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Contacting Employees After Hours May Come at a Price (Literally)

The way we work today has evolved well beyond the scope of many of the laws we are currently operating within. It is important to recognize that the current laws on the books are ripe for change, or at the very least are likely to be interpreted differently in the future.

When you launch your own company, chances are you’re thinking about it every waking hour including nights, weekends and even while on vacation. It’s hard not to, as much is riding on your business success. With so much on your mind all the time, many entrepreneurs have turned to sending emails, text messages and even calling their team when a sudden burst of inspiration hits, ideas surface or forgotten tasks are suddenly remembered-often late in the evening and over the weekends.

The expectation of what happens next is currently being evaluated by our legal system and may lead to some sizeable class action lawsuits. “The lawsuits are starting to catch up to technology” says Nader Anise, Esq. “The crux of the issue that’s being decided right now in the courts is about overtime pay as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Are employees expected to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? What is the fair compensation model for employees when the line between work and personal time has been blurred?”

In a recent Wall Street Journal Article it was estimated that as much as 44% of employees use their phones to check work email and work-related text after hours. For many, having a smartphone by your side means you can instantly see who’s emailed, texted or called you about work-related issues and as part of a desire to deal with urgent issues in the moment, many employees get sucked into responding and dealing with requests long after the workday is done (assuming traditional office hours).

Work-Life Out of Balance
This all started innocently enough. As part of a desire for startups and “lean” companies to attract workers, many entrepreneurs began thinking differently about the traditional office setting. Traditional office hours at a physical office morphed into a productivity focused, “I don’t care where or when you work as long as you get your work done on time and within budget” attitude. This allowed for more employees to work from home, work non-traditional hours and leverage screen-sharing, video and other technology for impromptu collaboration.

Smartphones further blurred the lines between work and personal time. But what happens when the work keeps piling on and employees feel the pressure to work increasingly long hours just to keep up with the increasingly unrealistic expectations of individual productivity? If the traditional boundaries of “work” vs. “home” have been at least blurred and arguably eliminated, how does the employee ensure reasonable downtime to stop working and recharge his or her batteries?

The Legal Implications of After Hours Contact
As part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Nader Anise explains, “Exempt workers are not eligible for overtime pay. The general definition of an exempt worker is someone who is a white-collar worker who earns more than $455 per week or $23,600 per year on a salary basis. If you make less than that, there’s a good chance you’re entitled to overtime pay. Of course, like all laws, there are exceptions to the rule and other factors that come into play.” And while this may not be an issue for you right now, there have been efforts by the Obama administration to increase these figures, raising this floor from $455 per week to potentially as much as $900 or $950 per week, or around $50,000 per year. If this regulation gets the green light, then there will be much broader implications and potential individual and class action lawsuits among unsuspecting entrepreneurs.

One Possible Solution: Setting Guidelines and Clear Expectations
In order to protect yourself and avoid potential class action lawsuits in the future, entrepreneurs must set clear guidelines, expectations and boundaries for their workers. For example, telling your employees that “Just because I sent you an email at 9:30pm doesn’t mean I expect you to answer it before tomorrow morning.” Better yet, develop policies and guidelines around after hour correspondence to get ahead of these issues.

“Ultimately, the new legislation being discussed and interpretation of the current laws could potentially be a big problem for entrepreneurs,” says Nader Anise. “The whole point of being small and nimble is to move quickly and get things done faster than the larger, more established businesses you are competing against. The purpose of the Fair Labor Standards Act was to prevent unfair working conditions; not to harm entrepreneurs.”

Regardless of final outcome in our legal system, it’s clear that the way we work today has evolved well beyond the scope of many of the laws we are currently operating within. It is important to recognize that the current laws on the books are ripe for change, or at the very least are likely to be interpreted differently in the future. If you haven’t spoken to your labor attorney in quite some time, it might be a good idea to spend some quality time reviewing your current business operations to identify potential exposure to problems before they become big problems and distract you from your core business. As Benjamin Franklin would say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Avoid Prematurely Pulling the Fire Alarm
Please understand that I am by no means an alarmist. The Wall Street Journal articlegot my attention and I wanted to make sure you were aware of the potential legal implications of a highly common practice in small and growing companies. This may not be a big issue today, but there are all the signs that class action suits are being formed right now and, if successful, would have significant impact on the way we work-now and in the future.

Ultimately, this is about being aware of what’s happening now and taking the precautionary steps to be fair to your employees and respect their downtime-even if you yourself are obsessed about building the next great company in your industry and changing the world in an incredibly powerful way.

When you’re in that zone, time ceases to exist and your drive compels you to do whatever it takes. I get it. I’m living that passion and I have worked hard to pull in likeminded teammates who share my passion and vision. We just need to ensure we’re being emotionally intelligent around the needs of the people who have joined us on our quest to change the world.

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What Is a Chief Marketing Technologist?

We can no longer afford separate silos between marketing and IT. The rapid collapse of these silos means that one person must be able to converse seamlessly between both groups.

Haven’t met anyone with the title of “chief marketing technologist” yet? You will. It’s the ultimate culmination between the chief marketing officer (CMO) role and the chief information officer (CIO) role, and it’s growing in popularity.

The line between the CMO and the CIO has been blurring for years. The first time I came across this was at a 2013 Ad Age conference featuring Bob Lord (Global CEO) and Ray Velez (Global CTO), of Razorfish, who had just published their book,Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it if you are interested in this topic. Their point is that at this time in our digital marketing history, marketing and technology musttranscend the very silos they have been neatly shoved into.

Naturally, the person best suited to collapse the marketing and technology functions within your company is someone who has been trained to handle both. Today, this is somewhat of a rare skill set, but it won’t be for long.

Gartner predicted this three years ago!

In February 2012, Forbes ran an article that read, “Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do.” Their main points to support this prediction were as follows:

  1. As we all know, marketing is becoming increasingly technology-based;
  2. Harnessing and mastering Big Data is now key to achieving competitive advantage; 
  3. Many marketing budgets already are larger and faster growing than IT budgets.

More recently, CIO published this article: “CIO-to-CMO Transition of Power Is Becoming a Reality”. CIO pointed out that the transition has happened faster than the five-year time horizon Gartner had predicted in 2012. The article argued that since most of today’s marketing is driven by data, CIOs are a natural fit to become the next generation of CMOs.

