There are a lot of smart professionals in business. People that have done amazing things for large companies or a few startup founders. However, to be highly successful financially takes the right mindset. Some of us must gain new habits and/or retrain some patterns with our mindset to break the cycle we’re stuck in and achieve a higher level of financial success. I want to help you reach that next level of success. Here are 3 mindsets tips that I know will bless you in business, sales, or marketing.

1 Remove Mental Roadblocks. Do it Now.

I don’t know about you, but I’m regularly putting mental roadblocks in my mind and in front of my path. Part of it is bad habits. I regularly practice reminding myself – “How can I do this now?”.

What I mean by this is simple. You may have a personal project you want to start, an investment you want to make, or a purchase you’re waiting to complete. These are just examples, but a lot of the time we fall into the trap of taking our current situation and calculating in our mind – when can I realistically do XYZ. And we come up with a plan and strategy that is sometimes not just a delay, but way into the future.

This could be for something big or for small regular projects and tasks we engage with daily. Here are a few examples. “When I get paid, I will start that project”. “When I pay off my debt or save enough money, I will buy/build that business”.  “When we create that creative asset, then we can launch our webinar and start scaling”.

With that goal, maybe you do need to wait until you get paid, but there is probably part of the work that you can begin sowing into now and start paving your path. How bad do you need that creative asset to be perfect? Maybe you can get it done with someone on Fiverr tomorrow and start promoting your webinar now. Maybe you don’t need your debt paid off, great credit, or a large chunk of money saved to buy a business. Could you accomplish your goal by finding an investor (other people’s money) or as one of my favorite influencers “Codie A. Sanchez” calls it – use that “Venmo Money”.

Here's what she means by “Venmo Money”. Think about your skillset, superpowers, and what functions and industries you’ve become an expert in. Where can you provide high value. Then go through your Venmo or credit card history. Where are you spending your money? Are any of these small businesses that you’d want to own a piece of?

For instance, you could utilize your skills in marketing and retail, and approach the local tea shop you’ve literally spent $10K at over the years. Pitch them on how you can grow their business 20%-$30% in 12 months for say 10% ownership. Or better yet, negotiate to be their marketing director at a set number of hours per week for a percentage of their business upfront. Now you have accomplished your goal.

I think you get the idea. Have a flexible mindset. Think of ways that you can start achieving your dreams by removing self-imposed mental roadblocks. This is how you crack the code. Whatever the project is, pause and ask yourself, how can I make this happen now?

2 Quality Over Quantity

As much as you’ve heard that marketing and sales is a quantity/volume game, it’s not. Marketing and sales success (ROI and Longevity) is about quality not quantity. But first, you need to think about your niche and your ideal customer.

Let’s say you are a salesperson or marketer in the auto industry and your goal is to make $200K per year. Would you rather choose to focus on selling/marketing 100 Toyota’s, 10 Aston Martins, or 1 Ferrari F50. Is it just that you’re intimidated by the idea of selling a Ferrari or is it not really your niche or ideal customer? The income could be roughly the same. Once you identify this, then it’s about finding a large pool of potential clients and creating ways to get in front of them.

Regarding finding customers, cold calling is dead. Trust me on this. Don’t buy a list and dial for dollars. Become a modern 2024 marketer, and you will scale your income. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be 100% digital.

For instance, when I was a Financial Advisor for Merrill Lynch many years ago, it was highly recommended that cold calling was the way to find and acquire high net worth clients (People with $250K of investable assets). It was basically the only recommendation on customer acquisition.

What I found was that I was cold calling 150 people per day from the local area “who’s who” database and getting about 1-2 appointments. In this type of outdated approach to lead generation I found that for every 10 appointments scheduled, about 3 would be qualified and book a closing meeting, where 1 would be an immediate sale.

So, if you do the math, this is a lot of cold calling and rejection just to sift through potential matches. I remember as an escape to this, I decided to create a list of all my ideal potential clients in the area (it was about 300 people), and I wrote a handwritten card to each of them.

In these cards I focused on quickly telling them about who I am, what I do, why people work with me, the result they are getting (Generally due to regulation), and I included a high-interest rate CD offer that they could take advantage of now with their cash assets for a minimum investment of $25,000.

I dropped these all in the mail. The whole campaign cost me about $300. Within two weeks I had 5 new clients ($250K AUM) from this campaign. Yes, I only had small, fixed income investments. However, most of them had million-dollar portfolios that were now realistically in my pipeline. Focus on being efficient and effective with quality over quantity. Bring client matches to you in an inbound way rather than throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

3 Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast.

Simple and repeatable processes and campaigns usually have the highest ROI from my experience. Yes, it’s important to ideate on your go-to-market strategy and develop a plan. However, it’s a matter of executing and putting one “iron in the fire” at a time. Don’t try to do too many things at once or go in several directions ending up half finished with everything, and no leads generated. After one tactic is implemented, optimized, and generating ROI – add another layer.

In a previous role for a SaaS business, it was apparent that webinars were the solution to grow our pipeline. I created a landing page for webinar registrants, gave myself 2 weeks to promote it via email and social media, and built my slide deck on 5 tips that provided a ton of free value. At the very end of the 45-minute webinar, I spent 5 minutes pitching our product and providing a 1:1 demo calendar link.

Two weeks after the webinar, the results were 250 registrants, 150 attendees of which 70% watched the entire webinar, 15 one-on-one demo appointments, and we closed 70% as new customers. Make your process simple and repeatable, always be optimizing, and remember to deliver on the things that don’t cost much to get an A – like customer service.