The importance of celebrating small wins

     There is always a silver lining so to speak. Even on the roughest days there are the positives that happen. Look for the small wins because they add up. Don't try and tackle the entire RTO Industry at one time. Chip away at it and remember the battle isn't won in just one sitting it's won in small settings. I just wanted to remind our team members out there that small wins are the building blocks for big wins.

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Sponsored by APRO, VOX POP ULI, Dialectic RTO Division, and Jeraud Norman Marketing!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the RTO show. I'm your host, Pete Chow, and today I wanted to talk to you about small wins. As a friend of mine put it, a friend and mentor of mine put it to me recently, it's hitting singles. And sometimes I think that we forget that those small wins really can make a huge difference. It came out of a conversation that I was having with him very recently. He could see that I was just kind of putting the work in, putting a lot of midnight oil in. And let me tell you, it's not easy sometimes having a podcast and be a regional and being connected to the RTO industry at the same time. Anybody who does multiple jobs like that, they can tell you it's not easy. Sometimes you have things that run in together, and sometimes your events are hard to meet, or the things that you have going on are hard to be obligated to when you have a couple of other things going on in the background. But then he sat me down and he told me that sometimes you just have to hit singles. And it took a little while for that to sink in, and it took a little while for me to understand what that meant. But what I wanted to talk to you guys today about is it's about one win at a time. Small wins win big championships. And those games are sometimes won by just getting on base. So hit the singles. Like if you're having a rough day, you sometimes you have to take a look at the wins that you have. Sometimes getting on base is just as simple as that. I counseled two customers today. Was able to sit down and help my collection situation by really contemplating where I was needed the most, what was the biggest effect that I could have, how to make that happen. And out of that, even if that's the only thing I was able to get to because I know I had a busy day, I was able to sit down and actually talk to two customers, solve their problems, and get things done. Sometimes getting on base and hitting those singles is just like selling that one product that was way over 90 days that nobody could get their hands on, nobody could really just figure out a way to get it sold, and then you do it. You make it happen, you get it sold. That's how you do it. Sometimes responding to your emails and just making sure that you clear your inbox for the day is just to make sure that you checked it twice, you checked it in the morning, you checked it in the afternoon, you responded, you got to all the situations that you needed to get to. You addressed them, you hit them back, or you sent an email back, or you solved the problem, or you answered the question. Sometimes that's a win. Sometimes that's getting on base. Hitting a sales goal for the week or for the month, sometimes even for the quarter. And you do that before the expected date. That's a win. Sometimes we get so big on ourselves and we get so caught up with what's going on the day to day. I've been having it myself. I know some colleagues have been going through it recently. And some of the things that I want to tell you guys is it's super important to not lose sight of the bigger picture. It's not okay to forget that it's okay to hit the singles. It's okay to get on base. It's okay to really enjoy the small wins because those small wins are how you clock in and clock out from day to day with a win, how you get ahead on the problem solving. Not every time that you go up to bat, you're gonna get a home run. And that's okay. You've got to make sure that you're doing your best and you show up every day. Rent to own is a grind. Rent on, there's a lot of aspects to it. There's the sales, there's the collections, there's the marketing, there's the inventory, there's delivery aspects, there's the employment aspects, there's actually the team building. Everything that starts from management and all the way down to a delivery driver or your delivery technician, their jobs are extremely important. Sometimes you got to take the wins. Just real quickly, I wanted to go over some baseball stats because I think that everybody knows baseball. Maybe not everybody's into it, but I definitely know that everybody understands it. And one of the things that I saw was that when you have a batting average, batting averages matter, right? A batting average is determined by dividing a player's actual hits by the total of at bats for that season, and it's either calculated as 0.000 all the way up to 1.000. Now, nobody's ever hit a 1.00. They've never always hit at bat, but you got to understand right now, typically uh in the last year or so, the baseball batting average is around 250. 