Transcript
When you're selling, you should always have a contingency plan. Maybe you even want to plan A, B, C, D and E because your quota is your quota. You've got to make that point, and if you were banking on making it, selling a certain product or working with a certain customer or closing a certain deal, well, you may have limited yourself. If you only have the one option and that option doesn't come through in a timely manner.
Don't give up. Figure out another way.
What else could you do to make your goal. Long term, this is even better. I don't get caught in the moment in the quota period scrambling to come up with your plan B. But set yourself up for long term success by having many contingency plans and by being resilient and nimble so that you can adapt as you need to.
Don't worry about the fact that you might have too many things come in during a certain quota period and that you're going to have a great big number to fight next year. That's a fine problem to have. It's a better problem to have than not making your goal this year because you were holding back.
You don't even know where you're going to be a year from now. Maybe with all the success, you're going to be promoted. Maybe you're going to get a fantastic offer somewhere else. Maybe something else will happen, but plan for the long term and remain successful and nimble and resilient in the short term. Let each quarter period work itself out, if you have these overages, that's better than having serious underages, they will never serve you well.
Find ways to create those contingency plans and to make the most out of every plan that you do set forth. I'm a big believer in the saying, if at first you don't succeed, try try again. And in the saying where there's a will, there's a way.
You've been listening to me talk about our straw bale gardens and our property and our, oh, transitional phase from living 15 years in California in the city, to moving to a rural property just a few years ago. One of the things we had forgotten about when we lived in the city in California was just how vicious the biting bugs in Missouri can be, the mosquitoes and the chiggers. Oh, and then there are the ticks, which can be really, really bad for you.
So the first few months of living here, we fought those bugs. We used all sorts of sprays and we inspected each other every time we came indoors, my husband and I, and it was tedious. It was really a buzz kill. But then we found the bug baffler. This is a head to toe suit of mesh and bugs can't get inside. When we wear our bug bafflers early in the morning, early in the evening, the times when the bugs like to be outdoors, well, they just can't bite us.
And since then, we've learned some other tricks, too, like we've built a house for bats and we have another one for martins, those two different animals. They really, really like mosquitoes. And so they've become the mosquito patrol around here. And we don't have nearly as many biting bugs as we used to. But we were resilient, we didn't give up. We wanted to be out there. So we figured out ways to make that more possible, more user friendly for us.
My plants in the straw bale garden, you know, they're pretty resilient, too. But there are some things they simply can't overcome and that I can't solve for them. Over here on the right hand side, you see my whole entire crop of radishes for 2020. That's about a third of what I got last year. And they're pretty small. But the problem is that we had a very strange season. It was quite warm in April, way too cool in the beginning of May.
And then suddenly it was just like August, the heat was was quite overwhelming for these spring plants.
So I picked what I could, I used what I had, and I know that there's not a thing I could have done differently, so I simply planted something else in that space, beans that I knew would handle the heat a little better than the radishes did. My fennel last year had a similar situation. It was, and that's what you see in the middle there, I use fennel and spaghetti sauce and salads and lots of other ways, and I like to use the tops of the fennel as well as the root that grows under ground.
But last year, my fennel, the tops were getting munched on by something I never did figure out for certain what it was, but something found that fennel to be every bit as tasty as I think it is. And my plants were really having a hard time. They were resilient, I was still able to get the fennel bulbs at the end of the season, but I had to figure out something new this year. And so I've got netting over the fennel now so that nothing can get to it.
You have to be creative. Part of being resilient is that you'll bounce back and that you'll find ways to overcome the problems, whatever they might be.
Here's another victim of the heat wave we've had this year. It's my broccoli and it hasn't started to give me a head on that broccoli yet. Maybe it won't, depends on what the weather will do. But I'm in wait and see mode. I want to give the broccoli every possible chance to grow. So I'm keeping it as cool as I can. I'm watering it, giving it a little extra love and plenty of compost and nutrition with the brussel sprouts.
I was able to move them. I transplanted them out of the straw bales and into a container that I could pull into a fully shaded area. So I have high hopes that they're still going to bounce back. You know, my okra and my beans, they're coming in way earlier than they have in years past. I think that's because of the heat. And what I'm learning as I'm trying new things is that you have to go with the flow.
Sometimes part of being resilient is knowing that you can't control everything. That's hard for me. I might be a little bit of a control freak, but if I can use whatever it is I have to work with, I'll be okay in the long run. It might not be exactly the way I planned it to be, but it will still be good.
