Welcome to Daily Confidence for Entrepreneurs Show Episode 38.
In this episode, join my friend Simon Severino and I talk about How to Double your Sales Confidence in 90 days.
Listen to the podcast here:
KEY POINTS:
Some Top Myths about Sales
What are some Actionable Advice to Improve Sales?
How can the Sprint Method double your sales confidence in 90 days?
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:
8:06 – Most people don’t even know what sales really is. They have pictures that are something like a breezy automotive guy trying to sell you an old car.
15:28 – One mistake is that you think sales is somehow fake or wrong, you shouldn’t do it.
21:50 – If you have half an hour, do the Equalizer. It is basically your Blue Ocean Strategy. That’s your positioning.
32:38 – We have built the Strategy Sprints Method in order to help our busy business owner clients. So with one or two hours per day, we help them really move their business in the right direction.
TRANSCRIPTS:
Mostafa Hosseini 0:01
Welcome to Daily Confidence for Entrepreneurs. My name is Mostafa Hosseini, and I’m your host for the show. At Daily Confidence we share strategies and tips and actionable advice that you could use on a daily basis to boost your confidence and when it comes to running your business.
During the show, we’re going to be giving away gifts and after the show if you want to enter the draw and qualify, just like, subscribe, comment, and ask questions as we have the discussion with our guest expert here. If you tag a friend who can benefit from the conversation, and or if you write a review to our show and share your experience with the topic that we talk about on Apple, Spotify or Google, you also enter your name for the draw.
We have an amazing guest and a very important topic. My guest is Simon Severino. Welcome, Simon.
Simon Severino 1:00
Pleasure to be here. Welcome, everybody.
Mostafa Hosseini 1:01
How are you?
Simon Severino 1:04
Oh, I’m excited to be here.
Mostafa Hosseini 1:06
It’s great to have you. So the topic today is How to Double your Sales Confidence in 90 days. Now, I know that sales is a very big topic and a lot of business owners have issues with sales. Some of them don’t like to sell. Some of them don’t like to be salesy or be perceived as salesy or pushy. So this is going to really help. If you want to boost your confidence when it comes to sales, stay in and stay around and we’re gonna have some really good and actionable advice, tips and strategies.
So let me introduce Simon and we’re going to dig right into it. Simon Severino is the CEO of Strategy Sprints, Europe’s leading remote growth advisory. It’s a global team of Certified Strategy Sprints Coaches that do only one thing, double the revenue of service-based businesses in 90 days. That is nice.
Simon also teaches Growth Strategies in select Business Schools and hosts this Strategy Sprints Podcast and his website is strategysprints.com. Welcome, Simon.
Simon Severino 2:16
Welcome.
Mostafa Hosseini 2:17
So Simon, tell us about your story. What is your story?
Simon Severino 2:21
Whoa, my story. So I started my career as a consultant and you know, when you’re a consultant, the business consultants you start with traditionally, in a company where you are just number 300,000 something. So you are a Junior Consultant, and then Consultant, Senior Consultant, Project Manager, Senior Project Manager, I did the whole thing.
My aim was always to be promoted quickly, because it’s so boring to be down there and up there, it’s much more exciting, you can go use it in the boardrooms, etc. So I wanted to be in the boardrooms and I managed to be promoted quickly, under two years, every time.
When I was a project manager, I was flying around everywhere. I was in the room with the executives from BMW. We will do the Born Electric strategy. I was in the room with the coolest teams and taking tough decisions, big decisions that shaped the lives of many families. So I had a very exciting job.
But I had a miserable life. Basically, it became so boring because all airports look the same after a couple of times, and you don’t have time to see them. You just see hotels and airports. So I had a very miserable life.
Then we got two kids, Sandra and Federico. I told myself, stop. There must be a smarter way of living your life and helping people make big decisions and impact their surroundings in a positive way. So let’s find this way. And we did it. We created it. I’m living it. Yeah, now I have a life again.
