What’s On My Mind
How can I grow my book of business faster?
This is a common question we get across our team, especially in the short, interactive Impact Sessions we lead for clients.
Impact Sessions are 1 and 2-hour live sessions we do for our clients on specific BD topics, from audiences ranging from intimate 15-person conversations to 1,500-person keynotes.
We give a few dozen of these a month on broad topics like a brief overview of The Snowball System to focused sessions like How to talk about your pricing with confidence.
Despite the broad range of topics, that one question is the most common:
How can I grow my book of business faster?
I think everyone is looking for a silver bullet.
There actually is one.
If you want big results…
You have to cut to climb.
Here’s the high-impact exercise we lead on this topic:
- Set a timer for 3 minutes.
Write two column headers on a blank piece of paper: Activity and Hours Saved.
Start the timer. Work fast, writing down everything you’ve been doing that’s less important than the new or expanded business development activities you’d like to do. Anything counts: personal or professional. Go fast.
- When the timer goes off, pause and look at your list. In the right-hand column, write the number of hours you could save each year by eliminating or minimizing each of the activities. A thumb to the wind estimate is fine.
- Add up the hours.
This is an incredibly powerful exercise.
I do this quarterly and I’m always astonished as the little traps I’ve fallen into.
Things that made sense to do in the past make no sense going forward.
We’ve done this with thousands of class participants, especially in the pandemic.
Typical results?
Per person savings typically range between 50 and 500 hours a year.
Here’s why this is important.
Business Development is a project. It’s ongoing. It never ends.
If you’re climbing, you’re testing.
Trying new things.
Getting a little better all the time.
The bad news: not everything works.
The great news: there’s always another tweak to test, another improvement to make.
That means you have to be cutting something to improve, and on a routine basis.
You have to cut to climb.
What’s Worth Revisiting
Did you check out the the new page on our site that captured all of our complimentary courses?
It’s worth a revisit, here!
ALL the courses on that page are no charge, our investment in your success.
These are great for a group to go through together so everyone is using the same systems.
And for large enough groups, we’re even happy to lead a live discussion of the courses on our dime. Just hit reply and let me know if you’re interested.
What’s Coming Up
I’m SUPER excited about our global partnership with LexisNexis InterAction.
(Their CRM is installed at more than 80% of the largest law firms in the world!)
We’re working hard to integrate a few dozen short training videos into InterAction.
The CMO focus groups Scott Winter and I led showed InterAction customers were really excited about what we’re cooking up.
I’ve recorded the videos and the LexisNexis team is now working on the coding and final design.
Excited to get this in front of their ~500,000 users!
What’s Worth Lingering On
You have to cut to climb.
Those are powerful words.
If we’re growing, we’re trying new things.
If we’re trying new things, we’ll get a mix of success and stink.
If we want to climb, to imporove, we have to cut the things not working, so we can test new ideas.
The exercise I described above only takes 5 minutes.
That 1/12 of an hour could free up 50 to 500 hours a year.
There’s few things in life as liberating to saying No to something.
Let’s raise us glass to cutting to climb.
We can all happily say…
It’s the end of an error.
Mo
ps. That exercise is GREAT to go through with your entire team! Shoot em this note to get the party started.