Benchmark Business Group

Block Your Time For Prospecting

October 5, 2021

Although most financial services professionals know how important prospecting is, it’s still the activity that gets pushed aside. The reasons for not prospecting vary, but can include service issues, training, focusing on other lines of business, and even procrastination.

There’s a simple, but effective way to ensure that your business has prospecting time. It starts with identifying how many meetings you need to have for sales. This can include reviews, new clients, and cross-selling opportunities. At the end of the day, how many meetings do you need to have to meet your sales goals?

Once you have that number, schedule those meetings on your calendar as pending. These are what we like to call, “blocks of success”. They are the activities that you need to have to be successful. As you schedule meetings, you can move these blocks around. For instance, maybe you schedule a pending block at 9 AM, but the client can’t meet until 9:15 AM. Because the block is already on your calendar, it’s easy to move and to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with any other activity on your schedule.

Quickly, your meetings will begin to fill up. But here’s the catch, any meeting time that isn’t scheduled with a client, or any meeting time that a client reschedules or doesn’t show, those are now your times to prospect.

For most professionals in this industry service-related activities seem to take over time that isn’t protected. So when a sales meeting is missed or there simply are not enough sales meetings on the calendar, most advisors turn back to service. The problem with this is that the activity your business is missing is sales. That's why “blocks of success” are there - to create the sales needed to reach your goals. Because no amount of service activities will create enough sales to fill the gap.

You can’t service your way out of a lack of prospects.

Simply put, if a sales activity isn’t filled with a meeting, or is rescheduled, then your business needs you to focus on sales-related activities. In this case, the lack of prospects is the problem your business needs you to solve, so your focus should be on prospecting.

Eventually you’ll start meeting the sales activity needed to fill your “blocks of success.” But until then, focus simply on filling any missed sales activities with prospecting activities.

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