Pilzer: The Frequency Formula

One major frustration facing new entrepreneurs and managers, particularly in sales, is the fact that even a process that works most of the time does not work every time.

When it comes to predicting the weather (70 percent chance of rain today), illness (15 percent chance of getting the flu), or business success (50 percent of a new business failing), our lives seem ruled by statistics. But statistics are only relevant after you have tried a process a significant number of times—what mathematicians call “having enough frequency.”

To create wealth you’ve got to have a formula. If you just try something two or three times and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you should give up. In fact, everyone who creates wealth has a formula that they’ve repeated again and again—and their process (or formula) works most of the time.

For example, you may have a sales process that succeeds with more than 50 percent of your qualified prospects, yet a new salesperson may fail again and again, only to give up in frustration.

Here’s an exercise I use to teach frequency to new employees and students.

I ask the person to flip a coin 10 times and record the results. Most people think it’s going to be an even five-five split between heads and tails. It’s not—it’s often seven, eight or even nine heads. Then I ask them to continue flipping the coin 90 more times (100 total)—and it’s almost always 51 to 49 heads or tails. This is a great exercise to teach that you need to try something more than 10 times to figure out if it works.

This exercise also exhibits why you must have enough frequency before scaling your business. You might develop a strategy that fails with the first eight or nine of your 10 initial qualified prospects, but then succeeds with 50 percent overall. Conversely, you might experience success on the first few sales calls and then expand too fast with a non-sustainable model.

As a teacher and a parent, I am often asked by young people why a particular effort didn’t lead to the expected reward. While I’ve tried to console my students, I, too, have been frustrated that, although rules and order constitute our world, those rules don’t generally work until you have enough frequency.

But the rules do constantly challenge, and thus strengthen, our faith in a world where everything doesn’t work out every time, but does work out over time—especially for those of us, like Job in the Bible, with enough faith to follow our plan regardless of how much adversity we experience.

Develop the faith and the perseverance to follow your plan. When something works a few times, don’t assume it’s the right or the wrong formula; you’ve got to try it 100 times before you can scale it.