Beat Your Competition Into the Ground
For
political candidates, if your signs are in the ground first, you will be
memorable and make a first impression. If you’re second or anything
thereafter you've just become visual spam.
Beating
your competition into the ground isn’t just good advice for politicians. It’s
also a great metaphor for you and your business. If you’re not first,
you’re forgotten. I share this with you because the single best piece of
advice my coaching mentor gave me when I became a college head coach
was “Be the first one in the living room.” He was referring to being
the first recruiter to make a home visit with a blue-chip prospect’s
family during recruiting season.
Following
his sage advice off the field turned out to be the biggest difference-maker
over the years in beating my competitors on the field. I kept track of how many
top recruits I signed when I was “the first in the living room” vs.
any other spot and was amazed with what I found. I noticed that if I was the
first recruiter to visit with our top prospects it was game over and I won! I
was the lord of the living room, signing almost every single one.
If I
was second or later I rarely got the kid, with one exception -- if I was
last. Believe it or not, that was when I also was able to land some of those
top prospects.
Success
leaves clues and there’s a good reason why this was the case. It’s a concept
called serial position effect, which is the tendency of people to remember the
first and last items in a series best and the middle ones worse.
The
concept was discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist. He found
that when asked to remember a list of items in any order, people tend to recall
the item in the beginning of the list best (the primacy effect), the last
item second best (the recency effect) and middle items not nearly as
well.
Being
first isn’t just about primacy, it’s about being responsive. The big no
longer beat the small. In today’s economy it’s the fast that beat the slow. For
example, recent research from the National Association of Realtors indicated that over 60 percent of home buyers
use the first realtor who gets in front of them.
Your
business is in that story too because if that’s the case with the single
largest purchase a person makes in their lifetime, it’s also how they make
their smaller decisions. Regardless of industry, when you’re first more often,
you’ll make more sales.
Case in
point: I needed to get my driveway seal coated this fall and I asked my
neighbors for referrals. They each gave me a different company. I called both
to get a quote. Company A showed up the next morning, while Company B still
hasn’t responded. The man from Company A and I sat in my living room, and
he recruited me so to speak. He explained how his company would save me money
(compared to his competitors), save me time (compared to doing it myself) and
how he could solve the problems we identified with my driveway.
Suffice
it to say, I signed with him and his company seal coated my driveway the
very next day.
People
will usually buy from the company that can save them time, save (or make)
them money or solve a problem for them. If you’re responsive and can
deliver any of the above you will win the business more often than not.
With
today’s technology, between call forwarding, Google voice and virtual
assistants, there’s no excuse for a lack of responsiveness.
Do you
have a policy on how fast your people respond to leads, referrals and
inquiries? If not, you need to create your version of the “first in the living
room” policy. Otherwise you’ll get beaten into the ground.
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