Few of us will ever run the 26 miles of a marathon. But you can apply some lessons from new research on marathon runners to hit your own goals and help clients hit theirs.
This was the takeaway from a recent New York Times article. By setting clear goals that are important to you and your team and closely tracking progress against those goals, your chances of success go up dramatically. One of those lessons is particularly striking: While mid- and long-term goals have value, it’s immediate, day-to-day goals that lead to significant changes in behavior.
Why marathon runners – just barely – hit their goals
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Here’s an excerpt from that article, showing how finishing times in marathons spiked just before key intervals.
Viewed from afar, the distribution of finishing times resembles the sort of bell-shaped distribution found in sporting results, economic numbers, elections and other groups of data. But zooming in reveals big heaps of finishes at the three-, four- and five-hour marks. There’s also a similar pattern at half-hour intervals (and to a lesser degree, at 10-minute intervals). Goals really work as motivators, as we see many runners sneak in just under their targets (the shaded peaks are at 2:59, 3:29, 3:59 and so on), and few who just miss (finishing times like 3:01, 3:31, 4:01 are relatively rare).
Distribution of marathon finishing times: The small spikes are people making their goals, with not a minute to spare. A finishing time of 3:59 is 1.4 times as likely as one of 4:01.
Based on data from Eric Allen, USC, Patricia Dechow, U.C. Berkeley, Devin Pope and George Wu, University of Chicago.
Setting short-term goals
There are two steps to the goal-setting technique that allows marathon runners to hit their objectives:
- Set immediate goals.
- Closely monitor progress against those goals.
When it comes to selecting objectives, start with the SMART principle. Set goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-based
I would add to that list two other qualities. Set goals that will have a meaningful impact on your business and goals about which you and your team can get truly enthused. Just as marathoners get excited about hitting their personal best times of 3.5 or 4 hours, so you need to be excited about your short-term goals.
Tracking progress against short-term goals isn’t a new concept. Here are two examples from advisors I’ve talked to who entered the business in the 1970s, when cold calling was the norm:
- A successful advisor recently retired after building a substantial firm that today manages $2 billion. When he started in the insurance industry, his aim each morning was to make three appointments with prospects, which would typically take place the following weeks. Every morning at 10 a.m., he began calling business owners – and stopped when he had his three appointments or at noon, whichever came first. If he hadn’t hit his three appointments, he would come back early from lunch and keep calling until he had his three appointments.
- A rookie broker had the goal of speaking to 20 prospects on the phone each morning about investing in Treasury bills. (Remember, these were the days when most business was done over the phone and before voicemail, when people actually answered their phones.) He would start with 20 pennies to the left of his phone. Each time he spoke to a prospect, he moved one to the right of the phone. When all 20 pennies had moved from left to right, he would take a break for lunch and repeat the process in the afternoon.
As old-school as this sounds today, both of these advisors went on to substantial success – in part because early on in their careers they focused their efforts on immediate goals. Here are some examples of short-term goals that advisors are successfully using today:
- Two years ago, one advisor resolved to use every annual client review to try to expand his relationship beyond the clients with whom he meets to include the clients’ spouses, adult children or accountants. To make this happen, he has added an agenda item for client meetings that highlights the one relationship he’d like to explore further. Over half of his reviews now lead to follow-up meetings with one of the people that the advisor =identified going into the meeting.
- In the aftermath of the financial crisis, one advisor and her team agreed to a new policy that if a client query couldn’t be immediately answered, the client would receive a return call or email within three hours with an answer or a timeline for when the client would get a reply. The person who took the call must treat the question as a priority item until the client has heard back. Importantly, clients were told upfront about this policy – so they became aware of the rapid turnaround time in answers to their questions. In a client survey commissioned by this advisor’s firm last spring, her clients gave this advisor the t top rankings within her firm on “responsiveness” and “I get prompt answers to questions.” In the section where clients were invited to make additional comments, several commented on the policy of three-hour turnaround time on questions.
- Early last year, an advisor set out to become more purposeful about what he accomplished in client meetings. At the start of the week, he printed out a one-page listing of client meetings for the next five days. For each meeting, he wrote down two objectives – one that will make the client better off and a second that will advance his business. He reviewed those objectives before going into meetings. On Fridays, he went through that one-page list of meeting objectives and identified whether each objective was accomplished entirely, in part or not at all. One of his assistants created a weekly score that is used to track his ongoing success at achieving his meeting objectives. Since starting to write down meeting objectives, this advisor has seen a sharp increase in positive outcomes, especially among those objectives that he has identified as helping move his business forward.
Tracking progress against goals
Setting the right short-term goals is a good start, but to get the full payoff, you have to track progress against those goals.
Here’s another excerpt from the New York Times article about how marathon runners hit their key targets:
Achieving these goals is partly a matter of careful planning and pacing … But part of their success reflects grit over the closing stretch. Most marathoners run the final 2.195 kilometers (1 mile, 640 yards) about 8 to 10 percent slower than they run the preceding distance. The clear exception is those who need to stay on pace to meet their goal; they push themselves harder and slow much less toward the end.
Of course, marathon runners have the benefit of markers at every mile and course clocks that tell them exactly how they’re doing throughout the race. To replicate marathon runners’ success, you need your own way to monitor how you’re doing against your key goals through your day and your week.
While quarterly and annual goals are important, it is those short-term goals that have the biggest immediate impact on advancing your business.
Next week, I’ll discuss another implication of the research on marathon runners’ success in hitting key milestones.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.
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