by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
With recruiting, it can be easy to get sidetracked, and it’s even easier to be moving so quickly in a direction that you don’t realize you’re slightly off course, or even maybe going completely in the wrong direction.
I highly recommend that every two to three months that you audit your daily recruiting activity and your results. Ask yourself, “Am I getting the results I want? Are my truly desired results, the key outcomes, the key indicators, are those getting better?”
If they’re not, then you have to look at your process and you’ve got to realize, “Okay, my process is not working right now. My daily behaviors are off. I’m probably focused on the 80% of things that are only getting me 20% of the results.”
I’ve talked about the 80/20 rule (or Pareto Principle) before, and it’s all about how 80% of results in life come from only 20% of activity. And actually, if you really look at the 80/20 rule, it’s honestly more like the 90/10 rule, maybe even the 95/5 rule. 95% of results come from 5% of the things you do.
To give you an example, I think that having set up mile markers along the recruiting process and then doing activities specifically that move your top recruits to your next mile marker is a key recruiting activity.
If I organize my next recruiting trip, is that working on recruiting? If I segment my database, is that working on recruiting? If I go to lunch with fellow coaches and we discuss our recruiting, is that recruiting?
No. None of it counts as working on recruiting in my mind.
The only thing that matters is getting commitments and to do that I need to create movement.
I need to focus on only doing key behaviors on a daily basis that will create movement with my recruits so I am moving them to the next mile marker. That’s the result I want. There’s no way to sort of move them. You either do it or you don’t. Everything else is a waste of time.
So, most coaches don’t do these types of analyses because they are too busy spending their day running around checking off mostly unimportant things on their to-do list. They’re not focused on their priorities, and they’re not focused only on the best things that matter.
If you are guilty of this, how can you start focusing on those things which get the biggest impact right now? How can you design your recruiting so that you’re doing the only the things which truly matter? When you get laser focused on what you want and need to be doing, you have to have high standards about how you use your time. You have to do these types of 80/20 style analyses and look at what are the true things that matter most to you.
Bottom line, your personal life, coaching life, and recruiting is a product of your standards and what you’re willing to tolerate. If you’re willing to tolerate living in the 80% of things which are producing almost none of your results, you’re not going to be high performing. You’re not going to become elite at what you do.
Once you focus on just your core priorities and the few activities that are making the biggest bang, the few activities which truly matter, you can delete almost everything else.
Mandy runs a program called Recruiting Made Simple where they focus on getting your recruiting organized in a way so you are clear as to what the next mile marker is. Go here to check it out.