Several years ago, I worked with Bruce, a regional sales manager, who taught his advisors five rules:
Be HONEST
Be FAIR
Be REASONABLE
Give GOOD DIRECTION, and
Be FIRM
While all of these are rules for dealing with prospects and clients, Bruce told them, the most important person to apply them to is yourself:
Be HONEST. If a client or prospect needs to do something, tell them the truth. When it comes to you, the advisor, if everything you’re doing isn’t helping you accelerate your business, be truthful with yourself about the reason.
Is it that you’re not a good closer, or that you don’t have enough people to talk with?
Is it that the local economy is bad, or you haven’t adjusted your approach to grow your business?
Is it that people aren’t buying or that you’re showing up as a someone hungry for a sale instead of as a trusted advisor?
Be FAIR. If you’re trying your hardest, don’t beat yourself up. If you’re not, give yourself a kick in the pants or have someone do that for you.
Be REASONABLE. You can’t expect to gross $500K doing what you’re doing now to gross $150K. You need to find solutions that will help you scale to that level and beyond.
Give GOOD DIRECTION. Tell a client honestly and with conviction what they need to do. But tell yourself that too.
Be FIRM. When you’re with a prospect or client, you don’t want to be aggressive, but you DO want to be firm. And you usually know the difference. When you’re off course, are you being firm with you to get you back on course?
Bruce told his advisors that if they followed these rules, they’d be successful, and he concluded his talk telling them “Work hard, make money, and have fun,” and added that he was there to help them stick to these rules, especially when they were applied to the advisors.
Bruce’s rules created a great number of successful advisors.
If these rules make sense to you, and you want my help sticking to them or just want to understand them better, contact me and we’ll talk about them.
And as always, keep REACHING…
P.S. I always wanted to make an acronym out of these, like the KISS rule, but HFRGDF doesn’t cut it. If you can come up with one, I’d be extremely grateful.