Who is playing the role of Chief Marketing Technologist today?

For this article, I interviewed Gary Shatswell at Sizzling Platter, LLC. His LinkedIn profile pegs his role as, chief information officer and VP of marketing. As the acting head of both marketing and IT, Gary Shatswell is a bonafide chief marketing technologist in role, even if he hasn’t officially received this exact title.

When learning more about Gary’s background, I discovered that, like many chief marketing technologists, Gary started in IT and worked his way up to the CIO role. As it became clear that today’s head of marketing is analyzing big data, building complex technology systems and architecture to manage customers and their loyalty, as well as marketing automation systems, all of this felt very familiar to Gary.

“I believe any CIO will initially feel a bit anxious about owning the marketing function in addition to their more traditional CIO role,” said Gary Shatswell, “but as CIOs discover that all of the most important information assets are currently being managed by the marketing department, migration from the role of CIO to chief marketing technologist feels like a natural evolution of the CIO’s role.”

What is so unique about the role of the chief marketing technologist?

The role itself is an acknowledgement of just how important the marketing group is to driving revenue within the organization and, when properly resourced, how today’s marketing information systems are driving the current and future growth of the business. If CIOs are not actively collaborating with their marketing counterparts, then there is a growing disconnect between the role of the CIO and the traditional role of the CMO. Only by bringing these two roles together can the CEO have a complete picture of what insights must be acted upon quickly in order to establish or maintain the top position.

In short, the power comes from the intersection between marketing and IT. Marketing without technology is quickly being left behind by more sophisticated approaches based on real-time big data, which, when properly analyzed, leads to insights, actions, and a sizable impact on the company’s bottom line. Conversely, an IT organization that is not connected to the marketing function is essentially blind to a large majority of the information assets being cultivated and managed by marketing information systems.

A hybrid approach is needed to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing and technology.

Today, we can no longer afford separate silos between marketing and IT. The rapid collapse of these silos means that one person must be able to converse seamlessly between both groups. While many CMOs are getting their arms around the technology side of their business, the natural evolution of this role is for the CIO to improve its marketing skills in order to grow into the chief marketing technologist role. The faster we embrace these trends, the bigger the impact we will have on our bottom line. That’s a great business insight steeped in data. This is our future, and it’s the reason chief marketing technologists will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

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At 24, This Recent College Grad Became the CEO of Her Father’s Company and Hasn’t Looked Back Since

The inspiring story of Amanda Holmes illustrates that there are plenty of Millennials who are ready, willing and able to take the reins of established companies.

My favorite sales book is Chet Holmes The Ultimate Sales Machine. Anyone familiar with this masterpiece probably also knows that Chet Holmes died at an early age of 55. What many people don’t know, however, is that his daughter Amanda Holmes, became the CEO of her father’s company, Chet Holmes International a year and a half after his death.

Here’s why this is an incredible story. Think about this for a moment. You’re 24 years old having been graduated from USC just 2 years earlier with a music degree (and a promising performing arts career) and you are faced with an incredible decision to “stay the course” with your original career path, or pivot and become the CEO of your father’s incredibly successful multi-million dollar enterprise with more than a 100 employees–most of whom are older than you and have been with the company for several more years than you.

Stepping-Up And Building The Future
So I asked Amanda Holmes how she felt about this incredible situation. To which she replied, “It was daunting at first. Who was I to come into this company and attempt to fill my father’s incredibly large shoes? So I just went to meetings and listened. I did a whole lot of listening for several months. Then I started asking questions. People would tell me to keep asking questions because my questions were really good. And so I did. Eventually it became clear that I was, in fact, best suited to be the CEO of my father’s company as I had spent so much time with him and understood his vision and how I could play an important part in that future.”

And it is at this point that I want you to think back to when you were in your early twenties and ask yourself if you were that in tune with how to come into an established company, listen deeply, ask great questions and decide how to build the future of an already successful company. I’m sure it helps to have an incredible mentor like Chet Holmes in your life, but as we know great advice only gets you so far. You have to be willing to take massive action on great advice in order to reap any actual benefits. This is what gets me excited and why I believe Amanda Holmes represents a mastery that is not typically associated with the Millennial generation.

Breaking Down Stereotypes
Last week while I was in LA, I attended an event hosted by METal, which is “an exclusive gathering of and for dynamic entrepreneurs and change-makers in the media, entertainment and technology space.” This was my first event and the founder, Ken Rutkowski, was not at this event. Instead there was a guest MC who showed an Official Comedy clip called Millennials in the Workplace Training Video. It’s a spoof training video about “…a new type of worker has entered the workforce. They are called Millennials and they’re terrible. Today I’m going to teach you about this new breed of worker so that you can avoid misunderstandings in which you feel the need to fire them immediately.”

What struck me about this video is that I’d heard that story before about my generation, Gen-X. It seems that every older generation feels that the up and coming generation is entitled and without the work ethic that got their generation to their desired rung on the corporate ladder. In my previous article, Growing and Thriving in the Age of Mediocrity, I surface a scary statistic that “workplace incivility is costing U.S. companies $300 billion a year and that 1 in 4 Americans have quit their jobs because of incivility at work.” A lot of this incivility comes from office stereotypes such as the ones called out in the Millennials in the Workplace Training Video.

Millennials Empowered
One reason why Amanda Holmes’ story is such an incredible inspiration is that it highlights such a contrast to the millennial generation stereotype. As Baby Boomers retire and it becomes painfully obvious that there aren’t enough experienced Gen-Xers to replace them, it’s people like Amanda Holmes that illustrate that there are plenty of Millennials who have mastered business at a young age and are ready, willing and able to take the reins of established companies and help them grow and thrive. Amanda Holmes has a unique perspective on this:

“There is a lot of talk about how large the Baby Boomer generation is, but few people talk about how Millennials are actually bigger than the Baby Boomer generation. There has been plenty of complaints from the Baby Boomer generation that Millennials cannot be hired because they’re lazy and disrespectful. But I see there are a lot more similarities than differences between these generations. It turns out that Millennials and Baby Boomers have the same values including family, friendship, and respect. It’s just different how each generation expresses these values. Baby boomers show respect with titles like saying, “Sir” or “Ma’am.” Whereas Millennials show their respect by giving honest feedback and speaking their thoughts. Same values, just a different approach to honoring these values. Since there are so many Baby Boomers in the workforce, Millennials will have to start taking over companies at an earlier age to account for the massive number of Baby Boomers going into retirement.”

