Increase your return on luck
In this week’s newsletter I’m going to show you how I increase my return on luck.
Waiting for luck is not a strategy, but preparing for how you deal with luck when it arrives is.
Ask a salesperson to explain the story of a deal to their manager and they’ll explain the strategy, the calls, the hard-fought negotiations.
Ask the same salesperson to explain it to a teammate and a wry smile will often creep in: “Yeah, that was a lucky one!”
We like to think the win was all down to our efforts, but deep down we know that luck plays a big part. Sometimes we were just in the right place at the right time.
Jim Collins is one of the business world’s foremost authors. He’s written classics like Good to Great and Built to Last.
In his book Great by Choice he wanted to see if some successful companies were luckier than others.
Were great companies like Microsoft, Apple, or Tesla just luckier than others in their sector?
Return on luck
Jim Collins investigates whether some companies are just luckier than others.
The research showed that successful companies experienced the same amount of good luck, the same amount of bad luck, the same spikes in luck and the same timing of luck as other competing companies.
What differentiated them was what they did with that luck.
They were fast to understand the luck, they were quick to capitalize on it, and they invested time and money to turn the luck to their advantage.
Collins refers to it as the Return on Luck.
Salespeople are no different. Over your career you will experience the same amount of good luck as the salesperson next to you. What will differentiate you is what you do with that luck.
When a customer or opportunity lands in your lap, make sure you can work fast, give them what they need, ensure you have time to spend with them, and focus hard on bringing the deal in quickly before anything else gets in the way.
Managing your calendar
One of the ways I prepare for luck is ensuring I have time available to deal with it when it arrives.
A sales role is a balance between work you initiate yourself, and work that is initiated by someone else: a customer, a partner, or maybe your manager. Some of this work can be valuable and some a complete waste of your time.
Consider the activities below and where they might sit on these two scales.
It’s very easy to “work really hard” and yet spend all your time below the line, racing from one meeting to another, jumping from one recurring meeting to the next, attending networking events (or as I call them notworking events), responding to blind RFPs, and following up on poorly qualified opportunities.
This salesperson is active and would have no problem telling their manager how busy they are! “I’m in back-to-back meetings this week!” It sounds like a badge of honor, but it is a false position.
You want to spend your time above the line creating content, prospecting to build your pipeline, meeting with customers, and moving your qualified opportunities forward. When your work is initiated by someone else it should be helping you to learn or be directly linked to creating or moving an opportunity forward.
You have a set number of working hours per week. You need to defend every single one of them from time wasters below the line, otherwise you are only harming your own chances of success.
In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he talks about the importance of building good habits by focusing on the activity rather than on the outcome.
So instead of looking at the chart above and thinking, “Yes, I’ll make sure I focus above the line” you need to have a defined process for how you will do that.
You cannot plan for any of the activities on the top right, as these are initiated by other people, but you can focus on planning the things in the top left quadrant, and actively declining the items in the bottom left quadrant.
Prospecting: You already have blocked out an hour each Monday for that
Content creation: Book time every week or every two weeks for this
Customer calls: Block time when this happens
Building and updating launch plans: Book this time in each week
For the bottom left you need to be rigorous around what you initiate. Do you need to spend the day traveling, or can that happen as a video call? Do you need to set that meeting up as a recurring meeting, or can it be ad hoc? Is that opportunity really qualified, or are you trying to convince yourself?
For the bottom right, these are the activities where you need to use your political skills to politely get yourself out of them as quickly as possible. If that can’t happen, try to limit your time commitment.
Recurring meetings: These are never valuable, so suggest ad-hoc meetings instead
Meetings with no agenda—no agenda, no attendance—are a waste of time
Forecast calls: These are valuable to your manager but rarely to the individual team members. Can they be shorter or less frequent?
Blind RFPs: Qualify out unless the customer meets your terms of engagement
Being rigorous around this will free up more of your time, which can then be used when the valuable work that is initiated by someone else (i.e., your customers) comes in.
How frustrating it is if a customer contacts you to ask for a quote to add on some additional products and your day is committed to low value activities!
Remember what you learned about successful salespeople and their return on luck?
Having free time to act on good fortune is what we mean.
Look out for luck and pounce when it arrives!
That’s it for this week - see you next Saturday!
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