If you can't do the BD you want, do the BD you can

Hold yourself accountable

In order to execute on BD activities it starts with putting time on the calendar to execute upon it. No matter if your plan is 5 outreach attempts or 500 attempts, if you do not hold yourself accountable you will not get it done.

The reason being, BD is hard and on the other side of it is the thing we all fear most——rejection. When faced with the possibility of rejection we all have the same (human) response, “nope I don’t like that/I don’t want to experience that”.

Stop yourself from having those second thoughts by putting it on the calendar and holding yourself accountable.

50-5-5

Start each Monday with a 50-5-5 session, meaning spend 50 minutes researching 5 different accounts with the goal of finding 5 people in each account to reach out to.

As the weeks progress the number of people who you will reach out to will increase, but for now let’s start small with the goal of 25 contacts total.

90 Minutes

Now you have your 25 contacts after spending 50 minutes of BD (which again was blocked off on Monday if you are following this step by step process).

Now comes the harder parts, blocking off 30 minute blocks to actually execute on the BD part. I say this is the harder part because this is when that poor mindset I had can sneak up on you, the one that says “well I can’t get to all 25 so I won’t do anything right now”.

Quite simply, do not set a specific outreach goal the first time you do this exercise, just work through your contact list and once the 30 minute time is up celebrate whatever you accomplished. If you got through 7 people, great. If you managed to reach out to all 25, great.

But guess what, you have to do it again (2 times actually) because that was the first 30 minute block of the week. You can not simply give up after one touch, and now you will reach out to those same people the next day (or 2 days later at the worst).

I created two different examples (see below) of how you can have 30 minute blocks scheduled throughout the week.

That is it for this week and hope you enjoyed the easy to follow BD process. It is simple by design but the hard part comes with executing consistently.

Putting things on your calendar is one of the best ways to hold yourself accountable, but if you want to take it one step farther tell someone you are going to do this (better yet have them do it at the same time as you).

?? One last important thing:

September was a very busy month at THS with new clients coming on board. Which is extremely exciting but it also means I have to limit the number of spots for future inquires.

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