You will be able to schedule and defend a fixed weekly block for prospecting.
Remember the pattern from the start of this course. A slow month scares you into prospecting. The prospecting brings meetings, the meetings bring work, and the work fills your week so completely that prospecting stops. Six weeks later the work is finished, the calendar is empty, and you are scared into prospecting again.
Nothing in that cycle is laziness. It is what happens when prospecting is the task that can always wait until tomorrow. This lesson is about making it the one task that does not wait.
When a week gets busy, you cut whatever has no immediate consequence. Client work has a deadline and a person waiting. A proposal has a buyer expecting it. Prospecting has neither. Nobody notices this week if you skip it. The cost arrives six or eight weeks later, as an empty pipeline, by which time you have forgotten the week you skipped.
That delay is why pipelines dry up after good months, not bad ones. The good month is the one where you were too busy to prospect, and the dry month that follows is the bill for it.
The fix is not more willpower. It is taking the decision out of each busy week by deciding once, in advance, when prospecting happens.
Put a recurring block in your calendar for prospecting, at the same time every week. Make it a real calendar event with a name, and give it the same status as a client meeting. If a client asks for that slot, offer them another time, just as you would if you already had a meeting with someone else. Because you do: with your future pipeline.
Choose the time of day when you have the most energy. Prospecting asks you to talk to strangers and handle rejection, which is harder at four in the afternoon after a draining day than at nine in the morning. For many people, mornings early in the week work well, but your own energy is the guide.
Size the block from your pipeline maths in lesson 7.1, Pipeline maths: work backwards from your target. Mei needs about forty-five touches a week. With her list ready and her templates written, each touch takes her about four minutes on average, some less, calls more. Forty-five touches at four minutes is 180 minutes, so she books two ninety-minute blocks, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Your numbers will differ; the method is the same.
Darren meets most clients in the evenings and at weekends, when young parents are free, so his blocks sit on Monday and Wednesday mornings, when almost nobody asks to meet him anyway.
The fastest way to waste a prospecting block is to spend it deciding who to contact. You open the CRM, start researching the first name, find an interesting article, check your email, and forty minutes later you have contacted two people.
So prepare the day before. Ten minutes at the end of the previous day is enough: sort your CRM by next step date, pull out the prospects due, do the five-minute research from lesson 4.3, Personalise in five minutes, not fifty, and have the templates open. When the block starts, you are contacting, not deciding.
This also makes the block easier to start. Facing a blank list is uncomfortable. Facing a prepared list with the first message half-written is not.
Keep a simple count each week: how many prospecting blocks you planned and how many you actually did. Put it next to your weekly results in your scorecard.
Results lag. The conversations and meetings you get this week mostly come from touches you made in earlier weeks, and sales often come months after the first touch. If you only watch results, you find out about a problem long after it started. Blocks completed is the number you can see straight away, and it tells you what your pipeline will look like in a few weeks. A run of weeks with two blocks out of two is a pipeline being built. A run of zero out of two is an empty month on its way.
Mei marks each block in her calendar with a tick when it is done. When she looks back over a quarter, the weeks with missing ticks line up closely with her quiet months later on, which is more convincing to her than any advice.
When you miss a block, do not try to make it up by doubling the next one. Just keep the next one.
The activity below asks you to book your recurring block for the next eight weeks and prepare the list for the first one.
Book a recurring prospecting block in your calendar for the next eight weeks and prepare the list for the first one.
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