In a previous articles I discussed the importance of having a thorough understanding of your customer psychology. Knowing why your customers are motivated to do what they do on an emotional level means you can intimately communicate with them, demonstrating you know their problems better than they do.
In another article I explained the distinction between your grand vision, versus your guiding strategies and your every day tactics.
I taught you that the key word when it comes to understanding your customers and your own process, is “why”. Ask why your customers behave how they do so you can best work to meet their needs and communicate in a language they understand. Ask why you make decisions and take actions so you are clear about how your every day actions relate to your overall strategy and vision.
The final piece of the puzzle, which I will explain to you in this article, is all about execution.
It’s great to conceptually understand these ideas and know the why behind human motivation, but if you fail to execute then you’re not going to get a result. At the end of the day, if you want success, it’s what you do, not what you understand or assume, that will lead you there.
Many people when they start new businesses fail because they don’t have enough knowledge. Knowledge is the first step because knowledge gives you clarity and clarity give you purpose.
At the end of the day, businesses fail because the people behind them stop doing the right actions or continue doing the wrong actions (usually a combination of both). The key to success is to figure out what are the right actions AND determine what is the right order to complete them in.
You need a clarity of purpose and enough motivation to keep working. The human being, or beings behind the business are the most important variables, and if you as the business owner, or your partners, contractors or staff don’t remain motivated, then you’re heading for failure.
I’ve worked with many start-up solo-entrepreneurs, most of whom never realize the success they want. The reason? They give up too soon. They haphazardly do a few of the right things, but always feel slightly lost or confused or impatient or frustrated. They second-guess their actions, get distracted by new ideas, and jump from one project to the next.
The few people who do enjoy success demonstrate something unique – and it’s obvious to the trained eye what it is. These people stand out from the crowd because of their steadfast motivation towards a goal. They still make mistakes, don’t always stick to one path, but they keep moving forward, failing fast and always learning from what they do. It’s the consistency of their execution that leads to the positive outcome.
You can eliminate much of the ambiguity and fear about what you are attempting to do, if you look at your business as a series of processes that must be successfully executed, one after the other, in order to get the result you want.
The fist step is to successfully execute your customer research process. Learn about your customer psychology before doing anything else (go back and read this article if you need reminding what this means: How To Develop A Crystal Clear Understanding Of Your Customer).
The next process is studying what strategies you need to employ, how they fit together and what order they should be executed in.
For example, as a blogger you usually execute a content strategy, followed by a marketing strategy and then a monetization strategy. Although these things overlap, generally you can’t successfully execute a monetization strategy without first completing a marketing and content strategy, as you won’t have any traffic to sell to.
Once you know what strategies you are going to execute, focus on the first one and only the first one if possible. For this strategy, pick the best tactics you need to complete in order to execute successfully, based on your strengths and current situation. For example, if you are at the content strategy step of building a blogging based business, and your strength is writing, you should map out a series of blog posts that you will write, which could be put together into a free report once complete (like an A to Z guide on how to do what your customers want to do).
From there, you take action and execute the tactics, monitoring results as you go along. Do this with a single-mindedness, as if your life depended on it, for best results. Don’t do it forever, but do it quickly. Execute, assess results, recalibrate, then execute some more.
At the heart of this process working is clarity of purpose. Your motivation is dependent on your confidence. Your confidence is dependent on your clarity that what you are doing works.
When you are confident that what you do delivers the desired result, you do a better job, hence giving yourself a better chance of success. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as Eben Pagan likes to call it – inevitably thinking. If you believe it is inevitable that what you are striving for you will have, then you increase your chances of it happening. If you believe the opposite, then you weaken your potential.
It makes sense then, that you believe what you want to happen will happen. However belief doesn’t come easy if you have little real world experience to back it up. That’s why quick and focused execution is critical. The quicker you learn what tactics work and what don’t in your given situation, the quicker you will become confident in your own ability to get a result.
Be careful that when you do experiment that you do it at the tactical level. If you keep changing strategies or you’re acting on assumptions about your customers that keep changing, you’re probably feeling more ambiguity than you are confidence.
It’s okay to experiment at the tactical level and as a result you learn new things about your customer psychology, forcing you to change your strategy, but this should only be done in response to real knowledge gained from execution at the tactical level. Make changes based on what you learn about your customers from directly interacting with them, not simply because you “think” it’s the right thing to do.
Once you start getting results, you will become more confident. Confidence in execution leads to more execution and it’s quite possible to reach a point where execution becomes effortless. Once you’ve done things a few times and the result is consistent, it becomes part of your innate abilities. You just know it works and can repeat the process at will without ambiguity.
Imagine what it would be like to have this sort of confidence when it comes to making money online. If you knew that completing a few techniques results in a certain amount of money coming in every time, you’re going to feel pretty relaxed about your ability to run a successful online business long term. This is the place you want to get to.
Execution is about repetition and testing of tactics until strategy is realized. Once a strategy is realized you know it works and you’re one step closer to what you want. Plus, you gain confidence and thus motivation.
If you want to make this process part of your life so you are successful in business, you need to make execution part of your every day activities.
If you execute in confidence, you can’t help but gain more confidence, because the worst result is clarity of what doesn’t work. Clarity is the path to confidence. Once you eliminate enough of what doesn’t work you discover what does.
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Yaro Starak
Executioner
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