Mostafa Hosseini 4:22
Very nice. So what’s the story behind what you’re doing now?
Simon Severino 4:35
Yeah, we basically thought about the principles and about what people really need if they are business owners and transpose them into their current way of living. So if you are a business owner right now and you run a service business or as has business and you want a business coach now you want many times a day the possibility to just quickly do something and you want something like it’s in the movie Spider-Man, you have the friend of Spider-Man who is on his computer, you know, the chair guy, and he’s in his ear. Then Spider-Man says, “Hey, should I kick this door or that door?” He goes, “Give me a second, the left door because the right door is closed.”
Mostafa Hosseini 5:20
I love that analogy.
Simon Severino 5:23
That’s helpful and that’s your real life and that’s what you need right now. The opposite would be okay. You wait three weeks before your business coach flies in your city. Then you have an eight hour workshop? Why eight, our why workshop? These are all things that were just in the tradition, this is how we do things. We basically said, okay, let’s forget all traditions.
How would we do it in a way that is natural, that fits to somebody that has kids, has a life and wants to do sports, and doesn’t want to sit in a round of chairs the whole day? We want to honor somebody who has kids and have a business and wants to do sports.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:03
Yeah. Is that your definition of business people that you’re after?
Simon Severino 6:11
Absolutely. We only work with people who want to have a real life in the real business.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:16
Is that why that is related to your top values?
Simon Severino 6:19
Yes.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:20
What are your top three or four values?
Simon Severino 6:24
Our values, we have six core values. They are focus, freedom, flow, happy, humble, hungry.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:35
Love it.
Simon Severino 6:36
These are our core values. Everything we do is decided by that.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:44
What about your personal values to your top three personal values?
Simon Severino 6:48
Yeah, they’re the same. Different values. It’s humble, hungry, and happy. That’s my core.
Mostafa Hosseini 6:55
Good. So what are you doing now? Who do you serve?
Simon Severino 7:01
So we serve business owners of service-based businesses and SAS businesses who want to scale their business and gain their life back at the same time. They know it must be possible to have both, it’s not an either or and there is a way.
Mostafa Hosseini 7:25
Got it. Then is there any specific type of businesses or or industry that you prefer to work with? You mentioned SAS and service businesses, but in the service world. Are there any specific industries that you prefer to work with or you’ve had good success with?
Simon Severino 7:45
We have had our best successes with consultancies and marketing agencies, creative agencies, and with SAS, but it’s industry agnostic.
Mostafa Hosseini 7:58
Okay.
So what are some of the objections that you usually hear about Sales?
Simon Severino 8:06
It all starts with “Oh, I don’t do that, I don’t like that, I don’t need that, and I get it, I was the same.” So most people don’t even know what sales really is. They have pictures that are something like a breezy automotive guy trying to sell you an old car. Of course, if that’s your picture, you avoid it. You don’t like it. I had the same picture. And I was like, I don’t do sales.
People would ask me, where do you get your clients? I just get referred to. I felt comfortable saying that. But of course, I hit a plateau. I couldn’t scale from there. So you have a time limit if you’re a consultant and you do it like that.
First, there is a limit of what you can do, how much can you do 300,000 per year, but then it’s over. You start to have a miserable life, because you’re booked all the time. You can never get to 500,000 and 1 million. It’s also not a good life.
It goes in the direction of a heart attack. That narcissistic situation because you don’t have any friends. Your family doesn’t like you anymore. You hit that point, and also divorce becomes becomes something that is on the table, if you do that for four decades.
So I sold that with my colleagues and I sold it in my own life because it wasn’t good for the relationship. At that point, you can only go smarter and going smarter means doing less. That’s why we do a bottleneck analysis. We basically cut in half what the team is doing and then we cut it in half again, and we find, you know, 80/20. We find the few things that move the needle really forward.
Then stick to them and improve that every seven days. That’s a Sprint Method, every seven days, you get numbers, you never do something that you cannot measure. Make it in a way that you can measure if it works. So every seven days, you get the numbers back, you improve based on these numbers.
