Track Your Micro-Wins If You Want to WIN!
Most likely, you’re measuring your success all wrong. If you’re like most business owners you evaluate your success based on one major yardstick—how much money you are making.
You’ve got it all backwards!
The profits we earn are the result of hitting a ton of other goals along the way. By focusing on the end goal of earning money, we tend to ignore all the other goals we need to reach in order to earn that money. Over-focusing on the end goal can make doing business overwhelming, which can result in losing sight of the things we’re getting right. For us overachievers, this means we are failing until we completely succeed because we’re overlooking lots of successes along the way.
This is how we end up feeling like we’re never doing enough for our businesses. And since there are endless things we can do to help our businesses grow, unless we’re seeing profits and productivity go up we tend to feel like we should be doing more.
What a dangerous way to think! It’s counterproductive and can actually inhibit our ability to be effective at what we do. Though many of us use the feeling that we’re not doing “enough” to motivate us to work harder, this can have the adverse effect of distracting us and making us less effective from minute to minute, task to task.
A Better Way To Measure Success
There’s another way to track and measure your success and goals that works better than constantly focusing on profits alone: Keep track of every single micro-win you get from your efforts and micro-celebrate them every day. Micro-wins are reflections of how well you are reaching people, and how effectively you are getting your message out there. Measuring your micro-wins will actually help keep your finger on the pulse of what is really going on in your branding and marketing from day to day, and will motivate you to think of more effective ways to build your brand.
So what are micro-results? When something positive happens as a result of your efforts. Count a micro-result when:
someone emails you that they enjoyed something you wrote
someone signs up for your newsletter via a freebie
a potential client emails you because of something you wrote (regardless of whether or not they close)
someone asks you to speak at their event
someone asks you to guest blog (or you ask someone if you can guest blog and they say yes)
someone asks you to be a guest on their podcast (or you ask someone if you can be a guest and they say yes)
someone makes an introduction to a potential client (regardless of whether or not they close)
someone retweets, shares, or reposts something you wrote
We tend to forget to value these micro-wins, even though the amalgam of these micro-wins is what helps us reach the big financial or business goals we set for ourselves. Focusing on them will get you to your bigger goal faster. That’s why we’ve created our micro-wins score sheet to help you count all your successes and reach your big goals, one micro-win at a time.
Micro-Win, For The Win
A recent student of mine who I taught to market through blogging told me this tale: “I recently posted an article on my blog, and even though I have no email list and few people see my articles, someone I met at a networking meeting shared my article with someone else they knew. That someone else read it, and then called me up and immediately purchased my lead product. But she didn’t end up going forward with the full project, so I’m bummed.”
Bummed? I was ecstatic for her! She’s been blogging for two months, has virtually nobody reading her articles, and yet someone still managed to read it and instantly and enthusiastically become a client!
Okay, so that person didn’t end up signing up for the full project; there are tons of reasons why that may not have happened. I’ve had potential clients disappear on me only to reappear months (sometimes years) later, telling me they dropped the ball because they had a major flood that ended up sidetracking them both financially and attention-wise, or they had a sudden illness in the family that put things on hold, or they got divorced, and that took all their attention. You have no idea why someone doesn’t close, yet we all assume it’s something we did.
But I digress. That’s not what’s important.
I was ecstatic for her because it proved to me—and should have proved to her—that her blog worked! Her writing was authoritative and compelling enough to have a reader take action and contact her. Her lead product was enticing enough that they bought on the spot. What this tells me is that if she puts energy into getting more people to read her stuff, more people are going to have the exact same experience, and some of those people will close and become a bigger client.
That’s why it’s important to focus on the micro-wins. The more of them you can stack up, the more of an inevitability your success will be.
It takes hundreds of micro-wins to build a reputation as an authority in your field. Being seen as an authority is how you go from being hired as a service provider to being hired as an expert, and being hired as an expert is how you go from charging hourly to charging based on value—multiplying your price and profitability. That is how you hit that ultimate financial goal, but it all starts with the micro-wins—and if you aren’t paying attention, you might be too focused on ineffective tactics to notice you’re not racking up the micro-wins you need to succeed.
Want to start tracking your micro-wins for success?
Click here to download Personal Brand Success Tracking Score Sheet, complete with point values to get you thinking about what kinds of micro-wins you should be looking for.
