December Challenge Lesson #2 - Divide By 10

Written by Dave Navarro on December 2, 2007

This is the second post in Dave’s December Challenge series - if you haven’t heard about it yet, read the intro here.

In lesson 1, you learned that simply assuming there’s a better strategy for getting your target result much faster is a huge piece of leverage. It puts you in the mindset of “the solution is closer than I think,” and that leads to finding it fast.

That’s the first step. But there’s a second step you have to consider - how your game plan may be slowing you down. Sometimes we set goals in such a way that we automatically make things harder on ourselves. For example, let’s say you’re starting from scratch, selling a $100 product and you set a goal like this:

I want to make a million dollars in 2008 by selling this $100 product to the world.

Sounds like a worthy goal. But it may not really be what you’re after, and it may be setting yourself up for a huge amount of extra work.

Here’s What I Mean
Let’s say you have a $100 product. You’d have to sell 10,000 of them to make a million dollars. Possible? Absolutely, people have done it time and again. So you set your goal in mind: 10,000 sales in 2008 = 833 sales a month = 27 sales a day on average. It’s possible, but imagine the amount of work you’d have to do to pull that off, starting from scratch. To reach your 10,000 unit sales goal:

• You’d have to generate a massive amount of traffic to your website.
• You’d have to write fantastic sales copy to get that traffic to convert to paying customers.
• You’d have to build relationships with prospects who’ve never heard of you.
• And so on, and so on.

Again, all very do-able, and it would keep you insanely busy. Your focus is on hitting the 10,000 mark, and you’re pouring all you have into it.

But What Are You Really After?
In this case, you’re focused on moving 10,000 units of your $100 so you can make a million dollars. But here’s the thing: You’re focusing on the how, not the what.

• What you want is to make a million dollars.
• How you plan to do it is to sell 10,000 units to the world.

The thing you want to do here is always ask yourself if your how is a highly leveraged way to get to your goal. Selling to 10,000 people is a lot of work. Maybe you could make it easier on yourself to get what you want … if you’re willing to focus on creating more leverage with the how.

You do this by asking a very simple question:

If I had to get this accomplished in 1/10th of the time, how would I do it?

That’s a huge question - but it can land you some huge results. If you had only 1/10th the time to accomplish what you want, you’d have to change your how to something that’s massively leveraged. You couldn’t just “improve traffic by 10%”. You’d have to think outside the box and come up with new faster-working ideas, like:

• Find a way to make your product worth $1000 instead of $100, and you’d only have to sell 1/10th as much.
• Consider adding high-priced consulting to go along with your product to accelerate revenue growth. You could earn thousands consulting or speaking.
• Bundle with someone who sells high-ticket items. If they can co-sell your items (even at a discount) as upsells to their products, it creates sales that you don’t have to personally put time in to create.

But Dave, You Don’t Understand My Situation …
I know some of you will be thinking, “But Dave, my situation’s different. I just can’t come up with creative solutions to help me get things done in 1/10th the time.” That’s a bull**** limiting belief that you’ve got to free yourself of.

Seriously - this is a strategy even a ten-year old can put into practice. Little guy Ryan Cenk wanted to break the $20,000 popcorn sales record for his Cub Scout troop … and he had sold a few thousand dollars worth of the stuff when he decided to use some leverage. He got on the phone with a guy his dad knew, the CEO of a mortgage company. Ryan pitched him on how tins of popcorn would make great holiday gifts for hiw employees … and netted over $13,000 in sales with a single sales call. No more door-to-door for Ryan.

No more door-to-door for you, either. If you want to make massive gains in how fast you’re closing the gap between you and your goals, you need to look at what you want to accomplish and ask yourself how you can tweak the how so you get faster results. Ryan’s how shifted from “sell to lots and lots of people” to “sell to just one of the right people.”

If you doubt that you can find a solution like this, go back to Lesson 1. Then put this lesson into practice.

You do this by asking a very simple question:

If I had to get this accomplished in 1/10th of the time, how would I do it?

Now get to it. And if you haven’t subscribed to this feed by email or RSS, do it now so you’ll get updates on new lessons as they come out.