On this episode of The Wednesday Call podcast, Andy Albright delivers the show from his home in Treasure Island, Fla. to discuss why speed is important to your "pit crew."
"It's not the big that eats the small; it's the fast that eat the slow." -- Gary Ryan Blair
Perhaps the most important reason of all for creating a sense of urgency and using speed as a competitive advantage is that time is finite. In terms of insurance sales, speed essentially means how quickly your business performs.
What is your turnaround time?
How soon do you respond to prospect leads by dialing?
How long does it take you to book your appointments?
How fast do you handle your clients' requirements when submitting applications?
When responding, booking and handling occurs, your success of getting an application issued-paid without chargebacks is not dependent only on speed, but on habit as well.
The Building Blocks Of Speed
All business activity boils down to two simple things:
1. Making decisions (What do I want?)
2. Executing decisions (How do I get it?)
Your success depends on your ability to develop speed as a habit in both.
Making Decisions
"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week." -- General George S. Patton
The process of making and remaking decisions wastes an insane amount of time in most businesses. The key takeaway is: WHEN a decision is made is much more important than WHAT decision is made. If, by way of habit, you can decide on when a decision will be made from the start, you'll have developed the first important muscle for speed.
You need to become deeply driven by the belief that fast decisions are for better than slow ones and radically better than no decisions. Some decisions deserve debate and analysis, but most aren't worth more than 10 minutes.
Executing Decisions
A lot of people spend a whole lot of time refining their approach to processes and to-do lists. Here are four ways to execute your business mission with momentum:
1. Challenge The When:
Completion dates and times follow a tribal nation of the sun setting and rising, and too often "tomorrow" is the default answer. It's not that everything needs to be done now, but for items on your critical path such as dialing and setting appointments, it's always useful to challenge the due date. All it takes is asking the simplest questions: "Why can't this be done sooner?" Asking it methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your business.
2. Recognize and Remove Dependencies:
Just as important as assigning a deadline, you need to tease out any dependencies around an action item. Things that can wait till later need to wait. You can't be slow-rolling on non-vital tasks when you could be hacking away at the make or break actions which bring you premium.
A big part of this is making sure you aren't waiting on something or someone to take an action. You want to be working in parallel instead. It's your job to recognize dependencies (things that need others and can wait) and non- dependencies (things that need no one and can be started right now).
3. Eliminate Cognitive Overload:
Classic cognitive overload comes in the forms of: Fit (Do my skills meet the expectations?); and Fairness (Are my actions going to be rewarded?).
Basically, Fit is code for, "Have I got game?"
Fairness is code for, "Am I going to get screwed?"
Until the mind can reconcile those two concerns, human-beings will reactively shut down all productive activities or purposely navigate the waters slowly by not deciding.
Unfortunately, speed does not wait on sureness. "Fortune favors the bold, the brave and the strong." A second chance depends on a "Take" strategy, and a missed opportunity relies on a "wait" strategy.
4. Use Competition the Right Way:
Introducing competition is a good way to add urgency. You can
either set the pace or be the one to react. Whoever is fastest out of the gate is the one everyone else is forced to react to. But, the idea of failing or being left behind is so terrifying that some may check out. Those people are only attaching competition to failure and not success.
Competition is a good thing because it gives us a realistic frame of reference to how well we are living up to our best in any facet of our lives. Ultimately we are in competition with ourselves, and our greatest adversary is our own ego because at the fundamental level, our ego desires to exist in a world where everything goes our way and we have little to no struggles. The adult in us knows better.
It knows that despite all our learnings we still know very little about the world around us, and so, therefore, there is always room for improvement. In reality, competition is a win, win situation, provided you do your best.
@AndySAlbright
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