0.250. Okay. If you're hitting over a 300, which is a 0.300, you're considered excellent. If you're hitting a 0.400, just so you know, it's almost impossible. The last player that actually accomplished this in the American or National League was Ted Williams, who hit a 0.406. He was over the 400 mark for the 1941 Boston Red Sox. That means that four out of ten times that he was at bat, he hit. Doesn't mean that he hit a home run. It means that he hit. And there's a difference there. You gotta understand that not every time you swing that bat, not every time that you solve a problem, not every time that you go to solve that goal, you're going to hit that home run. Sometimes that means that you're completing a third, a full third of what it is that's asked of you. I'm not telling you to underperform. What I'm trying to tell you is that it's a grind. Do something, do it well, and do it in a completion that's going to solve issues. Not everything that you solve has to have a perfect payout. Okay? That's a good lesson for account managers. When they're having conversations, you're not always going to get somebody to answer the phone. You might not get a good reference check, or you might not be able to verify everything that you need to verify. But when you do, that's when you take care of it. That's when you make it happen. That's when you make it count. Do it and do it to completion in 100% of the way that you know how. It doesn't always mean that the outcome is going to give you every single benefit that you need out of it, but you need it to the best of your ability and make it happen. Same thing with salespeople. You know, we have a sales meeting and we say, oh, well, this is all you have to do, and this is how you come back, and this is how you save an EPO or somebody has an early purchase option, they come in and they they want to pay it out, and this is how you convert it. This is how you talk somebody into up sales. But it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you just have to celebrate that somebody came in and you were able to sell them on that one product. Sometimes you have to be okay with saying, you know what, I did get that payment out of them. I was able to save that customer. I was able to give them something that they didn't have today that's going to affect them better tomorrow. That doesn't mean that every sales meeting that you're going to have, everybody's going to come out of top not salesperson of the year. It's okay. You have to know that when you're doing anything that you're doing, you just have to do it to the best of your abilities. And sometimes that's just getting on base. Sometimes that's having one person out of a sales meeting of five or six that just really gets it. They came out of it knowing, wow, I never knew that. I didn't know how to approach that. I didn't know what was going on, or I didn't know what that means, but now it's going to really affect me. What I love for six people out of six people to have a sales meeting and come out and just be the best salespeople that they're going to be. Absolutely. I'd be happy with a 400. Right? But is it really going to happen that way? A third of those people means two out of your six people really got something out of it. You hit an on base. Now you might get a home run. You might have somebody coming out who understands it so well that they go back to their stores and they just kill it. And they increase their sales output for 25-30% a week. But is that an everyday thing? No, it's not an everyday thing. Sometimes you just have to be happy with getting on base. You made it to a couple people. They understand it better than they did yesterday. I mean, you gotta understand that the greats are hitting a 400. That's not every single time. It's not. And even the greats sometimes need a refresher course. Just like you and me and the guy in front of us, sometimes we need that refresher refresher course no matter how long we've been doing it. Sometimes we can find a better way to get it done. We can get a better swing, we can get a better pitch, we can better call, we can have better phone etiquette, we can figure out how to do things online versus in person. We can figure out how to go over an agreement a little bit better than we did last time. We can word our terminology in a way that it makes it so much easier for people who don't understand the jargon of RTO to just get it. And that's what I want you guys to take away from this today is that sometimes we have to enjoy the at-bats that give us a single. We always want a home run. We always want to get win the game. We always want to do better than we did yesterday. But sometimes you just have to take hitting singles. That doesn't mean you're failing. It means that you're pushing. And just like we've always said on this show, it's a ladder. It's a staircase. One step at a time. One single at a time. One win at a time. Goals don't need to be destroyed. The goals don't always need to be overachieved either. Sometimes it's just good to hit your goal. And you can be okay with that. If the goal wasn't the correct goal, then that's a situation, right? So if I needed 10, but I put a goal of nine, that's not gonna work. But if your goal of ten is gonna solve a problem, and let's say you make those ten sales, you might not have made eleven, you might have not made twelve, you might have not made fifteen, but