We do 12 sprints at once. So if you improve something 12 times, it’s better. We pick the operations, we improve them 12 times, they’re better, or we pick sales. If that’s the focus of the sprint, we improve sales form, fit and function of the sales system. 12 times it gets better. So numbers get more predictable, and numbers get more reliable.
Mostafa Hosseini 10:47
Absolutely. Now for those people who don’t understand or know what Sprints are, can you give us a brief description, please?
Simon Severino 10:54
Yeah, so the opposite would be traditional project management, long cycles of discussion. Long, blah, blah, blah, meetings. Then three months later, there is a milestone, six months later, there is the next milestone, nine months later, “Oh, we didn’t hit on time on budget.” That’s the typical traditional project. Boring, me doesn’t work, you’re in too late and you have spent more than you wanted.
We do a bottleneck analysis and find the few things that move the needle really forward. Then stick to them and improve that every seven days. That's a Sprint Method, every seven days, you get numbers, you never do something that you cannot measure.
Mostafa Hosseini 11:22
What’s the opposite to that?
Simon Severino 11:24
The opposite is Sprint, or agile work. You have short sight and you start immediately by building not by discussing. So you have an idea, you go and build the prototype. In three hours, you test it 5 times out there for below $100. You make some tests and you come back with the data.
Then you bring it into the meeting and say, “This is my assumption, this is what came out, this is what I think we can achieve.” Then you just start. You do this in small chunks of work seven days. So everything you do can be measured every seven days. You will not have a surprise six months later, oh, but you have every seven days, both de-risking and data so that you can improve all the time.
So also your risk of it going wrong is much smaller. But it’s especially fun. Again, it doesn’t feel like a basketball team playing basketball or friends cooking together. Because you immediately get feedback. When you play Angry Birds, you shoot this bird and then it says 500 points. You get it immediately. That’s a sprint team. If you play in reverse, and you would wait two weeks for the report, how many points is that, that will be a traditional management of a project.
Mostafa Hosseini 12:56
Then it becomes a lot more, a lot more doable. We use that system ourselves as well. It’s a beautiful system. The fact that you mentioned is they’re not long cycles, they’re like, so you break their projects into a seven day, smaller chunks and tasks and projects that help us build up to the big goal that we’re trying to achieve.
And then like that, the fact that you mentioned that checking in every seven days makes a massive monumental difference. Like a lot of companies, they are not checking in every seven days. Maybe they check every month every three months, every six months, maybe once a year, and they wonder why things are not working. Right.
What’s a good resource to learn about this Sprint and the Agile Work System?
Simon Severino 13:57
Oh, we have a lot of resources, open source you can go to strategysprints.com/tools and we teach it there for free. You can use even greater tools in our templates.
We have master classes there where we teach it for free because unfortunately there is not so much. There is one wonderful book. It’s called Sprint: How to solve big problems in five days.
But that is only on decision making on the product level. So if you are a product team, this is your book. But we are talking business owners here and for the business owner there is no such book. That’s why I’m writing it because I’m missing it. I need it so I write it for myself.
So next year I can send you that but right now we are just the parts that we have collected. We are giving them away at strategysprints.com/tools
Mostafa Hosseini 14:48
Those of you that are watching or listening and joining us later, my guest is Simon Severino, my apologies. We’re talking about how to boost your sales confidence in 90 days. If you have any questions about boosting your confidence, or if you have any questions about sales strategy, feel free to pop it in the chat box. We’ll make sure to answer those questions. You also entered the draw for getting the gift from either me or Simon. Now, Simon,
What are some top myths around sales that people really usually run in their hat.
Simon Severino 15:28
We have to differentiate sales in terms of gardening or sales in terms of hunting to different kinds of sales. So gardening is good work, and then hope that the relations will then bring referrals. Hunting is when you really actively go out and say, I want to inform the world about this possibility.
