This past Thanksgiving weekend The Elf on the Shelf made her familiar return to our home. If you have young children, grand children, nieces, and nephews, you are probably all too familiar about the impact these little scout elves have added to Christmas tradition. In my opinion, what the smart phone did to the mobile phone industry is similar to what The Elf on the Shelf has done to the Christmas Season!
For those of you unfamiliar with The Elf on the Shelf, these scout elves are sent from the North Pole to help Santa Claus manage his Naughty and Nice Lists. Once a family adopts an elf, and names it, that elf receives its Christmas magic and can fly to the North Pole every night to report the day’s activities to Santa.
So when our elf made its annual return the morning after Thanksgiving, it wasn’t only the start of the Christmas season; it was the beginning of weeks of good behavior of our two young daughters. Well, perhaps the effort of good behavior would be more accurate!
So this got me thinking. What would happen if an Elf on the Shelf were in our businesses at this time of year? How would that shape our behavior?
Perhaps we would be more productive. Maybe starting our day 30 minutes earlier, and finishing our day 30 minutes later? Did you know that adding one hour of productive work time each work day, adds up to six work weeks over a year!
If you are in sales, what if instead of getting to the office on time, you planned to meet with a client or prospective client before heading into the office? That would add up to another 250 sales appointments over a year! What type of impact would that have on your sales results for the year?
What about your dedication to skills training and self improvement? How good of a student were you in this area last year? What are your plans to be a better student this year? Do you want to be a better student? If so, start with this: stop telling yourself: “I already know that.”, and ask yourself: “How well do I do that?”
Since we are dedicating that extra six weeks of work to our year, here are a couple of ideas:
Resolve to read one book each month. Don’t just make it all about business. Make sure that 50% of the books are about motivation, attitude, and self improvement.
Find two other sales colleagues and schedule one hour per week to practice role playing sales scenarios. Why would three people be the magic number? One person plays the role of the sales person, one person plays the role of the customer, and one person plays the role of the observer. Take 10 minutes to role play a situation, and 10 minutes to discuss amongst the three of you how things went. What went well? What you would have done differently? Then switch roles. In the one hour, everyone gets a chance to play each role.
The best thing about this type of exercise is that it is practice. Not practicing with your colleagues, means that you are practicing on your customers and prospects; is that what you really want to do? If you and two colleagues are disciplined to schedule this once a week for an entire year, all three would be on your way to being sales experts!
I hope these ideas helped you think about what you could focus on for next year. If you could just master one of them over the next 12 months, what type of impact would that have for you?
So you may have experienced that The Elf on the Shelf does an excellent job at jump starting our behavior. If that is what you need, I suggest you go out and buy one.
The real challenge is all up to you. Can you maintain the daily discipline for the long term? If you said yes, get ready to reap the rewards!