Focus on signal over noise - Elon musk
I read this quote (may not be verbatim) by Elon musk months ago, it’s still stuck with me so much that I wanted to share it with you all about how it has helped me bring in more results & focus on my business.
I work in sales & marketing for my agency which I co-founded (Blusteak.com). My main job is to get the brand’s story out there, build a community that believes that we are the best at what we do and get leads in the pipeline & convert them to long-term clients.
We get tons of inbound leads, Till some time ago, I would personally get connected to them, talk with them, even if I felt that it’s a wrong fit I still took them to further stages like proposal submissions, negotiations and used to put out a lot of energy for each and every lead that I got.
Then I realised that the quality of the proposals that I was making went down, I couldn’t give much attention to those leads that there “really good & apt“ since I gave equal attention to the other unqualified leads too.
I needed to get out of this, still, I had this quote of “Signal Vs Noise“ in my head. I decide to put it into action
The noise was all those unqualified leads that I was spending time on and Signal were those few qualified clients I couldn’t spend quality time with.
I did the following this to filter out the noise and to pick out the signals only:
1) Created a questionnaire that had very basic but key questions that acted as qualifiers for our business - such as the ambition (Goals), monthly marketing budget, current traction etc. Now we give out this questionnaire first and if it’s good enough only we move on to the next phase, ie meeting.
2) After every meeting I used to promise them a lengthy proposal which took 2-3 days for me to prepare. I’ve even prepared 30+ page proposals for prospects who didn’t even turn up for the presentation meetings! hence I made the presentation into a template in which I can spend very less energy but will produce quality presentations. Helped me cut out the noise of presentation preparations.
3) I became more courageous as a service provider. Before that, I was afraid to take a stand on the terms that we had put up. Now I realised that even if you are selling something, you need to show your authority by sticking to your terms just the way you prioritise the budget negotiations.
These are major changes I made to cut out unnecessary noise from my daily professional life. I can say I have much more time with me to just focus on things that matter.
Do you know what all are the noises that are keeping you away from the signals?
Pick out the signals, cut out the noise, focus on one thing at one time, allocate your time to the things that matter.
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