Friday, October 8, 2010

What Makes a Reasonable Goal?

I’m describing a personal goal related to my strategy of building business relationships, but what is written here applies to any goal you choose to have.

I have stripped my contact list down to 238 entries. I shed the small organizations which are too small to think big, and am gradually building up my numbers of contacts, CEOs and VPs of large firms.

I want to be known to each person on my list, say 240 contacts, right now, but by the end of the year could be 300, if I add one good one each working day.

Another word for “reasonable” is “rational”, which means, “can be worked out”, and that means some form of logic or numeric calculation, and remembering that Management Measures (and Management Measures – Part 2 ) I need to quantify my goal.

I’ll state it this way: ”My goal is to establish face-to-face contact with each person on my contact list within 3 months of placing them on my list”.

To do this I will have to phone/email/mail most of them in order to be known well enough for them to risk spending half an hour with me.

Or, to put it another way, I can do only 260 lunches in any one year.

I know how many dial-outs I need to make before I get an agreement to meet.

A few days ago I made 21 calls in 4 hours and got a single presidential agreement to meet for lunch. The same effort rewarded me with a total of 4 “please send an email”, which establishes a channel of communication.

If I did that every day, I’d get 4 emails out each day, but I really need only two emails out every day.

I can’t phone out every day – some days I am at client sites, so let’s say I phone out only half of the 260 working days in each year.

That means I need to make 20 calls every other day.

The mathematics is not difficult.

If I want to “touch” each contact by phone twice a year, I need to get 240 “live” phone conversations twice a year, that’s 480 live conversations each year.

If I can get 4 live conversations in 4 hours of an all-day phone day, I need to spend 120 days on the phone full time.

Is that reasonable?

Talk to Me !

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