My advice on working your way through a monstrous to-do list and making $ in your business.
With every post I make, I’m asking myself, can someone read this and make an impact on their earning potential this month/week/day/minute. Today’s advice can do that for just about everyone. I’m setting a high bar here because this is a critically important topic that I know we all struggle with. Figuring out where to start with your prospecting is a task that is insurmountable to some and an afterthought for others. Today I would love to help you bring it to the forefront of your mind and ensure it has a regular spot in your calendar with an emphasis on the relationships that drive your success!
Here are 5 Keys to making time for prospecting (or any other significant task in your business)
Establish your Priorities – spending time planning is of critical importance in your business. This ensures you do the right things to bring your success instead of hoping for ‘happy accidents’ to come your way. I suggest when you do your planning you identify your top priorities and limit this to a manageable number. I have 3 in my business.
- Serve my clients and important professional relationships.
- Increase my audience.
- Promote my business and find attendees for my programs.
When I have these priorities I can look at the opportunities that come my way and if they align in these areas, I consider them and figure out if they are good to pursue. If not, it’s an easy no. (More on that topic later in this post)
Recognize your High Payoff Activities – an exercise I remember well from my days in Sandler Sales is the division of pay/time vs no pay/time. (I found a way cool download on Google that has a worksheet attached to it, find it here. ) One side is direct revenue generation; client service or doing work you are directly paid for, face to face time with prospects or activities with direct prospect interaction. No pay time activities would be tasks such as research, drafting or responding to emails or other administrative tasks. These are required tasks, but would fit into the ‘administrivia’ bucket. I am not minimizing the importance of administrative tasks, I am encouraging you to recognize ALL the tasks that are required to be successful and spend your time when and where necessary. For a lot of professionals we end up spending way too much time in areas we are comfortable and enjoy and procrastinate on the tasks we don’t enjoy as much.
Know your Time Budget – I love the concept of blocking time and building out your model week. A concept I like to follow is that of using a budget, much like you would create a financial budget, only it’s using your time. Allocate the percentages of your time to the activities. I use a simple guideline to begin developing this habit and adjust the quantities up or down until you find your ideal ‘recipe’ for your schedule.
- If only a small percentage of your success is tied to ‘rainmaking’ or business development then you would allocate 10% of your time to networking, cultivate client relationships for referrals or nurture a couple of key partnerships.
- When your role has a ‘growth component’ to it where a greater percentage is tied to finding new clients, but you also have a high expectation of service responsibilities, or if you own the business and have to do the work as well as sell the work, I suggest you allocate 25% of your time to business development activities.
- For many of my clients, you have a primary expectation of bringing in new business to be successful in your role or are in a startup, allocate up to 50% of your time to business development activities.
A fantastic blog post I enjoy sharing is by one of my favorite thought leaders Michael Hyatt, he shares a great concept of Margin in your life and how to create it. Once you have your time allocated, you can assign your highest payoff activities into the allocated budget of hours or minutes.
Schedule the tasks – When you have identified the high payoff activities and know the amount of time to build your calendar, schedule the tasks to fit into these designated segments of your calendar. To figure out these tasks, look at what leads to your best results, I like to color code my calendar by the value to my business. I’m very visual, I love to glance at my schedule and know I’m on track with the right ‘mix’ of activities, through a color coded system you can tell at a glance if you are on track. Here’s how it works –blue represents client service and direct revenue producing activities, green is for prospect meetings and gold is reserved for my referral partner meeting spots. These represent money and those colors have to show up in my schedule in the right amount. I may have green meetings, but if there aren’t enough gold meetings, I won’t have the ‘green’ in my schedule or my business in the future. For my marketing activities I use a bright vibrant color – red to make sure I have the activity present and very visible if it’s missing, but I don’t want it dominating my calendar.
My color code key:
- Gold – Referral partner activities
- Green – Prospect meetings
- Blue– Client Service (direct revenue creation)
- Red– represents marketing activities; this would be content creation (like this blog post)
- Purple – Administrivia; I schedule time for follow up from my meetings with prospects and partners, reviewing and responding to email, social media and research on my prospects and partners.
When you have the color code in place it’s much easier to recognize how your time is being spent and if you’re on track with your ‘budget’ allocation.
Look for the opportunities to say no – Once you have your priorities in place, recognize the amount of time you have to spend, the activities that lead to your best results, and visual indicators of how on track you are with your efforts help you recognize the boundaries. If you are like me, there are so many exciting directions you can go in your business. Opportunities abound. And when you make your living on relationships, everyone warrants a meeting, right? No, they don’t. I am all about tracking activities, and like most sales people I recognize that the activity leads to the results, but only the right activities with the right people. I have so many spots in my calendar for face to face meetings, networking events, and marketing. Like a lot of successful business developers, I get a lot of requests to ‘pick my brain’ for advice, connections or direction. That’s why I blog and have a weekly prospecting tip where I give away my best advice. (If you’d like to receive it you can register here ) Meetings that fit into my schedule either have to lead to revenue with prospects, direct influencers of multiple prospects or resources I need to increase the value I bring to my clients.
I find that implementing these key activities in my own prospecting and encouraging my clients to incorporate them into theirs, produces more time for what matters more – time with family, friends and to live the live you love. We work to live, we don’t live to work. The more you control your schedule and make better decisions about what you do with your time, the more your time works for you and you aren’t a prisoner of it.
With over twenty-five years as a sales person, director, coach, and trainer, Breandan’s expertise in sales training, mentoring, planning, and strategy has generated more than $200 million in new business for clients across a range of industries. An accomplished sales professional with an outstanding track record, she works with individuals and companies to leverage the power of strategic referral relationships to grow their businesses.
Connect with Breandan on LinkedIn.