It's a rainy day down here in West Chester, PA, and the weather made me think of a really important part of business development that a lot of people, sometimes are aware of and sometimes aren't.
One of the things I always want to reference is there's a lot of great books and a lot of great information about the success mindset, about business development approaches, about all kinds of business things, about hiring, about how to make great presentations, all good stuff. I'm not trying to minimize any of that, but I think one of the things that's really important is to understand that the true process of business development, or what a lot of people call sales, is a very deliberate action. It's a very deliberate process where you create a result in the time frame that matters to you.
Now, why am I standing in front of our office door today and showing you a window that's speckled with raindrops? It's been raining here for two days. It's because I want to remind everybody that business development is not an act of planting seeds or farming. You can do a little bit of that, but you can't rely on that because you cannot rely on the gods above to get you the water or the right soil, or the right amount of sunshine or enough sunny days. You can't rely on natural growth processes to produce the type of results you probably want to see consistently in your business development efforts. If the rain doesn't come at the right time, that seed's going to perish on the ground. If there's too much rain, as we've had up in, Vermont, where we have a second home, most of the farmers last year were sick and tired of rain and lost a lot of their crops. They just got saturated and rotted in the ground before they could ever produce any edible food or anything that someone could take to the market. So you've got to develop a process that doesn't count on outside influences in the environment to get you where you want to be when you want to get there.
Do not become a success farmer. You've got to commit to becoming a success creator. Know your process, know the steps, and set a timeline for when you want to reap the rewards of your effort. When you want a collective decision, take a commissioned check to the bank. Put a purchase order in with your company so that you can see the success that you'd like to enjoy through your professional efforts.
So once again, don't let the wet window tell you that the ground's going to be right and you're going to get enough crop out of the ground. If you just sit around and watch it long enough, take control of your process and your success, and don't let some other non-controllable factor determine how well you're going to live your life and how well your career is going to go.
Get out of farming and become a proactive creator of success. Take care, have a great weekend, get out there and make it happen.
