Are You Keeping Your Database Clean?

Just think about your closets right now – If you simply had to show a picture of your closet, what would we see? Now for some of you we would see something very organized and so on, but for the rest of us, despite the fact that we don’t spend any time cleaning it or organizing it somehow it just remains completely clean with just the things that we want to wear all the time, right? Not right, that’s not what we find. What we find is that it gets cluttered over time and sometimes we think all we need to do is have a bigger closet and that would solve it. No.

What is revealed in the closet example is that we have the wrong criteria and so the criteria becomes and maybe you’ve had this experience: as we take something off the shelf as if to give it away we suddenly become aware, “Well, maybe I’ll wear it again sometime, maybe this will come into fashion again sometime, maybe it will fit me again sometime….” and that’s the wrong criteria, it’s so broad that nothing gets passed on to somebody else and so as a result it becomes overloaded and a mess and we can’t even find the things that stood out.

I’m not really talking about closets; I’m talking at this point about the kind of people that we work with, the qualified leads. We’re not looking for just more names, we’re looking for the exact kind of people who are waiting and ready for exactly the kind of thing that we are offering. That means we need to become exceptionally clear, use extreme criteria. Like with the clothes example in the closet, we need to shift to: Do I absolutely love this item of clothing? Do I wear it often? Does it look great on me? As we shift the criteria all of a sudden we become more selective, same with the sales leads that we want to be working with. We need to know who is the ideal person we are searching for and know that precisely, concretely. So that we know what to target and who to quickly move aside from: it’s about finding the right people at the right time, not just more people any time.