The Missing Ingredient In Your Plans

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey. As we're starting to slide into that time of year, that starts to feel like potty season, the spooky season and thankful season. And then holiday season. We start to also think about what we're trying to achieve by year end and today I want to chat about something that could derail all of those plans. Do you know why sales departments are often the least popular in big businesses? Because they have a tendency to go rogue. They are focused on the sale. They want to seal in their commission. So they may offer the world at a discount on a really tight timeframe. And sometimes they can forget that other people actually have to deliver on that promise. Now in your business, you're the person responsible for both elements. Most likely you are being sales person. Who's focused on getting that revenue in, but you're also the person who then has to deliver on what you've promised. So when you're thinking about what you're gonna focus on for the rest of the year, you need to make sure you're not merely focused on the sales side of what you want to achieve, but also on the delivery side. And that means we need to think about time. So you've probably heard this before, but there is a. Concept called planning fallacy, where people underestimate the time that it takes to complete a future task, even in the face of the knowledge of how long it took in the past. So think about you think, oh, I have to write a sales page. Like maybe that's the item on your to do list and you think, oh, that'll probably take a day. That's what I always think. When I have to write a sales page, it'll take a day. Despite the fact that last time it took me a day to get my first draft done, forgetting that I needed to then edited, find pictures forward, work out what the design was going to look like, actually loaded onto my website and then test it. and this shows up all the time. We have like the special kind of entrepreneurial time in our brains when we start to make plans and think about what we can achieve. We have a tendency to consider time really simplistically. So maybe we want to make a hundred K in Q4. And that means that we need 20 clients because we charge 5k. Let's just say we're doing, one-to-one give it really simple how our brain works is we go, okay. So I need 21 to one clients. Let's say they're having calls every other week. That's 10 calls a week. That's a 10 hour week. Right. It's really easy for us to think in terms of the direct delivery time. So when we're selling the delivery time that we're actually thinking about is completely forgetting the time that we will. To make the sale and the time that it takes to do things outside of that direct delivery. So your traditional one-to-one funnel, we've all had at some point in time, some can use that as an example, if you think that normally goes, opt in, nurture with some value, invite to a call and then close them on the call. We tend to think, okay, my close rate is say 50%. That means for 20 clients, I need to have 40 calls. So that's 40 hours of my time. But what we forget in that sales piece is the prep time. Before that call, are you reading intake forms? Are you having a Snoop on their social media? We're forgetting about the admin time to actually take the payment and make sure that it's processed. We're forgetting about how are they then getting onboarded and connected to everything with forgetting about followup time with people who needed to go away and think about it and who might need another call with forgetting that? A lot of times we're not great with our boundaries and those calls can be longer than an hour. Yeah. Now, chances all, when you're setting those goals, all you're thinking about is. Very high level. Can I deliver to 20 clients? Can I spend 20 hours delivering to clients you haven't thought about? Can I spend all of that time on sales calls? And then let's think about the rest of the funnel. What is going into getting you those 40 calls? Let's say roughly 10% of the people who've opted in convert into a core that's 400 opt-ins that you need. And roughly 10% of people who see that opt-in page convert, that's 4,000 people that you need to see that page. Yes, it's over a quarter, but that is a significant amount. Of time that you are spending attracting traffic before the sale, then there's all that time we just talked about during the sale. And usually this is not being factored in when we're thinking about my goal for Q4 is to make a hundred K with 20 clients. So now we've closed our 20 clients. Now we're thinking, well, that's an hour a piece, whether that's a 20 hour a week, if you're doing weekly or 10 hours a week, if you're doing bi-weekly, but what about all that non-direct delivery? What about your prep time ahead of the call? what about reviewing homework or frameworks or copy or whatever it is that you offer? What about the frantic emails when they're in crisis between calls. And the more mundane parts of serving a client onboarding, offboarding customer service requests for zoom links for calls and log-ins that have been forgotten. It's not as simple as this is my direct delivery time and that's my time complaint. And then of course there's all the rest of it that we need to do to keep our business running, like talking to our bookkeeper or having your own call with your coach, figuring out new rules and regulations, paying bills, chasing payments. The easiest way to get combat. This is to have actual data about how long things are taking you to actually track your time, get really comfortable so that you can go. I need you to write a sales page. Let me look at how long it took me last time. Oh, that took me a good week. Last time. Let me plan for a week. Right? It's being able to say on a client level. What it took, what it costs you to bring a client in so that when you decide that the next quarter, you're just going to double that, you know what that's going to take from you in terms of time, not just what is going to bring you in terms of money. chances are like most entrepreneurs out there. You don't have that data to hand right now. So first of all, start gathering that data, start paying attention to how long it takes you to do things during your Workday. And then as you start to think about Q4 and what those goals are the same way you would think about your monetary goals is a good bit of best scenario. I want you to think about How long that's going to take you from a time perspective in terms of best case, worst case, and most likely and the reason I want you to track those is I want you to start to see in the same way you would go back and look at a launch and go, Hmm. I thought that was going to go better or, wow. I really didn't aim high enough with that. I want you to do the same thing with time. I want you to be aware of how you approach assessing time. We need to get just as good at estimating, how much time things are going to take us as we are estimating how much money things are gonna make.