Brad Martineau, Chief Baller of Sixth Division, gave a highly entertaining and informative presentation on honing in on the things that make you successful rather than chase ideas that are not producing results. He used improving the client journey as a way to illustrate his points.
The Key Metric
In his presentation, Martineau focused on the key to what a business is about—that is to earn a profit. You earn a profit by marketing which generates leads and hopefully clients. A key part of the client journey starts with lead generation or source which turns visitors into leads. Ideally, leads convert into prospects and finally become clients. Throughout the process, there should be long-term follow-up.
As entrepreneurs guide individuals through the client journey, they (the entrepreneurs) become overwhelmed by the number of ideas, tools, and options available to them. This can be quite frustrating.
Martineau says the metric that we need to focus on is the time that we are devoting to thinking about ideas versus acting on ideas and generating revenue. We need to take action.
The Sixth Division specializes in automation. They take a systems approach to looking at each element in the client journey. They work out how they can improve each step and turn it into a system.
Idea Graveyard
Martineau pointed out notebooks are idea graveyards. If you do not put them into action, they simply die in the book. There are three fundamentals associated with this concept:
- Good ideas, the wrong time. Basically, does the idea apply to your business now or not? You will generate more ideas than you can execute. Therefore, you need to execute on ideas that align with your business.
- You cannot implement ideas—you implement plans. You must take your idea and turn it into a plan. This requires listing all the steps and time constraints.
- Implementing an idea is not the same as building it.
- Systems are better than superstars.
During his presentation, Martineau walked through a client journey and illustrated how he would think about each part of the system. He broke it down systemically so that attention was being focused on the essentials.
Martineau stressed we should not be spending time doing what is not producing results. We can easily fill our day with daily trivia if we do not have defined goals.
As I think about this presentation, I was struck by the importance of looking at each aspect of your business to see if it was going to help generate income or not. If it’s not going to generate income then why are you doing it? As I look at different parts of my business, I begin to question why I continue to do them. I will have to give more thought to how I will proceed. How about you?
