Shalini Sinha: The Accidental Businesswoman

I love numbers. I love using maths, teaching maths and instilling a love for maths in others. If I discovered I was a maths teacher in another lifetime, I am sure I would have been in bliss.

Numbers always lead you to an answer. They can be deeply philosophical. They express rhythm and music, shape and colour. When all parts of an equation balance together, they speak like a language. Quite simply, mathematics is divine.

I love, then, how in business I get to tap into the magic of maths. I’m not talking about ‘the numbers game’, the sales concept of how many leads it takes to convert a customer, and so by going after a certain number of leads you will generate X number of customers. Personally, maths expressed in such an ungraceful way offends me. No, I’m talking about how we can build the most beautiful, most effective business protocols – make much tighter conversion formulae – by a more elegant use of maths.

Let me give you a number: six. I’ve picked this number for no reason, except that it’s a number used commonly by one of my teachers, Dr Ivan Misner, a business guru often called the ‘father of modern networking’. Dr Misner is extremely successful at developing and applying business structures that work.

I’m going to help you develop a maths formula to build your business. Remember, every basic maths problem generates a perfect answer, and that formula expresses the same beauty that is expressed in the arts and music. Still, if maths isn’t your thing, don’t worry, you’ll still get the exercise; just ignore the maths metaphors.

As always, start with a sheet of paper and a pencil for notes. Now, consider these questions, and list a few points for each: What do you do really well? What makes you stand out from the others? What does your client want that makes them choose you over a competitor? Notice I didn’t ask ‘why’. I asked ‘what’. We are generating factors.

Let’s generate some more factors by asking more questions: What do you do so prospects clients hear about you? What do you do when you get a lead? What does a prospect need for their decision to buy your service?

More questions: When a client buys from you, what do you do next? What do you do to make them feel better after using your service than they did before they used it? What do you do to continue strengthening the relationship after the client has completed their first buy with you?

What you have done here is generated factors pertaining to a variety of aspects of your business: lead generation, lead conversion, sales process and customer experience/retention. You can continue to ask yourself more questions about different aspects. Remember to use ‘what’ so you can generate tangible factors.

To take all these factors from information and lists, and weave them into a beautiful formula for success, we need to reduce these factors: keep expressions of the variables, but express them in the most concise way possible.

Look at your list and highlight the most important, most effective factors. Reduce the list to these, but don’t lose representation from any of the areas. It’s neither efficient nor balanced to keep four factors expressing lead generation and lose a factor in the category of customer retention. Simplify your list until you have six factors.

Six factors – six beautiful actions – that when performed consistently will result in lead generation, lead conversion, positive customer experience, and customer retention. Six factors to focus on.

Dr Misner is well known for saying that “one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make is doing a thousand things six times.” That is, many of us keep trying lots of different things without creating a formula of what our strengths are and what we do that works. His recommendation? “Do six things a thousand times.”

Find your six things are really work. This is a fabulous key to success. Creating this formula will not only give your business a clear and focused structure, it will make your life easy because you know exactly what to do and will become an expert at doing it.

Shalini Sinha is a writer, speaker and business coach with a strong interest in equality and natural health. Connect on Facebook/Twitter at ShaliniBizCoach or email shalini.sinha@referralinstitute.ie.