Your Long Game Strategy and Your Short Game Strategy

The results you want when you play the long game are made up of the results you create by playing the short game.

Your Long Game

Over the long term, you need to nurture your dream clients, create new opportunities, and win those opportunities.

Nurturing your dream clients by feeding them value-creating ideas is a play for your long game. It takes time to be known as a value creator, to generate trust, and to open relationships. You can’t cram thesis outcomes, that’s why you need professional persistence to play the long game.

The social channels, or digital you, is a long game play. Most of what you do will take time to create the impact you need. Digital lends itself to campaigns, and campaigns are what you need to play the long game.

Your Short Game

Creating new opportunities is the short game. Your long game can set up your short game. By nurturing and building relationships over time, you may make it easier to create opportunities.

That said, you can’t wait to create those opportunities. To generate opportunities now, you are going to have to use an approach that produces better results faster, and that means referrals and the telephone. You can’t wait until your dream client raises their hand and asks for your help. You have to create the opportunities you need now by doing the work that produces those opportunities right now.

The sales process is a long game. You should do everything you can to compress the time it takes to win deals because it benefits you, your company, and your dream client, especially when they need results now. But it’s important to remember that fast is slow, and slow is fast.

You are selling to create a preference for you, your company, and your solution. If you are trying to play the short game by behaving as if your complex sale is a transaction, your short game will kill your long game. Playing the long game and selling for the lifetime value of the deal for you and your dream client is how you build clients for life.

Play Both Your Games Together

You can’t play only the long game. You also can’t limit yourself to the short game. You generate the best results playing the long game and short game together with discipline and persistence.