And Amanda Holmes should know as she’s done just that. I feel very fortunate to have met Amanda Holmes and look forward to learning from her as she flexes her business muscle and takes Chet Holmes International to new heights.

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7 Stages of the Entrepreneur’s Life Cycle: From Independence to Interdependence

Celebrate your accomplishments as you spend time with your friends and family members today. Know where you are in the 7 stages of the entrepreneur’s life cycle so that you can celebrate the independence (or interdependence) of your business.

Today, as we celebrate our founding fathers’ bold move for independence and the founding of the United States of America, it’s a wonderful time to reflect on similar desires and attributes that all entrepreneurs go through when starting their own company. Deciding to branch out on your own is a huge step in every entrepreneur’s life. Here are some of the important phases of evolution from the very beginning, to peak performance, and eventual end of life. Every business goes through a life cycle that is similar to a person and each stage brings with it unique characteristics and challenges to solve in order to move to the next stage.

Stage 1: The Birth of Your Company. This initial stage in the entrepreneur’s life cycle is filled with emotions running the gamut from elated excitement to fear and uncertainty. One thing is clear: The drive for independence starts with an idea. You see something that others don’t see and it compels you to take action and do something about it (for more on this topic, see related article, “Join the Billion Dollar PayPal Mafia Club: Ace These 7 Questions.“) While you may not be crystal clear on how you’re going to get it done, there is a natural drive to start something that doesn’t exist. When you take this step, you are seeking your independence in the business world and creating opportunity for others to join your mission and vision.

Stage 2: Toddlers Seek to Survive and Grow. Assuming that you find a way to successfully launch your company, you’re now looking to survive as a business. Most entrepreneurs will either seek to stay independent or immediately look for investors to give them the cash they need to survive. Staying independent will give you more control over your outcomes, but having a cash cushion will help you sleep better at night knowing you have some time to build your company and get it right. Survival is the name of the game at this stage.

Stage 3: Young Adults Get Cocky. You know your company has reached young adulthood when you are in hyper growth mode but not really in control of your outcomes. It’s at this stage that many companies run into trouble as entrepreneurs, having tasted the success they were seeking and suddenly think they can do no wrong. If you believe you’ve figured it all out and are killing it, you are at the stage right before you usually get blindsided. Rather than measuring and focusing on your desired outcomes, entrepreneurs are enjoying and celebrating their early success at the young adult phase. Many companies spend years cycling between the Toddler and Young Adult phases as they are missing the key ingredient to move to the next phase: stability. Only when a business is truly stable, can it rise to the next stage.

Stage 4: Adults in Their Prime. This is real success and it happens when your company has gone beyond survival and stability, and moved into a more predictable growth phase. This is the phase you want to stay in for as long as possible. This is also the phase when entrepreneurs seek interdependence. That is, other people and companies that can make your business stronger because they themselves are independent and strong. Rather than creating co-dependencies, adults in their prime form partnerships that are interdependent. This further helps maintain the growth cycle and keeps great companies in their prime.

Stage 5: Aging and Early Decline. Perhaps the interdependent partnerships have been strained or some of your best teammates choose to strike out on their own. Often times the marketplace has caught up with your great idea or someone else has seen an even better way to accomplish the vision and mission you set out to deliver. Whatever the circumstance, your business (and perhaps your entire industry) is being disrupted. At this stage you can either disrupt yourself to get back to your prime, or begin the journey to unwind what you have started (see related article, “You Are Either Uber or You’re Being Ubered.“)

Stage 6: Illness and Rapid Decline. If you have not figured out a way to stem the early signs of decline, then this phase is predictable. It starts internally with a team that isn’t sure where to go next and how to fix the problems that have been identified. Inaction leads to faster decline and internal stigmas, fears, uncertainty and doubt set in. Unless massive action is taken at this stage, the company is all but assured it’s going to fail.

Stage 7: Death. While we work hard to ensure that our companies outlast us, there comes a time when it’s clear that staying in business is either leading you into bankruptcy or has already caused such as cash flow strain that there simply is no way to dig yourself out of the hole that has been created. Shutting your doors can feel like a failure, but when the writing is on the wall, it’s much better to close up shop before the business takes everyone down with it.

What stage are you grappling with today? As you enjoy our country’s Independence Day, take a moment to recognize where you are in your business and what you need to do to move to the next phase. Before you can move from one phase to another, it’s important to recognize where you are and what got you there.

Celebrate your accomplishments as you spend time with your friends and family members today. Just know where you are in the 7 stages of the entrepreneur’s life cycle so that you can plan your future and celebrate the independence (or interdependence) of your business as well today. As entrepreneurs, we need time to step back and celebrate what we have built and accomplished. Otherwise, why spend so much of our lives doing what we do? Have fun and enjoy your day today!

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62 Actionable Ideas for Getting More Clients From 13 Top Marketing and Sales Leaders

Talk is cheap and great ideas without action are useless. Instead, here are 62 actions you can take today from 13 brilliant sales and marketing thought leaders.

If you missed one of the best eight-hour-marathon, virtual events of 2016, Amanda Holmes and her team at Chet Holmes International have summarized the key takeaways. Thirteen of the top marketing and sales masters reveal their secrets–from Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com, sharing his thoughts on reaching 4X more prospects to Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar on living a motivated life. You’re going to want to bookmark this page and come back often.

But don’t just read and absorb this content–make an action plan to implement this sage advice. As CHI teaches, “It isn’t about doing 4,000 things. It’s about doing one or two things 4,000 times.” So pick one or two initiatives and, with pigheaded discipline and determination, follow through on them until they become habitual. Intellectual curiosity does nothing to help your business grow. Taking massive action on great advice does. So put yourself in a frame of mind ready to drink from the proverbial fire hose of sales and marketing wisdom. Enjoy!

Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com–Reaching 4x More Prospects

  1. Most companies average 1.5 phone calls to a lead before they give up. Standard procedure should be at least six to nine.
  2. Teach your reps to ask specifically for direct dial numbers from prospects (make sure your web forms do as well). You will reach prospects much more efficiently.
  3. Forbid your salespeople to ask prospects about the weather: Mandate they find three less generic rapport-building topics (it takes two minutes to do a Google-Facebook-LinkedIn search).
  4. Teach your sales reps to use “reverse customer referrals.” Search the LinkedIn connections of prospects to find anyone they’re connected with whom your company has already done business with. Now your reps can mention that common relationship to the prospect–you have instant social proof.
  5. Have your sales reps read these articles and turn their LinkedIn Profiles into little lead-generation machines: “Epic List of LinkedIn Profile Tips.”

Chad Kirby, Infusionsoft–Seven Things You Forgot to Automate That Can Double Your Sales

  1. Know exactly who your customers are. Get specific: Write down descriptions of basic characteristics; pains, problems, and challenges; benefits they seek; why they buy from you; the most common objections; who is not your target customer.
  2. Once you know these traits, check whether your marketing messages appeal directly to these specific prospects. If you don’t have educational marketing collateral, build it to attract these ideal prospects to opt in to your lead system (e.g., create a free white paper: “Five Ways You’re [pain point of your target audience], and the Two Things You Can Do to [benefit of working with your company]”).
  3. Look at the places where your leads might be falling through the gaps and create a lead-capture process for each of these potentially missed interactions:
    1. Web traffic that leaves your site
    2. Walk-ins who walk out
    3. Telephone callers who hang up
    4. Networking contacts who leave
    5. Tradeshow visitors who walk by
  4. Look at what you’re doing to nurture your prospects (educating them, training them, building trust with them), and see if you can’t procedurize those processes.
    1. Make templates for those follow-up emails (and automate them in a CRM like Infusionsoft)
    2. Stop wasting the time of a live person by answering the same customer questions over and over. Create a PDF with the answers to the most common questions your prospects ask. Automate the system so that enquiring or new customers automatically receive this PDF.
  5. If you can’t guarantee that you’re asking for a referral with every sale you make, you must automate this process. (It can be as simple as an email that says, “Is there anybody you would recommend our services to?” along with a contact form to fill out.)

Amanda Holmes, Chet Holmes International, with Shane Hurley–The One Strategy That Increased Appointment Setting 5.5X and Sales Conversions by 38 Percent

  1. If your company is self-focused, you’re wasting 90 percent of your time, money, and energy. Stop with the me, me, me, me, me: “I want your business”; “I want to sell my product”; “My product is great!”
  2. Get the attention of the 90 percent of prospects that weren’t thinking about your product or service by talking to them about what’s interesting to them. For example: “Hey! This is a problem that you are facing, or this is something that you’ve been looking for. I can give you some information that will help you with that.”
  3. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal prospect. What keeps the prospect up at night? (It may have nothing to do with your product or service, but can you grab the prospect’s attention by giving a solution to the problem or highlighting it?)
  4. Market data is way more motivational than product data. Example: Did you know that 75 percent of employees have stolen from their employers, and half of them steal repeatedly? (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). This market data creates a much more compelling reason to speak to Shane at Redfynn about protecting your assets than simply touting the features of his products and services.
  5. Create a presentation that educates your prospects about these pains. The presentation should also provide great solutions to those pains (hint: one, but not all, of these solutions is your product or service).
  6. Once this presentation is created, it becomes the ultimate vehicle for creating trust and rapport with your prospects before even pitching them on your product or service. Done well, such a presentation (CHI calls it a “core story”) establishes you as an expert and authority while simultaneously resetting buying criteria in your favor.

Keith Cunningham–Don’t Get Big, Get Rich: How to Avoid Dumb Tax

  1. Stop tolerating “below the line” culture in your company. You get what you tolerate:
    1. Backstabbing
    2. Smack talking
    3. Gossip
    4. Etc.
  2. Studies have shown that if a company is $10 million or less, there is a 90 percent chance that nobody on the executive team is consistently looking at the numbers! If you do not already, you must start paying attention to your metrics:
    1. The accounting: balance sheets, income statements, etc.
    2. KPIs: How does my profit compare with my revenue? How does my profit compare with my operating cash flow? Etc.
  3. Make sure you’re looking at the trends in these numbers over time. It is fundamental to running a successful business–trends over time tell you where you’re succeeding and where you need work. Without an eye on the trends, you’re just shooting in the dark.
  4. Stop making the same mistakes. Start keeping a log of lessons learned. Every time you make a mistake (or something goes better than expected), pull out the log and make a note of the lesson.
  5. Anytime you’re thinking about trying something new with your business, ask yourself these three questions:
    1. What’s the upside?
    2. What’s the downside? (What could go wrong? What if I’m wrong? And how would that play out?)
    3. Can I live with the downside?

Brendon Burchard–How to Get Millions to See Your Marketing Messages

  1. Content is the new currency. If you aren’t already, you need to start creating great free content for your audience. (Your only other option is to pay for every click.)
    1. You don’t need to create something every single day.
    2. Try creating one significant thing a week.
  2. Make sure when you’re creating content, you “particle-ize” it–that is, convert it to the proper format and disseminate it to all your media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). You shouldn’t waste your time creating unique content for each platform.
  3. Implement “circular viralocity” in your social media efforts. This means make sure all your platforms link back and forth to one another. This interconnectedness causes all your platforms to grow much more rapidly.
  4. If you are not using retargeting in your business, you need to start; it isn’t optional anymore. You are blowing through leads and money if you don’t have a strategic retargeting campaign running.
  5. Keep in mind that at the end of your life, you will probably reflect back and ask yourself these questions:
    1. Did I live?
    2. Did I love?
    3. Did I matter?
    4. Live each day with so much intention that when you get to the end of your life, you are happy with the answers to those questions.

Clay Collins–How Leadpages Went From Zero to 40,000 Clients in 2.8 Years

  1. Instead of going out and hiring salespeople, consider hiring content creators to own different marketing channels (e.g., someone just to operate your YouTube channel and someone just for your blog).
  2. Put your content creators on a quota like you would a salesperson. Define how much revenue you want generated from that blog or that YouTube channel.
  3. Make sure to turn literally every single piece of content that you create into a lead-generation opportunity.
  4. Measure the results of your content creators. Most companies underinvest in content, because they have no idea how to tell what the ROI is on that content.
  5. Here’s where many companies fall flat: They fail to realize the value of creating unlimited budgets for things.
    1. If you have a machine that for every $1 you put in, $1.50 comes out, you should hire people to just feed dollars into the machine all day long.
    2. The key to doing this is measurement. You can’t even think about finding these “machines” in your company unless you’re measuring the results of what you’re doing.

