On Friday, August 31st my neighbor Jeff and I went to Charlotte to a breakfast at the Weston hotel to hear my friend, Coach Joe Gibbs speak about his new book hot off the press: Game Plan For Life, co-authored by Jerry Jenkins.

I’d say there was a pretty good turn-out. Over 1200 people, to be exact! We sat at the table next to Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory. There were several former NFL players there and some NASCAR folks too. Joe was introduced by his son J.D. who is now the President of Joe Gibbs Racing.

Joe always has a great sense of humor and some wonderful stories from his football days on the gridiron.

So here’s a guy who was a physical education major from San Diego State University. He goes on to be offensive line coach at four major colleges before moving up to the National Football League. For seventeen years, he served as assistant coach to the St. Louis Cardinals, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the San Diego Chargers before getting the call to become the new head coach for the Washington Redskins.

In spite of losing his first five games with the Redskins, Joe went on to lead the team for 12 seasons and led them to eight playoff appearances, four NFC titles, and three Super Bowl titles.

In 1996, Gibbs was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He was one of the winningest coaches in NFL history, at that time having a record of 124 wins and 60 losses, and a post-season record of 16 wins and five losses.

If that were not enough, upon retiring (the first time) from the Redskins, in 1992 Joe focused his full attention to his NASCAR race teams and now boasts three Nascar titles. Driver Bobby Labonte holds one title and Tony Stewart won two championships. And this season is looking strong with his newest drivers, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Bush and Joey Logano. Joey is the youngest driver in Sprint Cup history to win a race at just 19 years old.

So it is certainly an honor and a privilege to know Joe and his wife Pat personally. I first met Joe when the Lake Norman Young Life area was birthed, splitting off of the Charlotte area eleven years ago. My wife and I were honored to chair the adult leadership committee of this non-profit high school youth organzation – younglife.org. We often held our monthly meeting at the Gibbs home where Joe would be walking around with one of the grand babies on his shoulder with a burp cloth. Joes’ son J.D. and wife Melissa joined the committee and also continue to actively support Young Life.

So Joe has been on this grueling whirlwind tour promoting his new book, Game Plan for Life for about a month now. His fierce determination and focus that are reminiscent of his coaching days is apparent as he travels the country getting the word out.

How did this book get started? Thanks for asking. He commissioned a study that essentially asked the question, What are the key topics that will lead people to a “successful” life?

He put together an amazing list of Christian men (Josh McDowell, Chuck Colson, Ron Blue and many others) to write on a variety of topics, which is woven together by Joe’s personal testimony. He will also be interviewing for video all of these authors (each committed to do four hours of interviews with Coach Gibbs over the next year). Gibbs considers this his legacy work.

The foreword is aptly written by former Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy who has also won a Super Bowl.

The book is interwoven with many fascinating stories from Joe’s colorful career and abruptly begins with the shooting death of Redskins player Sean Taylor.

Last month we talked about getting your team together. How to hire top performers, matching skills to the job at hand, and, noticeably, hiring based on potential for growth rather than experience. While getting the right team members in place is a great start, as we all know, coming together is only a beginning. It is what comes after that that determines success or failure.

Most of the US sports world these days is talking about the prospect of basketball superstars LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade playing on the same team. Right now the Miami Heat is a TEAM, but it is TEAMWORK, that will determine whether or not they succeed. Can they work together? Can they engage their cast of supporting players? Will their coaching staff be able to engage strategies to maximize their potential and empower the rest of the team to perform up to expectations?<;Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We.”

Not only that, outstanding performers must be supported by experienced leadership and effective systems.

In business, as in sports, trust starts at the top, and teamwork (which doesn’t function well without trust) is essential for success. Companies that “win” create a culture of success from the top down. They hire with confidence, expect results and make sure that those expectations are clearly communicated. They recruit top performers, employ realistic and measurable performance standards, and maintain consistent two-way feedback. They provide ongoing training, not only on product/company knowledge, sales strategies, relationship building and the systems required for CRM, but on helping each team member understand more about themselves, their strengths and their weaknesses. In short, they foster an environment where “we” is more important than “me.”

Empowerment Through Systems

Top sales organizations also provide their teams with a well communicated sales process to serve as a foundation for enforcing selling discipline.

