I love peace 🙂
As I came into the office Monday morning the greatest two things happened.
1) all my accounts paid their monthly bill
2) no fires
Quite literally when these two things happen in any professional’s life, a sense of empowerment is felt. You start thinking “I feel like I can handle whatever the world throws my way.” Highly stressful things happen in life. A top performer handles them with courage, grace, and intensity.
Herein lies the hardest aspect of my job I’ve found thus far in my 5 year career which is handling business fires swiftly and easily while still managing a book of busines.
Most fires take a considerable amount of time and work to mitigate, which consequenctly means less time spent on growing other client’s businesses.
The art of managing and growing a book of clients is a complex skill set. There is no linear decision making path for every problem. Effective judgement becomes more and more critical in a successful career.
In a world where there are limitless things to do, having the judgement to know what to work on and what not to work on spearates the high performs and everyone else.
Here’s a decision matrix tree I’ve found helpful in improving my judgment.
A) is the client getting results
B) has the client acknowledge the results are coming from you
C) does the client understand, trust, and believe in your service/product
If A,B,C are checked off, spend time building phone rapport with these accounts. You are taking a risk not spending time talking to other accounts, but if they are too busy to talk to you anyways, you’re doing yourself a big favor letting the marketing keep those accounts busy which free’s up your time to spend growing promising accounts.
The best marketing executives are good at growing the best types of accounts. They are not working harder or luckier then the next guy or girl. What high performers are doing is executing sublime judgment across their book of clients.
A priority early in a business career should be figuring our ways to improve your judgment abilities by finding opportunities to increase the frequency in which your judgement abilities are going to be tested. Growth happens in the stretch, so stretch your judgement abilities to become a high performer.