Stacey Hylen, Chet Holmes International–Best Buyer Strategy: The Fastest, Least Expensive Way to Double Your Sales

  1. Compared with all potential buyers, there is always a much smaller number of ideal buyers. So ideal buyers are cheaper to market to and yet bring much greater reward. These ideal buyers are called “best buyers.” In some cases, this smallergroup of best buyers account for the majority of a company’s revenue. In spite of this, most companies market the same way to everyone. It’s time to create a special initiative to specifically attract these best buyers.
  2. Determine who your best buyers are. Are you already working with some of these best buyers? They can act as a good example of what similar buyers will look like: What kind of businesses are they? What industry are they in? What size are they? Etc.
  3. Once you’ve determined what your best buyers look like, you should create a list of specific targets. (Don’t be afraid to put some of the big scary names on that list.)
  4. Now build a plan for how you’re going to market directly to these targeted buyers every month without fail. For instance, you might send them a cheap (extremely cheap–otherwise it may be construed as a bribe) but creative gift (such as a key chain) with a letter every month. Follow every letter with a call. Every month.
  5. Now you go after that list with pigheaded discipline and determination (#phd) until they are all your clients. You never stop.

Tim Paige, Leadpages–The Perfect Sales Funnel

  1. If you don’t already have one, make sure you create a simple and free one-page PDF for your prospects to download from your website. This easy-to-make lead magnet will often outperform more complicated offerings.
  2. Use “content upgrades” to increase opt-in rates on all your free content (a content upgrade is something that enhances the value of that content, but in order to receive the upgrade, visitors must supply an email address).
  3. If you have a lot of free content online, look at your analytics and determine your five top performing pieces of content. Start by creating content upgrades for those pieces.
  4. Go through your website(s) and replace all imbedded opt-in forms with pop-up opt-in forms so that you force visitors to make a decision. Read this twice: 100 percent of visitors who do not make a decision whether to opt in on your website will not opt in on your site.
  5. Consider creating an automated email lesson or video lesson series so that people who opt in to your web forms start receiving something of value from you immediately.

Gene McNaughton, Chet Holmes International–Secrets to Hiring Sales Superstars (Do this one wrong and it’ll cost you on average $60,000)

  1. The very first step to finding superstar salespeople is to make a commitment that you’re only going to hire superstars.
  2. Write sales job ads so that a “hungry” person will feel like that ad is speaking to him or her. No: “Sales representative wanted.” Yes: “Our top performers make X.” (Look at what your top performer is making. If your top performer is making $80,000, $100,000, $200,000, put that in the headline.)
  3. Quantify what it costs you to take people through your hiring process. You will likely be shocked at how much you’re really spending as a result of not getting the right person.
  4. Your ad should challenge those who read it (“Superstars only. Must have a burning desire to succeed,” etc.). A good ad will weed undesirables out.
  5. Try putting this in your job ad: “If you feel like you’re a superstar, call us and leave us a voicemail that’s two minutes or less and tell us why you’re a superstar. If we contact you, then that means you’ve made it to the next round.”
    1. Half of these voicemails will be terrible: Boom, you’ve eliminated half of your candidates.
    2. At the end of an interview for a sales position, reject all candidates regardless of how they did. Those who continue to sell themselves are worth a second interview. Remember, how they sell themselves in the interview is how they’ll sell your product or service. Somebody who folds after the first no will not be a star salesperson.

Guruji Sri Sri Poonamji, Divine Bliss International–How to Do the Same Work in Half the Time With Less Stress

  1. “Be aware that stress and even depression are a result of attaching yourself to an illusion or a dream.”
  2. “Failure happens when you are limiting yourself to the somebody else you want to become. When you simply are yourself, there is no failure.”
  3. Upgrade your intellect; start working through your super conscience (the 97 percent of your brain that you’re holding out on and not using currently).

Ari Sherbill, PowToon.com–Six Genius Video Hacks That Generate Leads on Demand

  1. We live during a crisis of attention. The average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes (1988) to eight seconds (today). Your audience operates in three learning modes (visual, auditory, and kinetic). Your best chance at capturing this fleeting attention is to appeal to all three simultaneously.
  2. Consider animated visuals for your marketing. Animation abstracts the meaning of what you’re communicating and can thereby enhance the entertainment and attentional value.
  3. You can use a simple video creation software like PowToon to create video templates for your salespeople to personalize and send to each prospect (with that person’s name and specific pains to be solved). The novelty of a personalized video is such that people must watch it. It’s great for follow-up strategies.
  4. Can you use a simple animated video to liven up your Thank You page (or any of your webpages)? Remember, 55 percent of visitors to your website only stay for 15 seconds, on average. By simply adding a video, that jumps up to two minutes!

Ryan Deiss, Digital Marketer–Three Proven Email Marketing Campaigns You Can “Swipe and Deploy” in Your Own Business

  1. Using a flash sale campaign (no more than once a month and preferably once every two months) is a great way to create a buying frenzy from your email list.
  2. Can you create a targeted reminder (Are you still/Have you yet) email campaign? Here is an example:
    1. Prospect opts in and downloads a PDF: “Six Easy Steps to a Six Pack.”
    2. Every month you can now send an email with a little copy and the subject line, “Do You Have That Six Pack Yet?” Chances are, he or she doesn’t. You can proceed to offer the person your assistance in the email and repeat this every month.
  3. A great way to increase the engagement of your email list is to send out a faux quiz or survey.

Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar–How to Close More Prospects, Increase Productivity, and Stay Motivated

  1. For setting a goal,
    1. Write down everything you want to be, do, or have.
    2. For each thing you wrote down, ask this question: Why?
    3. If you can’t answer the “why?” it’s not your goal or dream.
    4. Check and make sure you haven’t confused your “what” with your “why.”
  2. Are you specific about your goals? If you’re not, it’s time to put a lot of furniture in that goal (e.g., if your goal is to buy a house, what does it look like? Where is it located? What color is it? What’s in the house?).
  3. Once you have this goal, now you want to get really deep into the benefits of that goal. The longer the list of benefits is, the more likely you’ll stick to the goal.
  4. Take stock of your bad habits: The fastest way to success is to replace bad habits with good habits. Every week, pick a small bad habit and replace it with a good habit. Do this for 52 weeks and you’ll have the best year you’ve ever had.
  5. A great way to motivate employees is to find out what their dreams are and then help them attain those dreams. Tie those dreams in to their success in your business.

