Happy new year — I hope you and your family had a great holiday season. I am traveling on my first of six trips over the next two weeks — three speeches for groups of mid-market and large company owners and executives from different companies, two client meetings with managers and salespeople, and a private event for my clients where we will be picking a barrel of bourbon at a distillery and splitting the bottles among us!

As I think about this upcoming work, I’ve been pondering the two major components of the 15-30%  new annual revenue growth my clients enjoy directly from the work we do together. I emphasize that this growth is predictable, meaning you are in control of it. That’s because it’s based on the behavior of your people. It’s growth that you are creating, rather than growth that is happening to you.

First, The Mindset

Behavior follows thinking.

If you think you’re bothering the customer, you won’t call them proactively.

If you think you’re providing immense value which they need and want from you, then you’ll behave accordingly, right?

This is why above all else, it’s critical to get your salespeople’s mindsets right. “Get your mental right,” as the football players say.

The reason most corporate change fails to become permanent is that implementers rarely address the mindset and emotional change required to create new habits.

In my projects, which run 6 to 12 months, we spend two-thirds of the training time focused on mindset and thinking. That is, we focus on confidence, optimism, gratitude, positivity, perseverance, and boldness. Infuse these things into your sales function, and you’ll find 10% revenue growth just from this. The system of behaviors (below) adds the remaining 10-20%.

(Ironically there isn’t much training time in my work with clients, because we are asking them to do things they already know they should be doing. It doesn’t take much time to teach people how to make a proactive call, or ask a did you know question.)

Then, The System

Following the mindset change, we must create an environment within which your sales staff takes and tracks very fast proactive actions consistently over an extended period of time. That is, we need a system to build this habit for your people.

Which means, the actions must be painless and very fast. There can be no barriers like “it’s too hard,” or “it takes too long.” A did you know question takes 3 seconds to ask. A proactive call is likely a one-minute effort because you’re leaving a voicemail and sending a text.

The actions must all be tracked in a system somewhere. A CRM tends to devolve into an annoyance for salespeople. It becomes an address book. You need a system to track actions and the opportunities that they create. We track opportunities so that we can follow up on them, progress them, and close them. All of this is a part of the system and our work.

Scorecards and statistics must be shared with your team. We do this for several reasons: to show them that this effort is permanent and not going away; to show leaders and laggards; to brag about people generating great new opportunities and sales; and, hopefully, to motivate those who are not to take more intentional revenue-generating action.

We do this, and all the other components of the system which are too numerous to get into here, to ensure that all your customer-facing people are implementing proactive communications consistently over time.

Change people’s thinking, and you’ll change their behaviors. Then track, count, and report back to the team about their behaviors.

This is how you can all but guarantee significant revenue growth.

Do these things and you’ll see significant growth in 2023 and beyond.

If you’d like to discuss how my clients do these things and consider the possibility of creating intentional growth with me for your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 847-459-6322, or simply reply to this email.

If your firm is under $15M, we start our Selling Boldly Revenue Growth program in earnest. It’s a special program I put together just for smaller companies, an incredible value, and an opportunity to work with me and do the things detailed above at a very low cost. Read all the details and sign up here.