A sales process is like a game plan – the details might change from week to week, or client to client, but the general objective, and the steps needed to reach that objective remain the same. What respectable coach draws up a game plan without first evaluating both his players and the competition, assessing the match ups, and adjusting his strategy accordingly?

Before outlining your sales process, you need to know your market and know yourself. Know what you do well. Know where you need help. (This is not always easy. If you are having difficulties; you may need to step back and look into your organization with a more objective eye, or hire an outside expert who already has the systems in place to do it.)

Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to tailor your efforts for optimal results. You will be able to see where your current efforts are falling short. You will be able to outline the variables which you will use to measure activity and productivity. You will have a general idea of how long it takes to move a sale through the pipeline, and any training which may help reduce that time.

A 2006 Harvard Business Review article “The New Science of Sales Force Productivity” notes that the most successful sales managers are those who utilize a method that “puts systems around the art of selling, relying not just on gut feel and native sales talent-the traditional qualities of the rainmaker-but also on data, analysis, processes, and tools to redraw the boundaries of markets and increase a sales force’s productivity.”

The authors argue that “in today’s selling environment, it is not enough to rely on your star reps and hope for the best.” They state that any organization looking to boost productivity should employ a systematic approach comprised of Targeted Offerings, Optimized Automation, Tools, Procedures, Performance Management and Sales Force Deployment.

Measuring For Success

A scorecard system is one way to pull this all together – a company scorecard to review the market and the business itself to get a clear picture of the playing field; an individual scorecard to rate the players.

In sales, specifically, an obvious way to measure results is in dollars, yet if you measure through monetary results alone, you don’t get the big picture. A critical aspect is being able to measure effort. Sales can often be a numbers game. Rejection is an inherent part of the process. For this reason, the individual scorecard should measure leading indicators as well as results. By looking at quantifiable activity metrics to gauge effort and productivity, you and your reps can end each week with a clear vision of what has been accomplished. How many phone calls were made? How many conversations took place? Were all required reports turned in?

Flexibility Through Structure

Adhering to a structured system makes it possible to disseminate information quickly, especially in an ever changing market. A key benefit of a well executed plan is that when it is wrong, the processes are in place to know it is wrong. You can step back, reevaluate and change direction midstream if need be.

As Tom Landry once said, “I don’t believe in team motivation. I believe in getting a team prepared so it knows it will have the necessary confidence when it steps on a field and be prepared to play a good game.”

Arm your reps with a plan, train to win and set the stage for success.

Having 10 years of experience coaching youth football over the past 25 years, I’ve seen the incredible amount of change that has occurred in how a coach game plans for his next game.

I began coaching youth football in the mid ’80s in what I now consider the stone age. Our coaching staff would do as much scouting as we could, but we were limited by the fact that the teams we wanted to scout would usually play their game at the same time we did. If they played before or after our game it was always too far away to make our game. We found that we could only scout games at the same field or send someone that was not on our staff to the game and take notes. This was okay for a basic scouting report, but no matter how good his notes were, there is no substitute for watching a game film. Back in the ’80s actually knowing someone with a video camera was pretty unusual.

Fast forward to today, almost everyone has a decent camera, so getting a scouting report is no longer as necessary as it once was. It’s nice to be able to download the game film and burn it to a DVD, all at home and watch it with all of our coaching staff. There is no substitute for watching game film with all of your coaching staff to pick it apart. Once that is done, you can begin to develop your game plan for your next game.

The vast difference between the mid ’80s and today is the fact that technology has allowed coaches to be better prepared for their next game. This allows them to be more specific in their game plan and hopefully better able to coach. Being better prepared also allows a coach to teach this great game to the next generation of football players.

Let’s talk about being successful with Internet marketing in the absence of having a viable game plan. Is it possible? Sure, I suppose anything is possible — but the overwhelming majority of individuals who struggle to make money with Internet marketing struggle precisely because they do not have a viable game plan. So what do you need to create an Internet marketing game plan that can dramatically increase your chances of success?