If you found these action ideas useful, I encourage you to check out the full recording of the day. Chet Holmes International has made it available here. While I can attest that this list provides an overview of many of the concepts covered, the full sessions take you a great deal deeper into these powerful concepts, strategies, and tactics. And again, remember, insights without action are useless. It’s what you do with this information that will grow your business.

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Former Facebook Data Scientist Explains How to Wrangle Your Data

While the deep technical expertise of a data scientist is necessary on some projects, you don’t need one to build a culture of data-driven decision making. Here’s how to empower your team.

Please allow me to geek out for a minute and I promise I’m going to empower you with the tools you need to put Big Data to work for you and your business. This week I got the chance to meet Tye Rattenbury, a veteran of Facebook’s core data science team. For a nerd like me, that’s more exciting than meeting Mark Zuckerberg himself. Sure Mark Zuckerberg is the celebrity, but Tye was the data guy in the trenches who built the data pipelines and analyses that fuel Facebook’s data-driven culture.

So you can imagine how awesome it was to meet a Silicon Valley legend who’s joined an incredible company called Trifacta–whose mission is to democratize Big Data for people like you. For far too long Big Data has been the exclusive tool of elite enterprises with deep pockets. So this article is going to show you how you can get started FOR FREE with incredibly easy to use tools like Trifacta Wrangler.

Pepsi Eliminated 90% of Their Big Data Wrangling Time And So Can You!
If you talk to any data scientist worth their salt, they will tell you that the first challenge of putting data to work for your business is getting it into a structured format so that you can analyze, interpret and make decisions around your data. This is lovingly referred to as “Data Wrangling” and it’s what sucks up the bulk of the unproductive (wasteful) time (4 out of 5 days, by most accounts). That’s because instead of spending time understanding the data, you’re wasting time trying to pull it all together in a useable format. This is what usually creates the bottleneck in any organization.

Think about it. You want to combine your customer data from your CRM (think Salesforce.com) and your Marketing Automation (think Marketo or Hubspot) with your social data (think Facebook and Twitter) and ideally your point of sale and/or ecommerce sales data (think Magento). Then you want to pull in 3rd party data (think Experian and Infosys) to round out your insights. Each of these data sets have a different format and therefore the first order of business is to combine them into a single source where you can begin to query the data.

“Trifacta was founded on the principle of enabling analysts to simply and easily pull in disparate data sources and to structure and cleanse them,” explains Joe Scheuermann, Vice President of Marketing for Trifacta. “We launched Trifacta for just this purpose and have even distributed a free version so that everyone can take advantage of our technology.”

“Pepsi uses our paid version of Trifacta Wrangler Enterprise ,” says Will Davis, Director of Product Marketing, “and in doing so they have cut their data wrangling time by 90%. You can imagine what their team of data scientists and analysts can do now that they don’t have to waste their time wrangling the data they want to analyze.”

Learn From Facebook: Build a Culture of Data-Driven Decision Making
“Facebook has a culture that demands data driven decisions at every turn” explains Tye Rattenbury, Director of Data Science at Trifacta. “Most of those decisions were fueled by on-demand analyses queued up by product managers and answered by a huge variety of people–analysts, engineers and even the product managers themselves. They were fast and rough, but had enough validity to stand on. To support the breadth of speed of these analyses, Facebook built a wide array of home-grown tools (some built from scratch, others extended from open source projects). Today, forward looking companies are finding off-the-shelf tools that give them the necessary breadth and speed to be data driven.”

Said another way, while the deep technical expertise of a data scientist is necessary on some projects, you don’t need them to build a culture of data-driven decision-making. Masking the complexity is what companies like Trifacta are doing so that the business analysts and strategic thinkers are empowered to ask better questions and probe for insights derived from their (near) real-time data sets.

Once you have used a tool like Trifacta to get all of your data into one location and in a usable format, you now have a plethora of other free or cheap tools you can use to empower your team to make data-driven decisions. These include:

  1. Data Robot: An invaluable website that is chalked full of incredibly powerful algorithms. You no longer need to even decide which algorithm to use. Simply import your data and the machine learning takes over. Specifically, it suggests what algorithms might work best to analyze the data you have.
  2. Qlik: If you simply want to visualize your data, this is the best place to start. Data visualization tools such as Qlik help you create charts and graphs so that you can see what you might have otherwise missed buried deep in your data.
  3. RapidMiner and H2O: More “off the shelf” machine learning models and algorithms in a box you can use to dig into your data–without being a data scientist.

The Cost of NOT Making Data-Driven Decisions
“Statistically minded data scientists often argue that the data outputs in many of these quick analyses are wrong because the data is low quality or your assumptions about the data are faulty,” says Dr. Rattenbury. “The key is to wrangle your data to improve its quality, and, in the process, improve your working assumptions. That’s what data scientists do.”

And here’s the thing. If you’re not using data to drive your decisions today, these insights are a quantum leap forward than the gut check that most entrepreneurs use to guide their businesses today. Can you get better insights with the help of those highly sought after data scientists? Absolutely. But if you wait until you can afford a data scientist, you will be losing opportunities and market share to all of your competitors who decide to dive in and begin experimenting immediately.

Therefore the cost of NOT making data-driven decisions is that you are flying blind and eventually will either hit a wall or simply crash and burn. On the contrary, the ROI of making data-driven decisions is that you are well informed and are empowered to know rather than guess what’s happening in your business. This, in turn, leads you to actually stay in business. Today, there simply is no excuse for making uninformed decisions. The tools are freely available to you and your team and you no longer have to be a data scientist to take advantage of them.

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Billionaires Master the Rule of 168: Life’s Great Equalizer

The Rule of 168 is one that cannot be broken and anyone who masters it will live a life of joy and utter fulfillment. Those who ignore it do so at their own peril.

