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In this video, we are going to talk about how to combine technology with your own habits to be more successful at business development. A lot of times we have somebody who will come up to us in one of our classes, and almost imply they could program everything into Salesforce or Lexus Nexus interaction or Microsoft Dynamics or some other CRM. And say, “Oh I can program this stuff in there, right, and it will take care of itself”.
Not so much. Technology can enable you to be more efficient, but you have got to have the right habits to be able to really move things forward in your business development pipeline and with your relationships. In this video, we are going to tell you just how to do this.
The first thing is to set up your technology appropriately. We really look at two major views. I am taking it for granted that you are using your CRM as a repository for note taking in your client’s mobile numbers and things like that.
We are going to take it to the next level here. And what we want you to do is two things. One is build an opportunity list or an opportunity pipeline with various steps so that when you see those steps, you know what you are going to do next. Our steps are really oriented around the client, meaning we are where they say we are at in the client process versus where we would say is at. Most folks program their CRM from our perspective, meet client, send proposal, close deal. Almost like they are cavemen or something, but the problem with that is, it really incentivizes you to nag the heck out of your clients. Did you get my proposal? Did you get me email following up on my voicemail? We want you to orient it from the client’s perspective. Those steps we use are listen and learn. Have we learned what they are doing? Can we propose something? Create curiosity. Start to turn the lens back on us, light back on us, so that the clients interested. Build everything together, think about all the little decisions that need to be made to get to a yes, and have we orchestrated a wonderful buying experience so that the clients want to do that and then lastly gain approval.
When we write it from the clients standpoint in a CRM, then we know what to do next. They are the judge and jury for where we at. Once you do that, the second thing you want to do is crystalize or get really specific on the most important relationships that you want to invest in. This is a different view because these people may or may not have an opportunity for you right now, but you know over the next two, three, four years, if you invest in those relationships, you are going to have the most success. These might even be people that never buy from you but provide you with referrals or other lead generation means; we call those folks strategic partners. So, we think you should get a protimoi list. Protimoi is a Greek word, we call first among equals. Figure out who are your eight or ten most important people you want to make sure you invest in those relationships and tag them in the CRM to create your own protimoi list.
That is the technology side. Now let us talk about the habit side. On the habit side of things, we can lend or we can look at some research by Anthony Greenwald at of the University of Washington. He really dug into voter habits and why do some people vote and some people not vote. We can broaden that to think of why do some people do things they intend to do more than others? And Greenwald’s research shows a couple of things. Level one is, when you put something into a to-do list, you have a higher likelihood of doing it. If you put something in your to do list and you schedule time to do it, visualizing where you will do the task, there is a higher likelihood that you will do it. If you do that and have somebody that you are going to circle back with after you do the task, to either tell them that you did it or did not, that is the highest likelihood that you have for doing something. So when you think of hacking your own habits, think about it this way. Schedule time for actually moving your opportunity list forward and investing in your most important relationships. Those things we are going to put in the technology we talked about. Schedule time to do that, put it in your to-do list and think of somebody that you can circle back with later to let them know if you did the things or not.
And then you can program your technology to shoot you an email with your list of opportunities and your list of most important relationships, with maybe the last couple of interactions you had documented. And that email gets dropped in your inbox at the minute that you start your scheduled time to move those two things forward. When we see people build the technology in the proper way, as a nudge and then also hack their won habits with the to-do list, the calendar and their accountability partner that’s where we see the magic happen. And technology and your own habits are used in the most beneficial and efficient way.
Hey this business development stuff is tough. You can kick a can down the road every day, you cannot do the next proactive thing, nobody is going to know. So we need to build in these mechanisms and technology and habits to make sure we stay on top of our own game, we hack our won habits so that we can be successful.
As with all of our videos, we hope this one helps you, help your clients succeed.