About Your Batting Average

The Desert of Arizona
Clear 22 Degrees

The great baseball player, Ty Cobb, is credited with having the highest batting average ever in Major League Baseball.

He got up to the plate 11,429 times and got a hit 4,191 times. That’s a batting average of .367. That’s the BEST ever.

That means he screwed up 63% of the time.

But I’m not interested so much in the number of screw-ups. I’m more interested in seeing just how many times up to the plate it took to get all those hits.

11,429 is a lot. He did that over 24 seasons.

In business, your leads are the same as your times stepping up to the plate in baseball.

When you don’t have enough leads, bad things happen.

If lead flow is TOO low, there’s no way to generate demand for you that exceeds the supply of you.

So you start doing dumb things. You start changing the way you do business in order to transform a lead into a client. You lower your fees, you make exceptions. You bend your own rules to “get the business.”

This is backwards. And it ultimately hurts everyone.

Lead generation is about sifting and sorting based on your criteria, not conforming to what comes in the door.

When you have enough leads, you wouldn’t consider changing how you do business or lowering your fees. It’s a beautiful position to be in.

And yet, most service providers still suffer from a lack of lead flow.

Why?

Because it’s real work sometimes. Often times, it’s the HARDEST work. Lead flow can be a tough nut to crack. You have to try a lot of things before something clicks. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t.

There are two ways to think about lead generation:

1. You can go out looking for something that “works.” (This is a great way to come down with a bad case of shiny object syndrome.)

2. You can pick something and ask yourself, “How do I make this work?”

The first way leads to skimming along the surface looking for low hanging fruit. I’m not against this type of fruit. And while you might find some, everyone is doing that. It’s crowded.

The second way leads to DEPTH. You go deep in one place and discover the secrets to making something work that most people will never know.

If you’re leaving your lead flow to luck and chance, how does that make you feel? How do you feel not knowing if you’ll be talking to MORE or LESS potential clients tomorrow than you are today?

The goal to work towards is a lead flow that you can control.