Turning One Day Into Two

byBald Eagle

4.3K followers

5 years ago

I once worked for a guy who was BIG on setting goals.

So big he always achieved them.

He worked in the financial services field selling Life Insurance and in those days if you sold 1 policy a week you were doing well.

On moving to Auckland North Island, New Zealand) from Christchurch (South Island) he realised his only network was his opposition! Hard to sell to those guys but ...

Introducing Joyce

No problem to Ian - he hired a PA and Joyce's only function was to see that his diary was absolutely full.

To do this she contacted the insurers and asked if he could be allowed to deliver all the cheques (checks for my friends over in the USA) of people who had cancelled their poilicies. He also asked if they would allow him to contact those people who wanted to cancel (for whatever reason) and who had no partial payout (in other words their policies had not built up any sort of reserve value). They were simply disillusioned, or in most cases coerced into buying a policy and now regretted it.

Now bear in mind your (yes you reading this) own attitude to Life Insurance and remember it is a very difficult thing to sell.

And here he was going to already disgruntled customers to assist them with cancelling their policies. It's not easy to knock on an annoyed client's door and try to turn them around but he figured that would be easier than selling to his network.

His first goal was never to finish the week without selling ONE policy - and boy did he work late into Friday nights sometimes. The stories he used to tell were absolutely amazing, humorous and sometimes downright scary.

Turning 1 Week Into 2

But he soon got a reputation and the Insurance Comapanies were feeding him with all sort of leads - by now some of them pretty decent ones too.

But now he had a problem as far as he's goal setting went because essentially the weekly goal became so much easier.

Joyce needed to step up her game after he decided to change his 5 day week into 2 x 2 1/2 day weeks.

The the goal was still 1 policy a week but now there were two weeks in each week; one ending at lunch time on Wednesay and the at 5.00 pm on Friday.

He was making big money.

But that two became a bit too easy!

Turning 1 week into 5

He then took a mammoth step and Joyce and he decided that the week should be increased to 5 weeks in one - in other words he needed to sell a policy a day! Absolutely unheard of.

But here's the thing ...

He reached that goal too after a short while and then upped his game even more.

Doing the Impossible - turning 1 week into 10.

Yes he turned each day into two weeks with the goal of selling a policy every morning and one every afternoon - 2 per day! A 10 time increase on all the other successful salesmen in the industry.

He achieved that goal too.

The interesting part of his story was that after a while the pressure was non-existent and he was having a blast just seeing if this could be done. I guess that happens when you're doing well - look what nice guys Kyle and Carson are.

How does this relate to me?

Well I woke up this morning with a goal (for the day) in mind and have turned my 1 day goal into a 2 day goal. I just dcouldn't get it done. So it is 8.24 pm here and I shall work until whatever time it takes to see this through - TODAY!!

PS He was a great and fun guy to work for.