Stay With It

Many of the initiatives that we use in business take time to become effective. This is most often true in Sales and Marketing. It is imperative that we put measures in place and then keep things running. Nothing is more destructive in business than starting two new initiatives each day and then abandoning them.

Remember the post on consistency? A large part of the consistency in our businesses derives from taking an objective approach to planning and then staying with the new initiatives. That does not mean that we ever ignore failure. It does mean that you must establish appropriate measures of success and then be in a position to refine and tune initiatives.

In other words:

• Plan
• Prepare
• Act
• Measure
• Refine
• Persist
• Have a plan to control cost and time - so that you can cut your losses if you need to.

Health warning: If an initiative is costing a lot of time or money, it is vital that all the risks are identified and controls established to ensure that precious resources are not wasted. It pays to test, refine, test and refine and test again.