Business is complicated; let’s not kid ourselves.  If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, and with great success.

As many of you know, one of my passions is football, and recently my girls’ team made their first cup final. It was a close game, 1-1, up until the last three minutes when we managed to score, and this was our twenty-first shot.

When we boil it down to football, scoring is the most challenging thing, and getting a customer is the equivalent in business.

That’s why in football, the highest paid and awarded are generally the strikers/forwards; in businesses, it’s the sales team.

Getting a customer is a process skill, but once mastered is a game changer.

Not many business owners understand this or spend enough time trying to understand the ‘secret’ to make it work.

Most entrepreneurs will rely on word of mouth or referrals even though most of that is out of their control, reactive and not even scalable.

The professional business owner, however, has a better plan and Maggie Thatcher indirectly showed me the way. Well, when I say Maggie, it was actually one of her Advisors…

I met Eddie (the Advisor) at a network meeting of all places. It was the Thames Valley Business Chamber of Commerce’s prestigious event, and Eddie was the guest speaker, and I was the young, eager wannabee new business owner.

Long story short, I ended up having a great conversation with Eddie, and he offered to help me find my scalable, proactive, control-getting customer model. When I said help me, I had to pay £5,000 for the ‘secret’, BUT this yielded a thousand times return on that investment.

The critical thought is that I needed a marketing/selling routine that worked continually with or without me. This simple thought hit me as a small business owner as my business was very much boom or bust, with lots of selling effort, then lots of delivery effort. A bit frantic.  What Eddie said really hit home.

The second part of the process was to create the Prospect Journey.

My sales/marketing efforts had been too reactive. I attended events, worked with partners, and even knocked on a few doors. Everything needed to be more consistent. It was the classic throw enough stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

The Prospect Journey changed all that.

What he created for me was a journey of four simple routine steps that I would take each new prospect on with explicit action and activity at each Step and a plan to move them on their journey at each Step. I would record all activity and results in a spreadsheet to understand our routine and rhythm.

Step 1 – Was the Awareness step. This was a proactive step to introduce ourselves to new ideal prospects. We created a letter of introduction and sent this to forty businesses every week. This happened each week, regardless of what I was doing elsewhere in the business.

Step 2 – Was the Engagement step. We would phone each of the prospects from the week’s mailing and others from previous weeks to ask for a meeting to demonstrate our software (our business was a software company in the Automotive sector).

Initially, this step didn’t work as everybody appeared too busy. But a simple tweak in the script and suggestion:

‘I am in your area next month. Could I pop in for a coffee?’

started gaining momentum, and appointments began to come in.

Step 3 – Was the Meet / Greet step, where we attended the appointment and explained what our software would do. Most of the time, curiosity was raised resulting in the business owner requesting to see a demo either then or at another appointment.

Finally, Step 4 – Was the Quotation step. Here I sent out a quote for the system based on their requirements.

All Four Steps were planned in the diary:

Step 1 – Happened Mondays.

Step 2 – Happened Wednesdays

Step 3 – Happened Thursday or Friday (later both).

Step 4 – Happened Tuesdays with all the follow-ups.

At first, the results were poor, and I thought I had wasted five thousand pounds on my new routine.

But…I kept doing the activity. Forty letters each week. Because I had a routine, I could also change aspects and see if it made any difference to the results.

After a few weeks, we started to book more and more appointments; those appointments resulted in demos of our software and the more demos we did, the more sales we began to get.

At the end of the first six months, I had sent over a thousand letters and had high-hundreds of prospects I was in Engagement with or Meet / Greet with.

Eddie had provided me with a plan to deliver rhythmic activity that was now starting to yield rhythmic acquisition of clients.

Over the next few months, the correlation and timing of the activity were directly linked to the predictability of the results. So, I did what any business owner would do; I employed another me – a salesperson.

Jon started on a Monday, and we sent out not forty but eighty letters that day. My training was simple as I just showed him what I did.

On Tuesday, Jon sat with me as I created my quotes and followed up on prospects.

On Wednesday, training was all about the phone calls to get to meet/greet.

On Thursday & Friday, we then went out for my appointments.

Within a few weeks, Jon was up and running and had a blueprint of what to do based on the activity and expected results.

Of course, at first, his results were not as good as mine, but aspects of his journey were better. We would often compare notes and ideas to improve each other’s.

Within months Jon’s figures were the same as mine, so yes, we employed another salesperson and kept on repeating this, growing a struggling business to a seven-figure machine.

This process continued for a couple of years, with each of us ‘owning’ a different region/territory that we became very familiar with. I had Hertfordshire and Surrey and would know every prospect based in those areas through my phone calls and demos.

The Black Book Routine (Eddie delivered the process in a black binder) had turned a haphazard business into a machine that, by the late 90s, was sending out two hundred and forty letters per week with all the results coming from that.

I remember our best month of sales came in August when I was not even in the business but knew that the routine was happening every week without me.

Can that be said of your business?

Do you have a prospect journey to maximise the potential of getting customers?