For today’s post. I want to talk about something that I’ve been working on and that we’ve implemented at WunderTRE. We call it the “Playbook.”

What is the playbook? What is it’s use case you might be asking yourself? It’s a list of actionable items that you and your team can do day in and day out that will lead to growth. Now while every business is unique in the way they should approach these items, I’ve boiled our playbook down to eight core “actions.” These same eight actions work for most businesses out there. Keep in mind, every business is unique, so, you might have one or two different ones that are not here, and some of the ones that are on here might not be relevant.

First, I’ll list the 8 action items out, and then I will go into more detail as we go along the post on each action and break it down for you. What are these great actions that make up the playbook this fantastic tool for growth? They are: Meetings, Delivering On Promises, Timely And Consistent Follow Up, Events, Content, Innovation, Personal growth, and Case Studies/Hard Data. Together, these eight things make up the playbook. Like a football team runs plays, we do our plays in our playbook to get results like business growth, more sales, or increasing the bottom line. We know that when we do these things, we will grow. Let’s dive into them in greater detail.

Meetings.

We have found that when we have one-on-one meetings, we’re able to get a better pulse on how the market is going. Whether we go to clients or prospects, or they come to us, we have found success.

Something like going to lunch, being there with them, one-on-one, face-to-face, having real-world human connection helps us strengthen our relationships with leads and clients to be able to understand them better and boil down what their needs are. When we know their needs, and we’re on the same page, we’re able to serve them better. When we serve them better, it’s a win for everyone. They’re more likely to refer us to friends and family because we’re top of mind, and we’re doing an excellent job for them.

So, meetings are a big thing for any business. How will you start working them in for your situation?

Deliver On Promises.

This one sounds like good business, right? You want to deliver on what you were paid to do! People are giving you money to provide a product or a service, you need to make sure you render that product or service, and it’s done well, not only giving them what they paid for but making it better than what they thought they were getting.

I see a lot of businesses deliver on the product, but it’s right at the deadline. Delivering is when you can beat expectations, not coast under the radar to try to get it done. Delivering on promises means you go above and beyond.

So, what’s another tool to grow your business? Deliver on what you said you were going to do, period. If you’re not doing this, start.

Timely And Consistent Follow Up.

Whether it’s with new prospects and leads, or whether it’s with current customers and clients, you should always be following up with them. As it pertains to prospecting, when I say “always be checking with them,” I don’t mean you should inundate them every single day with tons of emails and phone calls, but instead find a schedule that’s sustainable and doesn’t sever relationships. Consistent follow up is critical, stay top-of-mind, try to find their needs, check-in on them and make sure they’re still interested in your product or service, that’s big!

As it pertains to customers, this is where a lot of businesses get it wrong. They don’t follow up with their customers. Your customers are the biggest asset your company has. Not only they are paying you money, but they are the key to unlocking how to get other customers like them!

What does following up with customers look like? Reach out to them and ask them, “How do you like the product and the service that we deliver?” Or “Is there anything else we can do for you?” A script I’m a big fan of is: “How are things? Is there anything we can help with? Anything new going on? I wanted to let you know; we recently launched a new service that could work well for you! And oh by the way, do you mind leaving us a review on Google?” This can unlock the door for so much potential growth, and I see businesses not executing on it way too often. It frustrates me to see that going on.

Follow up with your leads and customers.

Events.

This one is broken into two kinds of subcategories, Networking, and Presentations.

Networking events allow you to do just that, network with new businesses, new prospects, new leads whether you’re a service-based or product-based business, Networking is one of the biggest sales channels that we have. Every time we do networking events, only good things come up.

Presentations, much like networking events, get you up in front of people. One of the biggest differences between the two is that at presentations, you are the reason people are there. At networking events, you have to mingle and fight the crowds and stuff like that. At presentations, everyone’s got all eyes on you, so it’s a little bit more of a setup and prep time, but it’s worth doing.

Start booking more events.

Content.

Now for WunderTRE, we have this broken up into four different pillars. That is what’s going to vary based on who you are as a business and what you can do. The four components that we have are the basic ones that every business should have. And if you want to have more than that you can. For us, and where we’re at right now with our team being the size that it is, we can’t do more than these four. Remember, we want to make sure that it’s something that we can repeat day in and day out. If that’s all we can handle, that’s fine. Here’s the four that we have:

• Email Marketing
• Blogging
• Downloadable Resources
• Video Content

That’s all pretty straightforward stuff. I don’t want to get super complicated, but I will touch on each one. What I want to say is, consistency is vital. Every business should attempt to do these four things but if you can’t pull them all off consistently than only do what you can do consistently, even if that is only one of them.

