Finding the Time: Prioritizing Prospecting in Your Schedule

Here we are in the final episode of our Prospecting Masterclass.

But first, a recap of our topics.

Episode #1: We began our journey with a discussion about lead sources and how to assess if you were actually getting the leads you need to close business. You can find the article here. ?

Episode #2: The conversion funnel was our topic, we discussed why referrals close at a higher level (and how you can improve your closing percentages on other leads) You can find the article here.

Episode #3: Referral relationships are structured in many different ways. Some organizations have figured out how to create entire sales operations without one full time sales person. This article outlines a few of the structures. Read it here.

Episode #4: Compensating referral relationships can often be a sticky situation. It’s not as simple as just throwing $ at your partners and hoping it works out. Motivation is tricky and we discuss it in this article. Read it here.

Episode #5: Staying top of mind with your partners, prospects and clients. If people aren’t hearing from you, they don’t think about you. This article shares a few of my favorite strategies to stay top of mind with ALL your connections. Read the article here.

All of these strategies are great, but without focused time to invest in growing your business, it’s going to stop with reading and never translate to action. This final article talks about making focused time for the RIGHT things to grow your business.

We are all granted the exact same bank account at the beginning of each year. The exact same number of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Knowing this, do you sometimes wonder how some people are able to get so much accomplished?

I have followed the thought leadership of successful people throughout my entire career. Why 2 people who have the same background, education and upbringing can have 2 wildly different career paths is always fascinating to me.? This was such an interest for me that I started a quest for sales professionals who make over $500K per year in their W-2 or 10-99 income. I found a lot of entrepreneurs who had attained that level of success, but not too many sales people.

At the start of my question, I had a bit of confirmation bias going on. I thought I would find support for my prospecting program. My basic assumption is that these folks just ‘had it going on’ around prospecting and since referrals are the preferred approach for many, it would be a great ‘case study’ for my Productive Prospecting methodology.

What I discovered is that they ARE very focused on prospecting, but even more than that, these people made different choices about their time. And that is what I’m going to share with you today for our final edition of the Prospecting Masterclass.

Let’s begin with the value of your time.

Knowing that we have a fixed budget of time, we need to be deliberate about the choices we make within that budget. Highly successful people are clear about the value of each minute and they spend them doing things that produce the greatest return in their career and in their life.

How can YOU do this?

First of all, what would you LIKE for your hourly billing rate to be? This equation can be complicated, but let’s keep it simple for now. Take your desired annual income and divide by 2000. One of the big lessons I learned through this interview process with top producers is that they develop a ‘time budget’. If they want to have a 40 hour work week, their available time budget to make decisions about is 50% of the total, so 20 hours in a typical work week.? In our Freeway to Fractional course we recognize that. This would have your calculation at roughly 1,000 hours annually, so let’s do the math with that number shall we?

Desired annual Income _____________ divided by 1,000 = base hourly billing rate.

Next you will look at the tasks you are focusing on throughout your day. A very constructive exercise a coach had me do was to keep a time log. It was a spreadsheet that I logged in 15 minute increments my activities. GetHarvest.com is a great resource to use, it’s low cost to use or free if you only have 1 project going (which tracking your time for your own reference it would be). Track your time for 2 weeks then identify the tasks that you can delegate to a VA (virtual assistant), that is one of the first big moves I made that substantially increased my income. Message me for connections to agencies who can connect you with VAs.

This exercise will help you discover the vital few vs trivial many. This concept is also known as the Pareto Principle, it’s the understanding of the activities that truly offer the highest return. You probably recognize this as the rule of 80/20. This shows up in just about every avenue of your life. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. 80% of your income/revenue comes from 20% (or less) of your efforts. Conversely, you also find 80% of your problems come from the bottom 20% of your clients often.

Mastering your time is the one critical factor that separates the top 3-5% of earners. It’s the choices you make with the minutes in your time bank. As you evaluate the tasks you do each and every day, look at what drives the highest return. Not just what is the value of the task, many administrative tasks may be a $25-30 per hour level that could be delegated to a VA, reaching out to your relationships to stay top of mind may seem like a small task, but those connections keep you top of mind and getting referred. That is a high value activity. Often the 1-1 conversations deliver incredible return.

One of my clients did the exercise of assessing just what he generated in top line revenue, the percentage of growth of his team after he became a sales manager and the overall margin. When he did the math, he contributed nearly $1,000,000 to the top line growth of the organization in a calendar year. Doing this math helped him recognize many of the tasks he was doing did nothing to contribute to the revenue creation, and he recognized that what he did that generated the highest and greatest value was connecting with alliance partners and referral relationships and public speaking events promoting his company’s services.

Time management isn’t as sexy a topic as lead generation, but without taking the time to implement these steps you are at the mercy of whatever happens to be left in your time bank at the end of the day.

I hope you enjoyed the conversations and if you've stayed with me this far, I appreciate the investment of time you have made in understanding how referral prospecting can fit into your marketing strategy. To dive into how to implement this into YOUR sales and marketing effort, grab a spot on my schedule for some brainstorming! You can access my scheduling link here.

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