So one mistake is that you think sales is somehow fake or wrong, you shouldn’t do it. That’s bad. Because you feel like you are pushing something onto somebody. Sales is not about you. It’s not about the product. Sales is about a problem and there is a solution.
You care about bringing problems and solutions together. That’s it. So this is what you do with your friends and what you do with your family. If you go for a walk, and you see a squirrel, and you want to show your kids, ‘hey, there’s a squirrel on there.’ Because you find that relevant and you care about that. You say hey, there is this squirrel that’s how I think about it. So it starts with mindset.
Mostafa Hosseini 16:41
I love it. Gardening versus hunting analogy. Love it. That’s a really powerful analogy. I’m sorry, I cut you off.
Simon Severino 16:57
It took me 15-16 years to understand this. My business coach told me “Yeah, okay, you’re gardening, but you’re not hunting.” I was like, ‘What is hunting? ‘ And he said, “Simon, you actively pursue your Rolodex, you go through them, you call them up, you follow up? You say, Hey, what are you?” I said, “No, I don’t do that. That’s pushy.”
He changed my mindset. Why is it pushy? What are you pushing? You are not pushing anything, you are checking in, you are asking what they’re up to? If you have something, then you will tell me about it. But only if it’s exactly what they need right now. They told you that they need it. It’s just human relationships.
Mostafa Hosseini 17:45
It’s more about nurturing relationships, in that gardening sense, versus the hunting thing.
Simon Severino 17:52
Yeah. The whole thing is follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. So for me one big change was when I first started bringing together all my contacts into one place that has changed everything. If you don’t have a CRM system right now, and you’re listening to this, just bring all your contacts together in one place. That’s called a CRM system.
Then you can start differentiating different stages like this. This person is slightly interested, highly interested, and wants to buy his boat, is a superfan. Start with just these five categories. Talk more to people.
Mostafa Hosseini 18:33
Repeat those categories again, please.
Simon Severino 18:35
Yeah.
- It’s slightly interested,
- Highly interested,
- Ready to buy his boat,
- Is ready to buy a second time?
- Or is a super fan?
For example, this could be the first 5 relationship stages that you differentiate. That’s huge. If you just do that. Then have it in front of you. I have it like a Kanban board and I see them and I can move them from here to here.
In my CRM system, if you just have that, it changes everything. It makes your life so easy. Now you’re thinking that your metaphor can be gardening or hunting, whatever, but you start thinking how can I move them from this stage to this stage? So you will, you will have these conversations. Then the next step is to create one email template for every stage.
If I have somebody in stage three, or they are really interested because, of course I have a tagging system to my website that says this person has watched seven videos in the last two days. Well then they get tagged as highly interested. So I got this message in Slack. You can easily put together apps and make them work together.
So in Slack, I will get a notification from a highly interested person to do something. Then I go to my CRM system. I know oh, they’re in stage three. So I click Email stage three, they get an email, it says, I see that you’re interested. What about we grab it and talk?
Mostafa Hosseini 20:16
Okay, that’s fair.
What software do you use to track them on your website?
Simon Severino 20:25
I have to ask my team what we currently use, because we change it every couple of years. We change the software, but whatever is it, I know that we use Kajabi in the back end. With Zapier, we link it to Slack and to other stuff. 90% of what we do, but I would not recommend it. It’s slow, and it’s expensive. But we are happy because the client has everything in one place. So just one login, and they have everything.
Use it. You can play via Zapier, for example. You can simply say, use a tagging system. So if the person does that, then do this. So NSA, when they clicked five times in one day, you tell me that they’re highly engaged, you sent me a message on Slack.
Mostafa Hosseini 21:19
Love it. Now, if somebody is watching or listening to this now or later,
What are some one or two actionable advice and things that they could do or strategies that they can improve their sales today or tomorrow, something that within an hour or two?
