DELIVER RESULTS. While effort is important, our clients expect results. Follow up on everything and take responsibility to ensure that tasks get completed. Set high goals, use measurements to track your progress, and hold yourself accountable for achieving those results.
Lisa Abell said it perfectly when she wrote about this fundamental two years ago:
“Anyone who’s talked to me for more than three minutes knows that I love Ted Lasso. If you haven’t seen this Apple TV comedy, it’s about an idealistic American football coach who gets hired by an English Premier League soccer team in London. Shenanigans ensue. Optimistic Ted tends to place character building and effort above everything else. In one pivotal scene (mild spoilers ahead), Coach Ted and his faithful assistant Coach Beard, get into a heated exchange about a decision Ted has made concerning a critical upcoming match.
“Coach Ted: You know better than anyone that all this isn’t about winning to me because that’s not how we measure success, right?
Coach Beard (slamming his hand down on the table): Dammit, it is! Winning DOES matter. And that’s OK. Losing has repercussions. If we lose, this is over, and we will have built nothing.
“This confrontation was a wake-up call for Ted as it could be for all of us. Working and working without delivering results — builds nothing.
“We can write the most beautiful letter, but if it doesn’t motivate donors to give – we’ve built nothing.
We can pump out a white #10 package to get it off our ‘To Do’ list, but if it sits unopened on a donor’s desk in a sea of other white #10s – we’ve built nothing.
We can set a reminder to send the client a generic biweekly “Checking-In” email, but if we haven’t nurtured a genuine relationship with the client – we’ve built nothing.
We can crunch numbers, create spreadsheets, and analyze data until the cows come home, but if that doesn’t translate into tangible wins for our clients – we’ve built nothing.
And we can spend the majority of our precious day as Team HSP, but if we don’t lift each other up, challenge each other, know each other – we’ve built nothing.”
Shoutout to Lisa for this great example. She is absolutely right, delivering results is how we WIN.
Whenever I am asked what sets us apart from our competition, I respond with “our results”. A couple of years ago, Kristi Noem’s team reached out to discuss potentially moving to us from Lukens. We were fortunate to see the projections for the Lukens program and I was surprised by how little they were expecting to raise. We sent them rather aggressive projections and won the work. In this case, winning the contract was easy, but we had to deliver what we said we would do. Because of our focus on results, we went on to exceed our projections. And by the way, we also outraised what Lukens was expecting for the entire year with just our first two mailings �.
