Ask Joe

I’m surprised so many people actually believe they can “make up” lost sales or lost activities today, just by doing a better job tomorrow.

In a race, you can’t make up the time you lost on the last lap during the next lap. You may run the next lap faster, but you can’t ever get those other 4 seconds back, they’re gone forever. And if you hadn’t blown those 4 seconds, you’d have finished the race even better.

Yesterday is history. If you didn’t get on the phone to prospect, if you didn’t push harder to get more commitments or get the money in to put that other deal on the board yesterday – you can’t make it up today by making extra calls or by putting twice as many sales on the board. Having a great day today, doesn’t change what you didn’t do yesterday.

So many salespeople and managers mess around all week and plan to make it up over the weekend. You may have a great weekend, but you will never recoup those sales you missed last week.

There are no ‘make up’ days – yesterday’s opportunities are gone – forever.

If you want to make this year your best year ever, just take tomorrow out of your vocabulary. The leisure of thinking you’ll be able to make up for what you could have done yesterday, costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.