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How To Manage Your Efforts To Make Your Marketing Plan A Reality
By C. Richard Weylman, CSP, CPAE
Sales Management Magazine published a study that said the average advisor spends approximately 80% of their time on trivia. Trivia is defined as things that do not move a business or practice ahead. Activities defined as trivia include managing paperwork, spending time on computer hypotheses, focusing on the minutiae and mundane and not investing in the activities and services necessary to reach out into the marketplace and spend more time with prospects and clients.
Recognizing that the job of a services professional is to reach out into the marketplace and maximize opportunities with decision-makers, the challenge becomes how to increase your effectiveness. In order to be more effective, you should ask yourself how and why you mismanage your efforts. Is it procrastination because a task may seem overwhelming? Or is it because of confused goals? Maybe you're just feeling overwhelmed.
The first step to increasing effectiveness is to examine yourself. Once you know your weak spots you can work to avoid those pitfalls. To help you overcome the things that knock you off track and decrease your effectiveness, here are tactics you can use to start increasing your effectiveness now:
- Focus on the future, not on the past. This will help you set priorities. Your highest priority is the things that you are going to do, not the things that you've already done.
- Focus on opportunities, not just problems. As an example, 47% of executives are in the office by 7:30 a.m., 78% are in by 8:00 a.m.. By making it a priority to start your day earlier, you will focus on prospecting opportunities. This will help you overcome the problem of not being able to reach quality people.
- Aim high to make a difference. By thinking about your vision and what you are trying to accomplish in the long-term, it will help you to set priorities and take actions that move you ahead in the short-term. Your goals for tomorrow will dictate your efforts and plans for today. Keep your eye on the future and the opportunities.
- Assess what it will take in effort to successfully hit your goals. When I speak throughout the industry about these issues, financial services professionals often tell me about their goals. I then ask, “Do you know how many calls you must make, how many people you must see, how much marketing and prospecting effort you must put forth to reach your goals?” Unfortunately, the answer often is, “I'm not sure.” Assessing what it will take in effort is the first step to achieving your goals.
- Keep things in order; organize yourself. If organization is not easy for you, purchase an organizational planning device that will help you to stay on track and move yourself forward. This could be hardware such as a notebook or it could be software in your computer. Organization will allow you to maximize your time and make sure that your efforts don't fall through the cracks.
- Be willing to risk. Increase your own expectations. This will help you to see the future and overcome procrastination and begin to avoid the things that knock you off-track.
- Deal with the consequences of your behavior. A few years back I spoke to over 100 women who had started their own companies and had built very successful organizations generating in excess of $5 million per year in revenue. When I asked them what they felt was the thing that helped them manage their efforts and move forward, the overwhelming response was that they were aware of the consequences of their own behavior. Remember, whether you do or whether you don't, there is a consequence.
- Stay flexible to maximize windows of opportunity. It is essential as you begin to execute your marketing plan that you build in flexibility. This prevents you from getting locked into a rut and in a situation where you are not willing or able to be responsive to the marketplace. Being flexible will also help you overcome procrastination and a sense that you are overwhelmed.
- Be sensitive about the best use of your time. Is it really productive for you to pick up your dry cleaning during essential time? Is it really moving your business ahead to come in late several days a week? Wouldn't it make better sense to get an early start by having breakfast with a client, prospect or center of influence so that you are off to a fast start and energized at the beginning of the day?
- Set deadlines for yourself. Practice the behavior that Thomas Edison did to be effective in managing his efforts and to avoid procrastination. He committed himself to a deadline on every single project. This forced him to make better decisions and to push himself to achieve more in a shorter period of time.
- Avoid the things that knock you off-track. You know the things that are knocking you off-track – long lunch hours, computer games, under-preparing or even over-preparing for presentations, etc. Log how you spend your time for the next week. Keep track of yourself in 30-minute intervals. Jot down all you did each 30 minutes. Then look at the things that are knocking you off-track and then make a conscious decision to avoid those things.
- Spend 20-30 minutes each evening reviewing your game plan for the next day. Kent State University studies have shown that by implementing this tactic you'll increase your effectiveness significantly. It will help you to avoid the things that knock you off-track and get you off to a fast start every day as you execute your marketing plan.
You have the ability to convey the value of an intangible to a society that places high value on the tangible. This clearly is a gift. By managing your efforts, you'll be much more productive and proficient – a high priority for each of us because to dream of the person you want to be and not do something about it is to waste the person you are.
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