Every morning I got to bed with a game plan for the morning. “OK, I’m going to get up at 5:30 a.m., finally drink my fruits and veggies, go for a 5 mile run, and be at my desk at 7:15 a.m. before anyone else!” Then the morning comes…. I have to fight off the “snooze monster” every day! But, once I finally get out of bed, I have a wicked routine that’s helped build my business.
Now on the PROFIT side of this story, I just finished reading a book by Mike Michalowicz called PROFIT FIRST. The premise is quite simple: we as business owners are terrible at creating a routine for allocating profit from our revenue. We pay bills, taxes, employees… everyone but ourselves properly. He’s developed an ingenious method for paying yourself first.
Avoiding Time Burglars
To the context of sales – sales professionals are rolling out of bed, grabbing their smartphones and CHECKING EMAILS! These emails are TIME BURGLARS! These are OTHER PEOPLE’S PRIORITIES!
Similar to Mike Michalowicz’s observation that business owners have their priorities backwards, I have the same feeling about sales professionals (and myself when I get caught in the email trap). The reason Mike wants business owners to carve out a portion of every account receivable to store as profit is because a business owner needs to help themselves first! Whatever money is left over AFTER paying yourself a profit, is really what’s left for expenses. If you can’t pay the bills, you’re not running a healthy business.
In that context, you need to build your long-term network and pipeline FIRST… before you get caught in the email / admin nightmare that we can all get ourselves in. TIME, that is a sales professional’s currency of today. You only have so much TIME to build your book of business. Pay TIME to yourself first (long-term pipeline development) BEFORE you begin serving others with email / admin.
Social Selling Is That Paying Yourself First
For myself, and the 10,000’s of sales professionals we train, this should be your 30 minute routine BEFORE you check your time sucking emails:
EDUCATE
Find 1 article you know would benefit either your network, or a specific client, and share those best practices. He that group of people through their buying journey
GROW
Check your “digital voicemails” each morning. That means using the LinkedIn Mobile App, or your computer to see who’s been engaged on your profile and content over the last 24 hours. These engaged profiles should be the first people that you add into your LinkedIn and Twitter network. These people have expressed an interest in you… and now you can continue to educate and influence these people more regularly by connecting.
ENGAGE
This is the best part about LinkedIn & Twitter – being able to strike up new conversations that you would never have been able to access via the phone and email. Set a goal for 3 to 5 new conversations each morning, and let this compounding action build your business over time.
See, that wasn’t that hard! That took you all of 30 minutes while you ate your morning cereal. But what you did was set yourself up for a future opportunity!