You know what, you do this? And you’re like 10, or speaking of the 80/20 principle, what’s one thing that could do to improve their sales skills or abilities 10 or 20%, within a short period of time.
Simon Severino 21:50
So if you have half an hour, I will do the Equalizer, the Equalizer is basically you do your Blue Ocean Strategy. That’s your positioning. Because the foundation for sales is really knowing what you stand for and what makes you unique. You can do that in half an hour, we have a tool for that is the Equalizer.
So it’s a spreadsheet, you go through that the first thing that it asks you is who are you three competitors? You write them down. Then it asks you what else can the client do if they don’t work with you? Because they cannot just go to your competition, they can also do, “hey, the intern Mike, the intern should do it.” Or we do nothing or we hire somebody to do it.
So they also have other alternatives. That’s the strategic arena. First, you think about that. Then it asks you what your competitors are investing in right now. Then you put in the features, for example, in technology, in onboarding, in emotions in LinkedIn, whatever it is, you make a list and then you grade yourself 10 Where you are currently winning, and one where you’re currently losing.
Okay, in 20 minutes, you will know where you’re winning and where you’re losing. Now the tool will automatically cluster it together and show you where you should cut costs this month and where you should invest more so you also have your budget. But the important thing is it tells you where you are winning right now. You can do this in 30 minutes.
We do this once a month in order to really know our budget so that we can cut costs and invest in something but in the right I think and we do it as a team. It takes us one hour as a team. It takes me half an hour when I do it alone because as a team we also discuss and we share perspectives and we align perspectives.
One thing that came up somebody from my team told me a couple months ago during this exercise they said hey what we stand for is CEO to CEO coaching. Nobody has that if you go to McKinsey, they will send you Junior Consultants, nobody sends you the CEO to to coach you and so I had an an ever really valuable new perspective and found what we stand for and our uniqueness just in this one hour exercise.
Mostafa Hosseini 24:25
This tool Equalizer, is it your tool or is it someone else’s tool?
Simon Severino 24:31
We have built it and it’s open source. We can share it with your audience. It’s at strategysprints.com/equalizer and you can grab it.
Mostafa Hosseini 24:42
Okay, so I’m going to try to put the link in the chat box, you are sharing some really good resources here. And so, strategysprints.com/equalizer. Right?
Simon Severino 25:01
Yeah.
Sales is not about you. It's not about the product. Sales is about a problem and there is a solution.
Mostafa Hosseini 25:02
Can you give us a summary of what needs to be there?
Simon Severino 25:06
- Step one, define your three competitors.
- Step two, the alternatives. What else can the client do? If they don’t go with you?
- Step three, rank in what they are investing?
- Step Four in what they’re investing in, what are they investing in? For example, they’re investing in person, in your competitors.
Mostafa Hosseini 25:34
Then you have to shop I guess, you have to do some digging up to understand what they’re investing in.
Simon Severino 25:39
You have an intuition for that, or better an instinct, because you see your competition, if they are your competition, then you will, you will come across them every week. Otherwise, they are not really your competition, they are your competition. If your client, if you see them coming in and out of the door of the same client, where you are going in and out the competition,
Mostafa Hosseini 26:03
So it was what they’re investing in.
Simon Severino 26:09
Then you have a list of what they are investing in, and you rate yourself 10, where you’re winning, and 1 when you’re losing, and everything in between. But try to be really very clear, you are either winning or you’re losing, sometimes you will be in between, that’s okay.
But try to really find out where you’re winning, because that’s the exercise about, you want to know, where are we winning? Where are we not winning?
Because basically, it’s done. You have now three clusters:
- Where we are winning,
- then where we are mad,
- and where we are losing, where you’re losing, this is where you will cut costs drastically to go minus 20% minus 30%, minus 50%.
If you cannot win in that category, why are you still even competing? Why are you bothering to let them win? Strategy is not about what you want to accomplish. What are you going to let go? The more you let go, the clearer you stand for one thing, and that’s where you can win.