One of the many reasons I love my coach, Chad Cooper, is because he often comes up with a blinding glimpse of the obvious–something that was right there in front of me all the time. Once you are aware of the rule of 168, then you will immediately see why it is life’s great equalizer.

The rule of 168.

One hundred sixty-eight is the total number of hours each and every one of us gets in any given week. No more. No less. What separates the ultra successful from the mildly so is what each does with this number of hours. The ultra wealthy and incredibly successful all live extraordinary lives. How is it that Sir Richard Branson can own multiple companies and still find time to become an expert kite surfer, while many of us stress out because we can’t seem to strike a balance between our careers and the many other facets of our life?

Time is the great equalizer of life.

Here is the beauty of the rule: It doesn’t matter how rich or successful you are–everyone gets only 168 hours each week. Period. You can’t buy more time, but you can sell your available hours to someone else. This is what the wealthy refer to asleverage. You probably already use leverage in your life. Do you have someone who cuts your grass or cleans your house? Or perhaps you have invested in a virtual assistant. Then you know the power of leverage. The question is, are you properly using the leverage available to you or are you being controlled by the leverage others have on your life?

Or, as Chad Cooper likes to ask, “Are you an extra in someone else’s movie script, or are you the lead author of your own blockbuster?”

The happiest, most successful people not only understand the power of leverage, but they also understand that time is the most precious commodity. Therefore, they do not squander it. They take the time to plan their weeks rather than allowing others to plan their week for them.

Stop allowing a to-do list control your life.

Most people use the worst possible planning methodology: the to-do list. By creating an overwhelming list of things you should do, not prioritizing them, and then attempting to cross them off, other people are free to add their items to your list. Your sense of being overwhelmed grows as you struggle to cross items off your list faster than they are put on, but the net effect is that the list is rarely completed. Instead, the list becomes a source of pain, stress, and something to avoid at all costs. This leads to procrastination and accomplishing even less than when you had no list at all.

Planning your extraordinary life.

Instead, take time to divvy up your 168 hours between the distinct roles you have made for yourself. When you subtract out seven nights of sleep, you’re left with between 112 to 126 hours (depending on whether you sleep six or eight hours per night). From there, you need to decide how to maximize the outcomes you want in your life given the remaining hours you have to work with.

Do you want to be an amazing spouse parent? How many hours in the week do you need in order to reach that outcome? If you’re finding that you’re working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, then you’re clocking 84 hours of work time and you’re left with only 42 hours. Add the two to four hours of TV most people watch ever day (28 hours) and it’s no wonder a lot of people are stressed out.

Taking control of your calendar.

Before you can design an extraordinary life for yourself, you first need to understand where all your time is going. Some of the most successful people, such as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, started tracking their time with a log of every 15 minutes from the time they got up to the time they went to bed. This helped them see where their time was being devoted and what changes can (and should) be made to prioritized the most important items.

Resources available to you.

There are also really amazing tools available to you, including Tony Robbins’s RPM Life Planner. You can download the free version of his workbook and get the high-level version of his breakthrough thinking immediately. I highly recommend his 10-day audio book program, as it will help you change your outlook on how you manage your time. After all, it’s usually your psychology and lack of purpose that encourages you to procrastinate rather than dive with both feet into the things you know you want to accomplish.

There are also several books available on the subject and one that will be coming out later this year by Chad Cooper. I can’t talk about that one much right now, but when we get closer to the launch date, you can bet I will be sharing some of the incredible insights he has included in his book. After all, if you like the rule of 168, remember that it came from Cooper and there is a whole lot more where that came from.

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Tony Robbins on Acing the Age-Old Question ‘What Does Your Company Do?’

What business are you in? No, I mean what business are you really in? In other words, what core benefit do you deliver to your prospective client beyond the category or industry in which you’ve built your career? Here’s how to pivot to a much more powerful response.

One of the most powerful lessons Tony Robbins teaches at Business Mastery is to know where you really are and create an effective business map to where you want to go. Sounds simple enough, but most companies struggle to clearly articulate the business value of what they do for their customers.

Take my marketing firm, Trepoint, for example. If someone asked me, “So, what business are you in?” the short answer might be, “Digital marketing.” But that does nothing to inspire the person I’m talking to and make him or her want to hire me. In fact, all it really does is allow the person I’m speaking with to quickly file my business into a known category and switch to a different topic (thereby losing an opportunity to explore possible ways of working together).

What Business Are You Really In?
Tony Robbins asked his more than 1,500 attendees, “What business are you really in?” Meaning, what core benefit do you deliver to your client beyond the category or industry in which you’ve built your career? For Trepoint, we came up with, “We create breakthrough marketing and innovation that is as powerful as the clients we serve.” That really resonated to my core. The result was that it unleashed my passion and was much more interesting to whomever I was speaking with. What business is Tony Robbins in? “I get you to be the man or woman you were meant to be,” he said. “That’s what the F I do for a living.”

Many Incredible Examples
Scott Harrison, one of Tony Robbin’s top speakers, told the audience, “This is a wonderful time for you to review what your neighbor has written and, if you like it, steal it.” Agreed. While you are certainly encouraged to come up with your own unique answer, it really does help to get some diverse examples of breakthroughs in several different industries.

With that in mind, I will use the balance of this article to highlight eight industry examples that I thought were much more powerful than their original industry-specific response. I’ve also encouraged my fellow Business Mastery Gladiators to use the comment section of this article to include their own, as it just wasn’t practical to capture all 1,500 in this article.