your goal was ten because that was gonna solve the problem. I need ten sales at this APC APU. This is gonna help me solve my problem. I need this many cards to pay in collections. I need this much float taken care of. It's okay to hit those goals and not destroy them. Sometimes it's okay to just hit that goal. Make sure you take the time to enjoy your singles. Make sure you take the time to get your team to understand that wins are wins. Help them celebrate. Help them talk about it. It doesn't mean that it's the end of the day. It doesn't mean that it's the end of the hour and we get it and that's it, and we stop. Nope, that's not how it works. We have to keep on hitting singles, and then we'll do it again tomorrow. But when you have counseled those two customers, and then you counsel two more, and you help solve problems and you get paydays set on the correct due dates, and you realize that maybe they were overloaded, or maybe that they have a need that we're not attending to. In other words, maybe there's a product that they do need more than the product that they do have, and we can solve that problem, get their payments taken care of correctly, figure out what was wrong with their early purchase option, or maybe they didn't understand something, those are wins. Making sure that out of the sales meetings, your guys get something. Making sure out of the collections meetings, your team is getting something. Maybe you're on the road, maybe you're a delivery technician. Now, to delivery technicians probably have some of the hardest jobs out there when it comes to what we do. In rent to own, sometimes it's very difficult to have a second floor delivery of a bedroom set still in a box that you got to put together. That's it. I'm gonna tell you right now, I wish I could say that there were people out there that were not going over rental agreements in other places. They are. Your delivery technicians need to understand what they're doing, how to be salespeople, how to be collections people, how to repair, how to fix, how to win, how to talk about the Google star rating, making sure they're driving correctly, even though somebody might have scheduled them in two opposite ends of the entire city. You're going one way and then the other, and somebody might have known that, or going on a one-man delivery that's on the second or third floor, and you really have to hustle. Those are some of the hardest things that we have to do. You also have to teach your guys to enjoy the win. Enjoy getting on base. We got it done. We saved the customer. They're excited. We're excited, we're happy. Getting that sale of that one product that just could not sell. This was not something that we really wanted to take in today. We didn't really want to bring that in. Oh God, I told them I didn't want that thing. And you might have been right. You might have been right. Might have been hard to sell. That's okay. Get behind it. You want that win? Call up everybody that you know that has that type of product and ask them. Ask them if there's a way to add on to their agreement this one special item that you know is going to be positively a big hit with them. And when you sell it, when you make it happen, when you get it gone, your manager should pat you on the back. Say, hey, you made a good decision. Hey, this was a good win. Then we go back and we do it again. Everything is done through repetition, so you have to understand that batting a 300 is excellent. Nobody really wants a guy or gal who hits 100 either. You've got to be willing to do it again and again and again. Hone those reflexes, hone those skills by doing it over and over and over. And then maybe, just maybe, one day, you're batting at 400 and you can take a look back. Just like Ted Williams did in 1941 and say, I have one of the best averages there is at closing sales, at getting my route to close where it needs to be, with the float that it needs to be, with the overs where they need to be. Maybe I made some great decisions with some of my staff members in the last sales meeting, in the last collections meeting. Maybe it was a real win on the last conference call that we had that I was able to say something that was a win. For everybody out there, I do appreciate the time that you take to listen to the RTO show. I just want you to know I'm always thinking about how to give you the best content. But if you have something that you want to talk to us about, hit us up on the show. It's the rtoshowpodcast.com. You can go on there, you can hit us up with an email. Uh, if you want to email me directly, it's Pete at the RTO Show Podcast.com. You can also visit us on social media. Just look up the RTO show. And we also now have a YouTube account. We're gonna start posting some of our podcasts when we have people on that we can get on the video. We're gonna put them on there as well. Uh, we do appreciate everything that you guys do. I do appreciate all the sponsors that we have. This show could not run without them. I am so appreciative to have them on the show. I'm so appreciative to have them working with us that it's just made a big change in what we do here in the RTO show. Thank you so much. And I want to tell you as always, keep your collections low to get your sales high. Have a great one.