5 Ways to Finish The Year Strongly
Today September begins and you have exactly 3 months to build a pipeline to end 2014 strongly. Irrespective of whether it has been a great, indifferent, or poor year you have time to turn it around or smash your targets.
5 essential things you can do to have an “I want to win” finish to this year
1: Goals:
Review the goals you set for this year. What have you yet to achieve and what can you refocus on between now and the end of the year?
Also set goals for next year– make sure you know where you need to be by January in order to give yourself a great start….maybe even a head start (how great would that be?)
If you are miles off target you can also set some more goals that you can focus on in the short term.
2: Build on existing hard work:
You spend lots of time chasing the next deal, deadline or the next new client relationship you need to build. However, it is easy to forget about looking after the relationships you have built.
Make a point of calling /meeting/touching base with everyone that you have done business with and almost done business within 2014. Find out about how this year has been for them and start talking about what their plans are for next year.
Remember relationships are build on hundreds and thousands of tiny little interactions, make sure you keep building on what you have built already.
3: Urgency:
Pick up the pace with which you work every day. Over the summer it is easy to slip into “its summer and no one is around” pace. Treat every day, morning or afternoon like there are not many left.
This may involve walking faster between meetings, shorter lunch breaks, or less chat between sales calls. However you pick up your urgency you will start putting more into your pipeline which, by the law of averages, means you will start getting some more successes. Just remember to keep the quality of what you do high.
4: Learn something new:
You may be a 1 month, 1 year or 5 year veteran of what you are doing, but nothing will refresh your motivation to succeed than taking the time to learn one or two things that you can do differently to succeed. New ideas always provide fresh inspiration of how to take on the challenges you have day to day.
5: Toughen Up:
My favourite quote of all time is “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so” from the play Hamlet.
Yes – you may have been unlucky this year, “if this one had happened” or “if that had not happened” you would have done better.
Now is the time to ditch the excuses you tell your manager or yourself everyday about why you have not achieved this year. Unlucky things generally happen to those with not enough in their sale pipeline. Bad things happen to everyone.
Focus all your energies on what you are doing to be successful and what you will achieve by the end of this year; you will almost certainly achieve more than by focusing on the past. And if you do not?…well you will definitely be happier focusing on the good things rather than the hard luck story you had been playing in your head before you switched your mindset.
The clock is ticking on this year and, unless you are Doctor Who or Marty McFly, you cannot change what has passed, all you can control is the future.
Ask yourself
“Do I want an ‘I want to win’ finish or an ‘I want to finish’ finish to this year″?
