Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of Ford Harding's book, 'Rain Making - Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field':
"Historically, training of professionals to win new clients has been haphazard. Law, accounting, engineering, medical, and architectural schools teach nothing about selling. This is also true of most business schools, surprisingly so, given that a sale is what defines the existence of a business."
The Introduction goes on to explain how the author, while doing consulting work, experienced good times then bad and due to particularly bad times was called upon to 'sell'.
About 'selling', the author reminisces:
"Slowly, with a little mentoring and coaching and after my share of mistakes, I learned what to do. Knowing how to bring in business, and so build a practice, has helped ensure a good income and more control over my own destiny than many people have in this turbulent world. It has ensured a flow of interesting work with interesting people. It has allowed me to develop and maintain a team of professionals. It has earned me respect among my peers."
(That excerpt contains a summary of many of the reasons why one might want to succeed in business.)
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The Introduction to the book contains the following major headings:
• Sales mean survival.
• Lack of time is no excuse.
• You must take responsibility for your own development.
• You have to get over the hump before it starts to be fun.
• You must adopt new measures of productivity and success.
• Marketing is an emotional roller coaster.
• You can gain a sense of control in business development.
• It is always better to be doing some marketing than none.
• You need to get face-to-face with a prospect to make a sale.
• Everyone can make a contribution.
• When you win, celebrate.
• Now is the time to start.
(Many good points)
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A couple of sentences in the Introduction also stood out and impressed me.
"Clients almost always return phone calls; prospects often don't."
"Marketers market."
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Harding says, "Most professionals who succeed as marketers begin by doing." and "Such people are doers first and planners second."
Harding doesn't just talk the talk on this, he also walks the walk. This is confirmed by the structure of his book, which begins with three parts action/tactics and ends with one part planning/strategy.
To explain his belief he states, near the end of the Introduction, "Part IV shows how to build a marketing strategy that is appropriate for you and your firm. It comes last because you must understand something of the tactics at your disposal before you select a strategy."
(This caused me to think about plans and action…and about Leading With Revenue.)
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"Leading With Revenue" is a philosophy I coined in an effort to describe how successful entrepreneurs go about being successful.
Leading With Revenue has particular impact during an entrepreneurial start-up.
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I feel Napoleon Hill's advice "Plan your work and work your plan" is the essential framework for sustained success.
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When asked to state the key ingredients of success, from start-up success to sustained success, I always include Napoleon Hill's "Plan your work and work your plan". I also always include Leading With Revenue.
Leading With Revenue is a philosophy containing about as much emotion as logical argument. Being that way, it is hard to learn it if you don't 'get it'.
I suppose, like the 'secret' Napoleon Hill embedded in and talked about throughout his 1937 classic ‘Think and Grow Rich’...if you are ready to receive it then you will 'get it'.
The 3 words - Leading With Revenue - can and should be taken literally. But, that's where the understanding of the philosophy begins, not where it ends.
Regardless, Ford Harding's words offer help....perhaps a good way to present some of the thinking behind the philosophy.
Ford Harding said, "....you must understand something of the tactics at your disposal before you select a strategy."
This aligns with the 'how' of Leading With Revenue.
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Here is a simplistic, theoretical and hypothetical example - an effort to explain Leading With Revenue:
Assume you come up with an action-tactic for selling something to someone. Assume you do the selling action. Assume the someone buys your something. Assume you find a similar someone and repeat the process. Assume the second someone also buys your something. Assume this process is repeated at least one more time. After three successful actions proven by three sales, you have generated some revenue and you have reason to conclude you have come up with a successful something to sell and a successful way to sell it. Assume you decide to feed this result back to your plans/strategies and make adjustments to reduce all the other somethings you sell and reduce all the other somethings you do in sales while expanding the one combination of somethings that has proven to be successful in generating revenue. After that strategic change is made, assume your fourth sales effort succeeds, your fifth sales efforts succeeds, etc. Then, assume you feed that additional success back to your plan and assume, because you feel you are definitely on the track to success, you remove everything but the combination of somethings that has worked and you etch your plan in stone...at that point, your plan only contains instructions/guidance about the successful product/service and the action that leads to the successful sale of it and the generation of maximum (or at least optimum) revenue.
Assume all that...
The business-develoment stars have aligned.
Not only have the stars aligned but they have aligned in about as efficient and simple a way as one could ever expect.
That would be an ideal example of Leading With Revenue.
· Have at least one product or service
· Have a plan, which contains at least one good sales tactic for action
· Do that selling action
· Succeed every time you sell (sales success means revenue)
· Feed the results (successful product/service, sales tactic, and resulting generation of revenue) back to your plan
· Revise your plan to remove things that don't work, leaving only the things that do work
· With your revised and fully-precise (perfect) plan, do more selling
· Grow your business rapidly and without any challenges whatsoever
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That's a picture of the ideal Leading With Revenue.
That incorporates Ford Harding's points and Napoleon Hill's philosophy. The only problem is, being 'ideal' it is purely hypothetical and theoretical and it will never happen in the real world of business development. But, the fact the example is 'impossible theory', does not reduce the need to understand Leading With Revenue.
The impossible example illustrates the iterative, back-and-forth relationship between plans and action, the foundation of Leading With Revenue.
While Ford Harding quite intentionally teaches tactics before planning, we must agree plans come first. We must agree with Napoleon Hill: one must Plan the Work before one Works the Plan. However, one must not expect to plan with perfection or completeness at the first try. (Actually, I would argue plans are never close to perfect, but that's another topic.) One must not underestimate the value of one good idea, backed by action. (Napoleon Hill repeated that message frequently.) And, one must not underestimate the danger of excessive planning, at the expense of action.
The initial plan may be just an uncomplicated combination of an idea about a product and a process for selling it to a buyer. In fact, isn't that what's near or at the heart where invention meets entrepreneurship?
Or, the plan could be 50+ pages of verbiage, tables, graphs, and pictures. That's not an unusual thing at mature businesses and larger corporations.
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Regardless, whether it is applied to nascent plans or to mature plans, Leading With Revenue is the driver for initiating, expanding, and sustaining business.
• Have a plan... whether large or small, whether deeply personal or widespread corporate doctrine
• Take action in the field... whether in strict compliance with your marketing plan or due to leading-edge entrepreneurial spirit
• Monitor the results of your business-development actions....both the absolutely-essential failures and the to-be-celebrated successes
• Feedback those failure results and success results to your planning process
• Adjust your plans, to organize, guide, and optimize your action
• With optimized action, expand your sales…expand your revenue…grow and sustain your business
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While that is not how I have done it in the past, that is another way to begin to describe the iterative, success-oriented processes around plans-action-results-plans....which I call Leading With Revenue.