After COVID hit last year, I dove back into a book I read many years ago, "Celebration of Discipline," by Richard Foster. My goal was to use the newfound time on my hands to deepen my spiritual life.
But I realized as I immersed myself in the book that the idea of disciplines and habits is central to business growth.
First, let me start with a few definitions.
Disciplines are the paths to the goal. They are the means used to achieve business growth.
Suppose you refer to an activity or situation as a discipline. In that case, you mean that you need to behave in a strictly controlled way (habits) and obey particular rules, best practices, or standards to be successful in it.
A discipline is a branch of knowledge, often studied in higher education or specialized training. Inbound marketing is a discipline. Being disciplined and creating content regularly is one of the habits required to be successful at the discipline of inbound.
You must believe in the effectiveness and applicability of the discipline first before seeing the results. Believing that you will succeed with a particular discipline or set of disciplines precedes seeing the results.
Habits are the regular behaviors that enable the discipline you follow to succeed. Habits are staying on the path. They are a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.
Being disciplined with habits is the practice of training people, or yourself, to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. It is the building of self-control.
Being disciplined is doing what you want to when you don't want to and not doing the things you shouldn't do when you want to. Habits, good or bad, are the results of being disciplined or not.
In the end, the goal you set dictates the disciplines you follow, and those disciplines create your habits.
Too many business leaders want to see results before believing in the discipline.
- They want a viral video to magically bring the best prospects to their door - without learning the disciplines of storytelling, content creation, and persona development.
- They want a killer Google Adwords campaign without struggling with the disciplines of messaging, differentiation, and targeting.
- They want to grow revenue without understanding the emerging disciplines of customer experience management, customer success, and influencer marketing.
- They want salespeople to drive revenue goals without implementing the discipline of the sales process and not using customer relationship management tools.
Some business growth disciplines include RevOps thinking, building a customer-focused culture, analytics-driven decision making, and customer experience development.
I intend to dig into this topic in a big way this coming year to help you understand how you will grow your business by following the disciplines of business growth and building the habits you and your team will need to succeed with customers today.
Happy New Year!
If you need help developing and implementing a customer-first strategy and need some help, please reach out.
Topics: Inbound Organization, Leadership
