One of the big challenges many people and companies deal with is the challenge of measuring the right things.
I do a lot of work in sports business and for a lot of the sports sales teams I work with, phone calls is the measurement that they use for success. Even though study after study show that phone calls get worse and worse results now.
Recently, I have been reading an incredible book by Angela Duckworth called Grit. The gist of the book is that passion plus perseverance is the essential tool to results.
Which really mirrors much of my own work.
The challenging thing for me is how often we seem to find ourselves being gritty as hell, but beating ourselves to death over the entirely wrong things.
Let’s go back to sports for a second, in many organizations marketing is an afterthought to their business departments. I don’t know if they feel like it is the responsibility of their partners or if their brands are well known enough that they don’t have to be bothered by marketing…or what?
But this leads to the mentality above, which is that the best metric we have is cold calls.
As a consultant, I know that cold calls aren’t really effective for me.
As someone that has worked with sales teams around the globe, I also know that cold calls have about a 1% rate of success, if I am being generous.
Let’s move on to other measures that are used to measure success that may or may not be right: things like “likes,” “engagement,” or some other buzz word du jour.
To be really successful and grow your business, you need to be really cognizant of the important measurements that are going to move your business forward.
Sometimes they are tough to tease out.
Other times, they are right in front of you.
But my challenge to you, on Labor Day in America, is that instead of just valuing how hard you work, find ways to work smarter. Perhaps it would be a good call too make for any day like this. You could make a List of 2022 holidays US citizens celebrate and find similar lessons to learn and challenges to face.
Because the point of Labor Day isn’t just to highlight workers, it is also to highlight the power of people and groups of people to identify ways to make improvements, create change, and get better results.
Which is what I hope for all of you.