Let’s lose the maybe’s!
I donʼt seem to have any spare time these days. With emails, texts, Facebook, LinkedIn, phone calls, meetings etc my life is completely full and I donʼt have room for anything else! So Iʼve decided to get rid of all the MAYBEʼs in my life. All the people who canʼt make up their mind whether theyʼre a YES or a NO.
This has become so important to me of late that Iʼm starting most of my sales meetings with a conversation like this:
ʻAfter weʼve finished talking today I expect both you and I will either be a YES or a NO. That is, youʼll either like what Iʼm saying and think it could be useful for you and your team, or you wonʼt! Same for me. Now I love both YESʼs and NOʼs, the people that drive me mad are the MAYBEʼs.
I expect like me youʼve got a pile of MAYBEʼs on your desk, people who are either too nice to tell me NO or just canʼt make up their mind. Have you got a few of them in your life?
Well, letʼs not finish our meeting with either of us being a MAYBE. Let’s decide right now to be either a YES or a NO. If youʼre NO then that’s fantastic! I know that I donʼt need to do anything else for you, I donʼt need to send you anything, I donʼt need to call you in fact I can leave you alone completely. If you’re a YES then weʼll probably need to communicate further, book another meeting, arrange a phone call, decide who needs to send what to who etc.
Iʼm a big boy now and I realise that not everyoneʼs going to like me or value what I do. Please donʼt say MAYBE just to spare my feelings. It will make both our lives so much simpler and easier and save us a lot of time, if we just said NO.ʼ
Itʼs those MAYBEʼs that sap all our time, they require lots of attention and make us believe the future is going to be brighter than it actually is. What do you say we all join forces and get rid of the MAYBEʼs in our lives?