Mostafa Hosseini 27:16
I love that. Tell me about how you help people and what is your gift that you’re sharing with people today?
Simon Severino 27:30
So practically, when they started with us week one, we set up a dashboard of three numbers. We asked what are the three goals that you want to achieve in these three months? What are the three numbers that will tell us 80% of the story. The story is, are we going in the right direction at the right pace?
The three numbers will be:
- One is usually around revenue for new clients per week.
- The second number is usually around how happy the clients are with the NPS score.
- Third one depends on the business. Sometimes it’s the churn rate or number of or conversion rate or sales time.
So we pick three numbers that will tell us 80% of the story. We put up this simple dashboard, it’s just a spreadsheet. But you see all the time you see these three things, and you will see if they’re going up or down. That changes everything. Because now you have a fully aligned team, doing together just three things and measuring just three things every seven days.
Now you have the feeling of friends playing basketball, because of course, now this gamification effect kicks in. Every team that sees a scoring board wants to be better next week. So if it says, how many clients did we have this week, then every team wants to have three clients next week. That’s natural. That’s how we’re wired.
So there will be a positive competition and the positive energy in the room. It’s also that you have simplified the thing, because one problem that business owners have, you can do 100 things, you could improve your LinkedIn outreach.
You could improve your website, you could improve the product, or you can go and check out the Clubhouse because everybody’s saying this is hot. But then you lose yourself. So it’s all about reduction. What’s the one thing this week that we move forward?
Mostafa Hosseini 29:33
Love it. You’re speaking my language, man.
Simon Severino 29:36
Yeah, you are the One Pager Marketing Plan guy. So we have the same philosophy.
Mostafa Hosseini 29:42
So what is the gift that you’re sharing with us today?
Simon Severino 29:50
Yeah, yeah, I think the Equalizer is the best investment of the half an hour that people can do.
Mostafa Hosseini 30:00
Beautiful. So I shared the link here on our show notes. If you’re listening to this later on our podcast, to access the Equalizer tool, which seems like a very, very useful, practical, amazing thing. The link is strategysprints.com/equalizer. Go there, answer those questions and within a half an hour, you’ll come up with your strategy. Get some awareness about who’s doing what and what you need to focus on.
Now, I love the fan. We have the question showing up. The question is, what are the top goals you want to achieve in the next three months? Or top three goals now?
Can you tell us how you come up with a list of the top three goals?
Simon Severino 30:47
Oh, yeah. So we have eliminated kind of everything in between. We have one big hairy audacious goal, like Jim Collins says it’s one. I have three things every week. So the one big hairy goal is we want to replace sprint teams, replace boring teams worldwide. That’s the big hairy goal.
We wanted all teams to have fun, basically, so that it doesn’t feel like work. Because it’s gamified. It’s simplified. And it feels like playing basketball with friends. That’s the big goal.
But how do we know that we are moving the needle forward? So we have three KPIs that we measure every Friday, and we hold each other accountable. Currently, they change from time to time, but right now there are a number of new clients closed this week. Our NPS score: how happy are the clients? The third one is the number of subscribers this week to our newsletter.
Mostafa Hosseini 32:06
So those are the KPIs that you’re tracking on a weekly basis.
Simon Severino 32:11
Exactly. So on Friday, I will be asked Simon, what was your contribution? My team will show me the numbers. But they will ask me, what did you do to move this forward and what we learned from this? What’s working really well and what’s working not so well? So what do we have to do?
Mostafa Hosseini 32:29
Love it.
If someone wants to learn about that system, what system do you use?
Simon Severino 32:38
We call it the Strategy Sprints Method. It’s basically what we have built in order to help our clients, they’re business owners and they’re busy. So with one or two hours per day, we want to help them really move their business in the right direction. It’s the Strategy Sprint Method. You can learn it from us, we don’t teach it. We do it. But you get to take a Sprint coach for three months, and you will do it directly, the next day you start doing it.