Email Marketing. We have two different emails that we send out, one on Wednesdays and one on Fridays. They go out to different audiences, so not everyone always gets the same stuff. We try to make it more relevant to the individuals that are on our email list, but email marketing is still by and large one of the biggest things that you can be doing. It helps you stay out in front of people and get your written and video content out there.

Blogging. Like the one you’re reading, can help you reach a new audience, build engagement, get website visits, and it helps with SEO, which, as a business owner, is always a significant advantage. Blogging is something that everyone should do.

Downloadable resources. This is the way that you can take traffic online and make it where they’re no longer online traffic, but actual leads that want to get ahold of you. Send visitors to your website via your blog, email blasts, social media campaigns, and whatever else to your resources that they download. In order to get access to these downloadable resources, users must enter their information in a form like their phone number, email address, etc. and then they can download the resource. Now you have their contact info!

Video. YouTube and IGTV are your friends. Video content is king, you hear it all over everywhere all the time, so, I’m not going to hash it all again, but the video is huge, you should be doing it, if you’re not, start!

Do you have a content strategy in place? If not, you should reach out to us.

Innovation.

Now this one is where it kind of gets a little bit mysterious because, how do you innovate? There’s not necessarily a process for innovating. Can you sit down and say, “Oh, I’m going to innovate something today.”? Maybe. I will argue that you can set yourself up and set aside time for innovation.

For a long time, we at WunderTRE used to do late Thursday night meetings, and we would stay at the office after hours. We use that time trying to look at the business with a bird’s eye view, instead of working in the business, we would try to work on the business. As time has gone along, we’ve had to change up our schedule a little bit, so we don’t do Thursday nights as often anymore, but we still set aside time dedicated for working on our business and innovating things. Whether it be a business process that needs to be better, a new marketing channel that we can enter in for ourselves for our clients, or if it’s a new way of doing business, whatever it is, we set aside time to be strategic and say okay, during this time we want to walk away at the end of this meeting, and have a better way of doing something, a new fresh way of doing whatever x y z challenge is.

So, while you can’t necessarily just say, ooh… let’s innovate; you can set yourself up for success by setting aside some time to be strategic, and innovation will come.

Personal Growth.

The most overlooked thing when it comes to growing your business, in my opinion, is growing yourself. Self-help books, courses (like uDemy), YouTube videos, anything that promotes personal growth and challenges your thinking. Things that when you finish them, you walk away from a better person because of it. For us, that’s one of the biggest things. If we are not growing as a business, all I have to do is take a look at myself and say, “Am I growing as a person?” And if I’m not, that’s why I’m not growing in business.

Make sure that you’re taking the time, not only for yourself as the leader of the company, but also for your team members. Build it in part of your company culture to where you are encouraging people to grow on a personal level. Your bottom line will thank you; your employees will be happier, the retention rate of employees will be better, customer relations will be better.

There are so many effects to growing personally. Take the time to do it.

Case Studies/Hard Data.

Case studies are big. If you’re a product based business, it’s showing off facts or statistics as to why that product is good; If you’re service-based, it’s showing how your service helped someone in a positive way. It’s backing up your product or service with real-world facts and data.

This is a no brainer. The funny thing is, this is probably the one that we struggle with the most, not because we don’t have good facts and data to show, but sometimes gathering all that information and putting it in one place where it’s easy for people to understand can be very, very difficult and time-consuming. We have a lot of success, not only for ourselves but for clients. So it’s not like we have a shortage of things to be able to point back to. We’ve got to get out there and do it, every time we have; it’s been great. So showing your work, aka case studies or product reviews, hard data, anything that solidifies your authority in your given product or service is a win, and you will grow.

Make sure that you’re taking the time to put out good case studies or hard data. Take time.

We’ve been running this variation of the playbook for a little over six weeks, and in that time, we have seen tremendous growth, not only in our bottom line but in our personal lives, growing as people, everything around us seems to be getting better because we are running our playbook. And it’s streamlining things for us. If I want to grow, then I need to make a video on LinkedIn. If I want to grow, I need to make sure I’ve got meetings on the calendar. “Oh, we want to grow the business”… then we make a case study., “Oh, we want to grow the business’… then pick up the freaking phone and book an event. Now you know what it takes to grow the business. This is the playbook; if you run the playbook, you’ll grow your business. All these action items I have mentioned are things that we are actively doing. You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the actions we’re taking. Go on our website, check out all our blog posts, subscribe to our email list.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this post. Don’t just read this though, put it together and figure out how this stuff fits in your business. If you need to change some things around, that’s fine; but, stop just reading the posts and start taking action from it. You gotta stick at it, but if you do, and you do them well, get ready for some serious growth. It’s right around the corner.

Thanks for reading, catch you next time.