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Last year, I started writing quite a bit about the Pick-3 process, an intervention that I bring to almost every one of my clients with great success. Since sharing the details of the Pick-3 process, I’ve received hundreds of emails from companies around the world telling me about how they’re using and adapting it to stay in better contact with their clients, and I’ve heard some incredible success stories from it. From the ones I've worked with personally, we've had even greater results.

This week, I want to introduce another tool from the Evergreen toolkit that’s had a huge impact on companies where I’ve introduced it. I call this one the “Evergreen Forest.” Much like the Pick-3, there is a tremendous value to using it even in its simplest forms, and we have developed more powerful and sophisticated versions of it for our use in client engagements.

Here’s the basic version of the Evergreen Forest (as seen in the image below), in just three steps:

Step 1: List all of your products and services vertically;

Step 2: List all of your customers across the horizontal axis

Step 3: Put a tree in any square where you have sold that product or service, to that client; If you haven’t sold that product to that client, put a watering pail.

(These are the instructions for the “give it a try at home, kids!” version. We’ve crafted a much more powerful tool for companies that involves looking at every sale to every customer, multiple criteria for what gets a tree vs. watering pail, and many other features that make it more applicable for day-to-day use. That being said, this is still an incredibly powerful exercise to go through even with just the three steps above!)