Mostafa Hosseini 33:06
Love it. Now, Simon, what are your favorite top two or three books that you usually recommend people to read?
Simon Severino 33:17
Business owners or general
Mostafa Hosseini 33:19
Business owners.
Simon Severino 33:20
So business owners, I recommend, how many books?
Mostafa Hosseini 33:29
There are three or four that you usually recommend or books that have made a massive transformation in your life.
Simon Severino 33:35
Yeah. So there is one book from April Dunford. She’s a member of our mastermind, and this book is amazing. This is for tech companies. It’s about positioning, but it’s also for every other company out there. Because she has a 10 step Process laid out in this book, How you find your right positioning. It is perfect. This is written by somebody who has 20 plus years in consulting. And this is worth much more than you pay for. This is beautiful.
Mostafa Hosseini 34:13
Very nice. Any other books that you recommend?
Simon Severino 34:17
Yes, if you are into copywriting, and I think everybody should get into copywriting really, because we are all in that space. I’m realizing it just now. It’s a beautiful book by Eugene Schwartz called Breakthrough Advertising. These days, it’s about copywriting. Everybody’s into copywriting because every time you write an email to somebody, you are doing copywriting and this can be a skill that really changes the game.
So for me, one of my major things this year is to learn how to write better, because communication is everything. We talked about everything. The third book that I recommend is the Blue Ocean Shift. It’s my road to the Blue Ocean Strategy, it’s the practical one. So business owners can go directly to the tools, and the tools like the equalizer tools that help you find out where you are unique, so that you can let go of all the rest.
The foundation for sales is really knowing what you stand for and what makes you unique.
Mostafa Hosseini 35:33
Got it. That’s fair. Now, Simon, if you had an ad that everyone on the internet could see on Facebook, Google, all over the web, what would your message be?
Simon Severino 35:51
It’s cool. I would say Be the fun you seek.
Mostafa Hosseini 35:58
Be the fun you seek. Yeah. Love it. Tell me more about what you mean by that.
Simon Severino 36:08
You know, many people think, oh, when I’ve reached that thing, then I’m happy. When I have 1 million in my bank account, then I’m happy. Then I’ve done the Tech Talk, I’m happy. When I’ve written a New York Times bestseller, I’m happy. If you do it like that, you will never be happy. Never. Because it’s always there.
Unless you start liking the journey. So it starts with happiness. Why do I have this big, hairy, audacious goal? Because I like having the goal. But if I don’t reach it, and it’s possible in business that you don’t reach it, I have enjoyed the process.
I have a great life. We have a great team because it gives us energy. Anyway, even if we never get to that but we had a great team and great time. We had enough for our families, had time for our friends, and we have lived a great life.
Mostafa Hosseini 37:17
Love it. That’s essential too. I think I’ve heard Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, “Live into the vision of what you’re trying to be.” That’s a man that obviously has done it and you’re doing it. I’ve heard that advice from a lot of high achievers. I believe in that.
One of the exercises that I do if I don’t forget every morning and in the evening before I go to bed is trying to visualize what I’m looking for. Just living into that moment.
I love what you’re talking about here.
Simon Severino 37:58
Yeah. The fourth book comes to my mind. It’s called Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. Vivid Vision, it’s about he says skip the mission statement, do a vivid vision instead. It’s basically what you just said that you really embody something that you want to do in the morning and in the evening. He says, “This is what you could do with your team.” So the business mission should be a vivid vision, one that you really feel and smell and you really like to live right now.
Mostafa Hosseini 38:32
Yeah, can I share with you what I have? So this is my vivid vision. It is six pages long with every detail about beauty in every aspect of life. Well, if there is honestly one thing that I could say, I heard a guru talking about it. He likes to sit down and write down exactly what you want.
