“Hit & Run” as a Secret to Success

To be in business and truly be and act as an entrepreneur means you need to take risks. Those risks should be as calculated as possible, but they are still risks.

The difference between truly taking that leap and not is something called fear. If you have an idea you must take financial, embarrassment, and criticism risks. But more importantly, you must take on the risk of failure.

The most successful people out there that rose to the top from scratch, whether their thing is business, sports, etc, are where they are because they failed. Sure there are some lucky ones that started from nothing and met their goals without ever truly failing, but they are the same ones that can’t tell you how they actually made it to the top.

If you believe what you are trying to do is a good idea, then you will not ask yourself the question of “what if this doesn’t work”. Mostly because you know the answer to that question if you put fear aside. That answer is “if it doesn’t work I’m going to hopefully learn something and definitely move on to the next thing”.

If you think about it, most success stories start out with someone being as low as they could go. With that said, it makes it a little easier not to ask the “what if it doesn’t work” question because when you start from the bottom, it really can’t get worse. Right?

Of course you can say “well I’m doing alright and I don’t want to risk losing that position”. If that’s where you are and it makes you happy, then good for you. If this is not the case, then don’t plan on moving up the success ladder any further unless you decide to take some sort of leap of faith at one point or another.

So now that we all know that risk of failure is necessary to keep moving up with our goals then it’s time to reveal the secret of the “Hit & Run Principal”.

The best way to make a business move is to set yourself up to take your risk, then succeed or fail as fast as you can. If you succeed, you keep pushing the envelope until you get to the saturation point and decide if that level of success is good enough to stay with or try something new to push ahead. On the other side of the coin, if you put your failure measures in place then you can stop immediately when you hit them, do your learning from the situation, and move on to the next thing.

Remember: A true entrepreneur doesn’t need concrete, complete and safe answers. Those who need that much insurance will have a very hard time getting to the next level because they can’t fill the entrepreneurial requirements of taking the risks and then recover from a failure.

Lead Generation vs. Directly Selling to Prospects

Here’s a very important fact to always keep in mind regarding your marketing process and converting people you drive to your business into customers: People like to buy things. They don’t like to be sold.

Add to that one more important and very true fact: The odds are, you will not get your information in front of people exactly when they are looking to buy.

Now if you take these two facts and effectively put them together, you will realize that marketing is not a one shot deal even to the hottest and most targeted prospects. And it’s a total waste of time to expect to push a person into buying from you especially if they don’t know you or your company.

For these reasons, any marketing is best suited to generate leads and not to close a deal unless you truly have the money to burn in sending out price based catalogs every month and using that as your main piece of marketing (ever heard of a company called Dell?). Not even an option for a service/consulting company.

Your goal in marketing should be to put your targeted message for one key product/service in front of laser focused prospects using a few types of mediums on a scheduled basis throughout the year. In the marketing pieces it is absolutely necessary to get the prospect to do something specific to identify themselves to you as someone to bother with as a true prospect. This is known as a “call to action”.

The result you are looking for is to place these hot prospects into a new sales funnel for those identified as interested in what you have to offer. Do this and anyone responsible for closing a sale in your business will have a huge weight taken off of them. They are now not an annoying pest, but a welcomed guest. Life just got better for everyone.