It starts with having a goal, and then developing a daily schedule that is specifically designed to include activities that will move you in the direction of reaching your goal in the shortest amount of time possible. How easy is this to do? For most people, all it takes is a couple of hours — sometimes even less. Grab a piece of paper and a pen. Write down exactly what it is you hope to accomplish as an Internet marketer. Then, spend some time formulating a daily schedule. Let me give you a piece of advice. Do not overestimate your amount of energy and the amount of time that you have available to work on your business. For example, if you work from 9 to 5 do not assume that you can come home and work until five o’clock in the morning.

Here’s the bottom line: it is very unusual for somebody to find success with Internet marketing without having a goal and a daily schedule to follow. Do yourself a favor, develop a viable game plan to follow on a daily basis and you will dramatically increase your chances of being successful with Internet marketing.

I could not help but think of my progress in my home business when I saw the latest new video on YouTube, “Guy Walks Across America.” It’s an incredibly produced video of a good looking guy walking across the country from the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and sites in between. The video has really gone viral, with 1,457,174 as of this writing, and it was uploaded only 10 days ago! I just love to see success in action!

The video really spoke to me because throughout the years, my husband, kids and I have seen many of the same sites that are flashed in the video, like the bridges mentioned above, the Lincoln Memorial, the chrome bean sculpture in Chicago, Mt. Rushmore, Rocky Mountains, and lot and lots of prairie. And like the “Guy Walks Across America” video, our trips always took some careful planning. My husband would always go to the library, get out the Fodor’s Guide and the Frommer’s Guide, decide which cities, parks and sites we were going to visit, and put together our game plan. Then he would take out the Rand McNally Road Atlas, and map out our trip.

But no matter how well planned out trips were, we would usually run into some setbacks. I’ll never forget the time we were taking a 3 week trip out west a few years back. Somewhere on an Arizona highway, in June, between Las Vegas and Yellowstone, the AC in our conversion van died. But rather than delay our trip to get it fixed, we bought a small, 4 inch fan that plugged into the cigarette lighter. That little fan was the only thing keeping us cool for the rest of the trip. But you know what? It didn’t matter. We still had a great time. In fact, that was one of the most memorable family vacations we ever had, because we had a solid game plan, and we were able to get right back on course even after a slight detour.

Who knows, maybe the “Guy Walks Across America” crew had some setbacks as well. Maybe the guy got a hole in his shoe, maybe he didn’t have change for the toll roads in Illinois, and maybe he couldn’t get satellite reception on his GPS and got a little lost. I am being facetious, of course. That whole ambitious project had to have a well thought out and well defined game plan in order to succeed.

To succeed in anything in life, you need a rock solid game plan to reach your goals, and a road map to get you to your milestones. When I first started out in the home business industry, I didn’t have a game plan or a road map. I jumped from opportunity to opportunity, from training to training, from strategy to strategy, not getting anything accomplished, not seeing any results, and not making any money. In fact, if you pardon the pun, I was all over the road. It wasn’t until I finally got myself a rock soloid game plan and a strategic road map did I start seeing real results in my business.

To get a woman back you are going to have to create a game plan. When creating a plan to get a woman back you need to make sure that certain things are included in the plan, without specific things being included the chances of you being successful in getting a woman back are slim.

The first thing that you have to include in your game plan, is when you will attempt to execute your game plan. This is important to include in the plan because timing is everything. You have to be careful how long you wait before you make any attempt to get her back because you could lose any chance you had by waiting too long. You also have to be careful with how soon you try to get her back because after the breakup she is going to need some space; this allows her to get her head on straight.

The second thing that you need to do when creating a game plan to get a woman back is to figure out what you need to do to get her back. When figuring out what you need to do to get her back you need to think about why she broke up with you, doing that ensures that, you will be able to correct the things that went wrong. For example, if she simply lost interest in you, you will need to work on doing things that will get her interested again. Women like a challenge, so try playing hard to get by going out and having a good time with friends, instead of sitting at home and sulking.

Before you can execute your game plan you will need to make sure that you are not acting out of desperation, you want to make sure that what you are doing makes sense in a logical way. Women are not attracted to guys who are desperate because they consider them weak.

To ensure that what you are doing is logical you will want to evaluate your game plan from an outsiders view. The best chance of doing this successfully is to look at it from her point of view, and be honest with yourself. Ask yourself if I were her how would I react to this or how would I want to be approached. This approach will give you your best answers, so that you can execute the proper game plan.