The actual success recipe 🍰

One of the oldest analogies in the business world is: “What’s the recipe for success?”

These answers lean towards passion, motivation, energy, purpose, focus, dedication, consistency, etc.

And while all of those are really important, in my opinion, there’s only one ingredient required to find success in your job / career / business

It’s simple: Do More of What Works

(I know, I mentioned this last week, but it’s important to double-down on this one!)

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Okay, back to it:

Before you answer this question, take a second and commit to being brutally honest with yourself: How often and well do you evaluate your daily practices?

Do you know which activities are producing results? And vice versa, have you identified which ones are a waste of your time?

Make your life easier by throwing out anything that isn’t clearly helping you achieve your goals and become hyper-focused on the activities that are moving the needle forward.

Here are two real-life examples of Sales Reps I’m work with right now, where we’ve committed to “Evaluate and Remove” and/or “Do More of What Works”

Example #1:

Because she lives in a region where cold-calling simply isn’t an acceptable way of doing business, cold email is paramount. So, we needed to focus on a few things:

1. Which email format is most effective?

2. Which sequence structure is most effective?

3. Which subject lines drive open rates?

4. Which call-to-actions generate the most responses?

So, we began A/B testing everything.

At a high-level, we’ll run 3 sequences concurrently, each one with a different approach. After the sequences are complete, we review the performance and simply throw away the stuff that didn’t work.

If the sequences perform equally, we take a look at the top performing emails from each sequence and then pull those emails into a new high-performing sequence we’re looking for.

As always - keep it simple!

Example #2

In a completely opposite region, I’m working with another Sales Rep in which cold calls have historically performed well. On top of that, she simply doesn’t like to write cold emails and doesn’t enjoy writing in general.

Most importantly - she loves the chase of cold calls and is wildly effective on the phone.

Eventually we reached a point of, why do much of anything else other than make calls?

If the recipe is do more of what works, then she should simply make more calls. The last few months, she’s been dialing 1,500+ times/month and has exceeded quota both months!

We removed the mental block of “I have to send out X number of emails and Linkedin messages” which provided more mental space for “I’m going to hammer the phones every day until I hit quota.”

While this isn’t the right approach for everyone, it works for her.

One final broken record spin: Do More of What Works.

Why would you spend your time doing anything else?