  1. Are you in the real estate business? No, you’re actually in the business of helping families achieve the American dream. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of creating wealth through home ownership. Much better description from Century 21 Allstars’ Mirna Martinez.
  2. How about the video production business? You’re actually in the business of helping companies express and market themselves through turnkey video production services. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of making it easier for all companies to embrace and market themselves through digital media, saysVSP Worldwide Productions.
  3. Perhaps you’re a lawyer. Actually, you’re a professional problem solver. Or better yet, you’re providing peace of mind and a good night’s sleep during people’s most turbulent times. Wow. Love that one, from KER Legal Group.
  4. Are you competing in the fast casual food service business? Perhaps you are you in the business of fueling the world with energy, health, and vitality to help reduce the sickness and suffering in the world. Or you’re in the business of changing people’s lives through proper nutrition and lifestyle choices. Watch out, Chipotle! Johnny’s Garden is coming for you.
  5. Have a hardware store? To compete with Home Depot, you need to be in the business of helping your clients love and care for their home by providing world-class products, knowledge, and passion. Crown Ace Hardware is putting much needed services back into the hardware-store business.
  6. How about the insurance business? The value is really keeping people and their valuables safe and making sure they are financially secure when things do go wrong. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of creating an environment in which people have total security on what matters most to them, thereby allowing them peace of mind and to focus on living life to the fullest. It helps when your business’s name is iCare.
  7. Do you write children’s books? Well, you could be in the business of enlightening kids so that they can wake up from the paralyzing fear of death, while using book profits to improve the quality of life of those kids endangered by poverty and violence in America. Powerful stuff, Joseph Diaz-Oldenburg!
  8. And finally, what if you run a children’s camp? Perhaps you are really in the business of empowering kids to become their best self through inner confidence, self awareness, contribution, and success. Or perhaps you’re in the business of creating opportunities for kids to create the life they want. Now that’s a camp I want to send my kids to. Sign me up, Camp Lonehollow.

What Business Do You Need to Be In?
The last question in this exercise is future looking. Regardless of how awesomely you articulated your current state, technology, and innovation are moving so rapidly, you need to continuously look to the future to determine the business you are becoming. So, while Trepoint currently creates breakthrough marketing and innovation that is as powerful as the clients we serve, we also need to be working on our future business: Transhuman Revenue Reengineering for Web 5.0. But explaining that is for a future article.

The point is simply that you need to always be working on two businesses: the one you’re currently in and the one you are becoming. That way, you’ll never find yourself in the company of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Borders–none of whom changed fast enough to stay relevant and compete with the likes of Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.

So the next time someone asks, “What does your company do?” make sure you give that person a compelling answer that is client-benefit based to truly ace this question.

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To Increase Your Productivity up to 200 Percent, Ask These 3 Questions

Change is automatic, but progress is not. Progress is about making the changes that get you closer to your desired outcomes and by asking these 3 questions daily, your outcomes will become more focused and deliberate.

 

As I continue my personal transformation via Tony Robbins, I’m totally digging hisTime of Your Life Rapid Planning Method. There are several themes from this work that I would like to share with you, my fellow entrepreneurs. These ideas are simple, powerful, and can increase your productivity anywhere from 25 to 200 percent, according to Robbins Research International. Here are just a few of the key insights I’ve picked up from Day 1 of the RPM Life Planner:

To increase productivity up to 200 percent, ask these three questions constantly:

  1. What do you really want? Or in other words, “What is the specific result that I’m committed to achieving?” Most people don’t know what they really want, and this is why “success” is elusive. Goals like “to be successful,” “to make millions of dollars,” or “to lose weight” are vague and therefore rarely get accomplished. Getting deep and specific around what you really want is the first step to achieving it. It also will help you focus, and this is where most entrepreneurs fall short. There is so much we want to achieve that we end up managing our lives through to-do lists, which has the opposite result of what we want: more time, more productivity, higher rates of success, and better results in our lives.
  2. Why do you want to do this? “Why” is usually more important than the “what” or “how” questions. “Why” gets to your true purpose. Do you know what your true purpose is? Do you know what your company’s true purpose is? Answering these questions will help you deepen your focus and clarify what’s important in your life and for the growth of your company, all of which further removes you from the busywork of your typical to-do list.
  3. How are you going to achieve it? As Tony Robbins says, “Reasons come first, answers come second. With big enough reasons, we can figure out how to do anything.” The irony is that most entrepreneurs focus on the “how” before they ever answer the “what” and the “why” — which is backwards. When you start a business, you typically focus on a business plan that lays out exactly “how” you’re going to achieve success. Rarely do you include the answers to the first two questions, and that’s a real problem. As Simon Sinek says in his powerful TED Talk, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” The answers to the “why” questions inspire you, your team, and your customers.

The questions you ask yourself control your outcome and your thinking.

Most people ask the wrong question each and every day they go to work. You know the one. We all ask it: “What do I need to get done today.” The answer is usually on some form of a to-do list, where we incorrectly perceive “urgent” items as important. When we ask the three questions above, we quickly realize that much of what’s on our to-do list is not moving us toward the ultimate outcomes we seek.

One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein, who said, “Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” Tony Robbin’s version of this is, “Questions are the controlling force of your thinking. If you focus on what you want and why you want it, you can get just about anything.”

Depending on whom you believe, the average 4-year-old asks between 100 and 400 questions per day! When you’re a child, you ask questions constantly. As a toddler, you’re taking life in and enjoying every minute of it, but you have tons of questions because you are in a peak learning state. At some point, however, we stop asking the right questions and begin focusing on our to-do lists — and this is where our productivity really begins to suffer.

Tony Robbins’ favorite question is “How can I make it better?” This is the question that keeps him focused on continuous improvement even after he’s built several highly successful businesses. He’s learned from the billionaires around him. Bill Gates, for example, asked, “How does Microsoft become the intelligence that runs all computers?” At one point, Microsoft Windows was on 85% of the world’s computers.

Change is automatic, but progress is not.
Most people answer “I don’t know” to these three most important questions. Unfortunately, that’s the worst possible answer — not only because it’s not true, but it’s what Tony Robbins calls an “in-can’t-ation,” versus an “incantation.” That is, the more you tell yourself that you don’t know something, your brain, in an effort to align with your conscious mind, starts to believe you and make it so. Rather than focusing on “I don’t know,” trust that you do know the answer to all three questions, and spend 10 minutes writing down the first things that pop into your head. The more you focus on knowing the answers, the faster they will come to you.

Progress is about making the changes that get you closer to your desired outcomes. With daily focus on these three questions, your outcomes will become more deliberate. You can begin to say no, to help your business grow, and that will move you beyond the typical to-do list, where “urgent” items are often mistaken for being “important.” Every person and business changes automatically, but progress requires vigilant clarity around these three questions.

Here’s to increasing your productivity by as much as 200 percent — just by asking the right questions and focusing on the outcomes you wish to achieve. I also highly recommend ditching your email. I’ve done it and it’s given me as much as 50% of my day back. Before you say, “I could never do that,” go back to the same three questions and ask yourself if the current state of your inbox is really moving you toward the outcomes you desire.

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