26/40 Own What You Control

Have you every had a simple little phrase or lyric get stuck in your head and pop up unexpectedly for decades to come? I have. Especially with a string of three specific numbers that have followed me and somehow make it into most speeches and workshops I give.

10-3-1

I was an intern for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network the summer after my sophomore and junior years. After my junior summer, as I started my senior year, expressed my intention to go full-time with them after graduation. I had done pretty well over those summers and started to build a decent book of clients while still in school.

When I started my full time, I had a head start on others who hadn't interned in my training class. I also had seen how the incentive structure was arranged and what kind of things caused the Managing Partner and Managing Directors to take notice, especially regional and national awards that bring some prestige to their offices.

So I decided to go after the number one national spot for first-year financial representatives that had been interns in college. I worked out how many sales the winner the past year had done and added 10%. Then I decided to make a plan to make that happen.

This plan is where these infamous three numbers make their appearance.

10-3-1

When I was deciding to sell life insurance as my first job out of college, my parents had me talk to one of the elders at our church who'd been in insurance for his whole career.

"If you'll be smart enough to be dumb enough to do exactly what they tell you to do for your first two years, you'll do just fine. Don't reinvent the wheel."

I took that to heart and picked up on the fact that our activity tracking system for how many calls we make, how many appointments we take, how many referrals we get, and how many sales we make were all built around these numbers.

10 referrals would get you 3 pitch presentations.  

3 pitches would get you 1 new sale.

Every speaker and every training that we went through talked about "just trust 10-3-1" to the point it was almost kool-aid-worthy. The best of the best in the firm said that they still used 10-3-1 to plan their work and had never beaten those percentages. They might have bigger closes and fewer closes, but they still started with 10 referrals that got 3 pitches to get 1 close.

So I decided to work backward on what kind of activity I would need to do to win the national prize. I decided I needed to have 120 closes to win - that's the "1." That meant I needed to have 360 pitches - the "3." To do that, I would need 1,200 referrals, the "10." That broke down to 100 referrals a month, 25 a week, or 5 every workday.

And that is just about exactly what happened over the course of the next year. I focused on getting as many referrals as I could in every meeting I went to and through every network I could find. If you were in North Texas in 2005, there is a real chance that I asked someone to introduce us. There were countless late nights and early mornings in the office researching new people so I could encourage people I already knew to make the referral.

After 12 months, it all paid off. I was the number one life insurance salesman in the country amongst my rookie class. I made 121 sales on 386 pitch meetings that came from 1229 referrals. Almost exactly 10-3-1.

After I left the insurance business. I found that there was a 10-3-1 like set of numbers for almost everything that can be sold. Sometimes the odds are way worse, and sometimes they are slightly better. But there is always a top-of-the-funnel number of people that you need to initiate a conversation with in order to have the opportunity to pitch them so they can have the chance to say yes.

But the most important thing to understand is that you don't control who says "yes," there were two out of three people who you pitched that would say "no." You also don't control who let's you pitch them, seven out of ten people didn't get that far.  The only thing that you control is how many people you big the conversation with, the ten.

No matter what process you are running, sales, marketing, or even dating - the only thing you control is how many times you initiate and ask someone to take action with you and your endeavor. The rest is out of your control. There are certain things you can do to polish the work down the funnel, but ultimately, those opportunities only happen once someone is approached and given the chance to respond.