You will review a month of activity and set the plan for the next 90 days.
It's the last working day of the month. You've posted, commented, messaged and asked for referrals all month, and maybe run an event as well, so it feels like a lot of work. The question is whether all of it is paying off, and which parts are paying off most. Without a regular review, you'll keep doing everything at the same level forever, and that includes the parts that bring in nothing.
This project sets up the review you'll run every month from now on, and uses your first one to write the plan for the next 90 days.
Write a one-page monthly review and a 90-day plan. The review pulls your five measures for the month, compares them with the previous month, and finds the activity with the best and worst return on your time. The plan sets targets for content, engagement, referrals and events for the next 90 days, with more time for what works and less for what doesn't.
It takes about 45 minutes. You'll need your measures from lesson 8.1, Measures that matter and vanity numbers, your source-tagged contacts from lesson 8.2, Tag every lead with its source, and your trackers from modules 4 and 6.
Write down your five measures for the month just ended, and the same five for the month before. If this is your first month of tracking, you won't have a comparison yet; note the numbers anyway as your baseline.
Look at what moved. A single month is a small sample, so don't read much into a change of one or two. Look for big moves and for anything that's been heading in the same direction for two or three months.
Return on time is what an activity brought in, divided by the time you put into it. For social selling, the most useful version is meetings booked per hour spent, or the hours it took to produce one meeting.
For each activity, estimate the hours you spent on it this month. Your source field then tells you how many meetings it produced. Here are Wei Ling's figures for one month as a worked example:
Posting: 4 hours of writing, 1 meeting, so 4 hours per meeting Daily commenting routine: 15 minutes on 20 working days, which is 5 hours, 3 meetings, so about 1 hour 40 minutes per meeting Referral asks and introductions: 2 hours, 3 meetings, so about 40 minutes per meeting Client breakfast: 6 hours including planning and follow-up, 2 meetings, so 3 hours per meeting
Altogether she spent 17 hours and booked 9 meetings, against 6 the month before. Referral asks had the best return by a wide margin. Posting had the worst.
Two cautions. First, meetings aren't deals, so as months of data build up, check which sources turn into deals too. Second, some activities feed others. Wei Ling's posts may be why some practice managers accepted her connection requests, and her event fed her referral list. So use return on time to adjust the mix, and be slow to drop anything entirely.
Find the activity with the best return and do more of it. For Wei Ling, that meant making more referral asks. She'd only asked at three of the moments on her list from lesson 5.1, Referrals come from moments, not from asking more often, so she set a target of making an ask at every one.
Then look at the activity with the worst return and decide whether to cut it or change it. Cutting suits activities that cost a lot of time and show no sign of working after a few months. Changing suits activities where you can see what's wrong. Wei Ling looked at her posts and noticed that none of them ended with a question or an invitation to reply. She kept posting weekly but changed the format, and she'll check next month whether it made a difference.
Now write targets for the next 90 days across the four areas of the course. Keep each to one line, with a number you can check.
For content, say how often you'll post and what you'll change. For engagement, give your daily routine and the number of conversations you aim to start. Referrals need a number of asks and the moments you'll use, and events need a yes or no for the quarter with a rough date.
Wei Ling's plan: one post a week, each ending with a question; the commenting routine every working day, aiming for ten new conversations over the quarter; a referral ask at every moment on her list, aiming for at least twelve asks; and one client breakfast, pencilled in for the second month. Arjun's plan put more weight on events, because his couples responded well to his first one, and less on commenting on finance writers' posts.
Put a reminder in your calendar for the last working day of each month to run this review again.
A finished review fits on one page. At the top, your five measures for this month and last month side by side. Below that, your return on time for each activity with the hours and meetings behind it, the best and worst activity named, and what you'll do about each. At the bottom, the 90-day plan with a target for content, engagement, referrals and events. Your final project asks for a review like this at the end of 60 days, so this is also your practice run. The activity below asks you to write it.
Write a one-page monthly review with your measures and a 90-day plan for content, engagement, referrals and events.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).