Then read that document every day for 90 days. Right? So I did that. Then I read it for a while. I forgot about it a few years later, like I wrote it up to 20 actually 2019 or 2020. Then back in 2014 or 2015 I realized I achieved almost every single thing that I wrote down there. I swear to God, I’m like, oh my god, what if I was continually updating and reading this? So I started doing it again back in 2016 or 17. Then the same thing again happened to stuff that I wrote down on this and I read and visualized then rebooted and memorized back to your weekly check in. A whole bunch of them have happened.
Simon Severino 40:06
Beautiful. Yeah, thank you for sharing. I would love to read it. These exactly. You feel the energy right now when you say you really can see it in your body and in your eyes. That’s exactly why I lacked the discipline to read it every day.
I try to help myself, I have spoken it into an audio file on my phone with some background music, you know, like shamanic guru, like drums. So I hear it in the morning. I go running every morning. So I hear myself telling, and if it’s right now it’s, I am in 2023, this is what happens. This is where we are and I meet every challenge with courage, etc. Where I am and what I do.
Mostafa Hosseini 40:59
Love it. I did not and I did that. It’s a powerful exercise. Remind yourself every morning, listening to yourself, say “Here’s what’s going to happen, here’s what I’m doing, here are my affirmations, my vision.”
I love it. Have you had that experience where the stuff that you wrote down and reminded yourself on a daily or weekly basis happened more frequently and a lot easier compared to the stuff that you didn’t?
Simon Severino 41:34
Yes, definitely. It may have made it easier to say no to some stuff. Made it easier to decide what tasks that I should do in the morning and which in the afternoon I should not do at all because they are not aligned with that.
Who should I work with and who should I not work with? These are all very important decisions and if you have that clarity because we have read that in the morning, it will be much easier for you to take the right position during the day.
Mostafa Hosseini 42:08
Love it. Simon, is there anything that you’d like to add to what we talked about that maybe we didn’t talk about that you want to share with our audience?
Simon Severino 42:18
I think we covered a lot of ground. If you just can pick one thing right now, listening to these, either do your vision or do half an hour of your positioning exercise. Just pick one and do it.
Mostafa Hosseini 42:34
Love it. Simon this was a really good conversation. This is like you’re speaking my language. I love it. This is where you shared some practical advice and tools and generously shared your tools and resources with our audience.
So if you’re out there listening or watching this, go to strategysprints.com which is his website. If you go to strategysprints.com/equalizer, you get access to that tool where you can analyze and prioritize your things that you need to do and come up with your strategy within half an hour to an hour, I guess.
So Simon, I really appreciate you.
Simon Severino 43:24
Thank you so much for having me here. Keep rolling.
Mostafa Hosseini 43:27
Thank you. Now for those of you who are watching and listening, one way that we help our audience, boost their confidence and be more confident running their business is by helping them create and implement their One Page Marketing Plan in three days or less, through our signature course, or boot camp called Simple Marketing Formula. It is happening on the weekend of January 22 to 24th, which is like this very weekend, and it’s happening again in February.
Now, if you’re interested in clarifying what you need to do and reduce confusion, anxiety, frustration and overwhelm about marketing, join us and a group of heart-centered, committed entrepreneurs from around the world work together to build your one page plan that you could use on a daily basis.
Much like the example that Simon was bringing in with KPIs with strategies, here are the top three things that we need to do for our marketing and give yourself the chance to improve your chances of reaching success and experiencing your goals by a minimum of 4040 times. Right?
So I’m going to put the link here in the comments. Check it out. And if you’re interested join us the link is persyo.com/join-smf. That stands for Simple Marketing Formula. The link is going to be in the watch comments in the show and it will be in the show as well. Thank you for joining us at Daily Confidence for Entrepreneurs. Thank you Simon. Again great to have you and we’ll see you on our next episode.
Simon Severino 45:10
See you soon, bye bye.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- Equalizer Tool Gift from Simon Severino
Sprint: How to solve big problems in five days Gift from Simon Severino
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
- Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford
- Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing – Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth by W. Chan Kim
- Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool for Aligning your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future by Cameron Herold
- Simple Marketing Formula Boot Camp
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