it down. That's like $8,000 a month, $8,900 a month, something like that, right? And then, so let's say that's like $2,200 a week, right? Something like that. So the goal is like, okay, I want to make $2,200 a week.
The first mistake that they make is that they're saying that their goal is too big. Now, you just explained why you should break that goal down because it's more attainable. $2,200 a week is more attainable than $100,000 a year. But I think that that's still where people go wrong because they're chasing a number. What I realized is that you can't chase a number, you could chase the activity. Activity leads to the number. So in my case, right, when I was selling life insurance, right, you get a commission from the life insurance that you sell. So I can't control how much money I make just going off of numbers because I might get a big policy and I make a lot of money, or I might get a small policy and I make a little bit of money, right? What I realized is that I did the average of what my average case size was. So let's say my average case size was $1,000 commission, right?
Then I realized what am I doing to actually get a client? So there's a few ways how you can get clients. You can cold call, you can canvas. Canvas is like go to different businesses and just pop up, here's my business card talk. I wasn't good at cold call and I wasn't good at canvassing but I was good at getting referrals. That was my pipeline to get business. I was good at getting referrals.
Then I realized that in my system, for every three people that I contacted, one person I would close.
So I realized that the numbers worked in my favor based on activity, not just a number. So what I'm saying is that I realized that in order for me to hit the financial goal, it was based on activity. I needed to get, let's say 10 referrals. Every week, I needed to get, let's say 15 referrals. I needed to get 15 referrals every single week because I knew if I got 15 referrals, then I would close five people. If I close five people, that's $5,000.
But that's still not good enough because it's like, well, how are you going to get 15 referrals? So then I have to have a system in place. How am I actually even meeting people? I had a few ways to meet people. I would go to events and I would try to meet people from there. I would call existing clients. I would have my circle of influence. So you put together a project, 100 of people that you know, you take them out to lunch. So now I'm breaking it down. I'm saying, okay, I need to get my goal in this situation is to get 15 referrals. But in order for me to get 15 referrals, I have to reach out to 100 people.