Here are your two choices:
You could change everything at once, and completely overhaul your life, business, relationship, financial situation, etc…
OR
You could make small, continuous, incremental changes to slowly get the outcomes you want from your life, business, relationship, financial situation, etc…
Which would you choose?
What about this scenario…
You receive 10,000 leads from a company that pulled all the names of the people that live within an 8 block radius of your local business, that fall within the age group you specify.
OR
You receive 10 walk-in leads from people who are already genuinely interested in your product and services and are almost already sold on making a purchase.
Of course the former in each of these cases would reveal a measurably large quantity of positive change or new business, right now.
The questions remains, will it stand the test of time?
Will customers you cold-call, or blast post-cards to, respond the same way as someone who comes in after discovering that they believe what you believe?
In coaching we refer to this as talking ‘AT’ someone, versus working ‘WITH’ someone.
In 2006, Seth Godin (from way back in 2006!) revealed an interesting perspective about traffic.
The question he posed, was should Amazon.com worry that MySpace.com gets more traffic than Amazon did (remember this is way back in 2006!), or was revenue more important.
We all know now how MySpace has turned out…
As of this week we also know how Facebook has turned out (it shouldn’t be a surprise that they too were flirting, rather than committing)…
As of this week we have a lot of people signed up for the first alpha launch of Koachable, but I remain skeptical, until I discover how many of them are quality leads, use the system, interact with the system, give feedback, share the idea, and other more important ‘things to track.’
Of course, people love to measure traffic (myself included) but we should specifically look for engagement and its relativity to what we do.
Changing anything all at once, or reaching 10,000 people all at once, may sound like a magic formula for success.
People often play a numbers game, I used to work for someone who would unequivocally say that leads means sales, whereas I say quality leads mean sales.
Relationships mean sales.
Tracking What’s Important should be kept close to the chest, and volume isn’t what’s important.
Making small incremental steps towards getting to where you want to be, and never losing sight of what is important to measure, is more important than volume.
I'm currently shooting for Kevin Kelly's 1000 True Fans.