[Transcription]
Welcome, welcome! Rob Brown of Encore Partners here.
Time for day 9 of the 21-day Time Mastery Challenge.
I hope you’re keeping up. I hope you’re going through each of these daily exercises, adopting each of these success habits so that your business gets stronger. You’re saving time, you’re becoming more productive.
You can see your business being a business that you’re really proud of.
I’m not going to go through the laundry list of things we’ve accomplished so far. They’re listed here on the screen, you can see them in the notes. They’re becoming a great list of tools that, if you’re implementing them, are designed to get you that time back that we promised. They will give you that added productivity to help you build the business of your dreams.
So, let’s jump in to today’s topic.
It’s somewhat similar to yesterday’s topic in which you fired at least one client. Today, I want you to clean out your pipeline of prospects. This is one of my favorite topics because a lot of the work that I do with advisors is helping them build their pipeline of ideal prospects who become ideal clients of their practice. You can’t do this unless you have a clean slate of prospects, people that you really believe have the potential to become clients of your practice.
And if you have a goal for your business of the number of new ideal clients that you want to add, it has to match up to your prospecting pipeline. So, let’s just say that you want to bring in a dozen million dollar relationships this year, that means you need to have at least 24 million dollar ideal prospects in your pipeline. Cleaning out your pipeline is one of the best places to determine how well it matches up to that type of goal.
Today, I want to help you clean out your pipeline of prospects.
The first question is want you to answer is: who are your active prospects? So, if you look at your pipeline list whether you keep it on a spreadsheet or you keep it in your CRM system or you have a handwritten list, it really doesn’t matter to me where you keep it…how many active prospects do you have? (BTW – I believe it’s really important to keep your pipeline all in one place so you don’t have business cards here, napkins there, spreadsheets in another place, some of them in your CRM system and some not.)
Assuming that you have them all in one place or that you’re going to put them all into one place because of the activity we’re going to go through on this call, I want you to ask yourself first who are your active prospects? An active prospect is somebody that you have already communicated with. Based on your conversation, you believe they have the potential to be an ideal client of your practice and they’ve told you, based on that conversation, that they want to continue the conversation. They haven’t necessarily committed to becoming a client, but they’ve learned enough that they want to consider becoming a client of your practice. They may not do it today, but over the next six months, twelve months, they’re going to go through your process, understand what you do, and determine if they’re a good fit for you and vise versa.
These are you’re active prospects.
You’ve spoken with them, you think that they have the potential to be an ideal client, and they’ve told you “let’s keep the conversation going”. That’s where I want you to start. Categorize your active prospects as being active. As I said before, you probably want to have two times as many active prospects as your goal for new relationships.
Determine who your active prospects are…right now.
The second question I want you to ask: Who among those people that you have listed on your list or in your CRM system as prospects…who has the potential to become an active prospect? If you’re looking at your pipeline and you’re not sure, maybe you received a referral to somebody and haven’t gotten a hold of them yet, that’s somebody that you need to put in a secondary category of determining whether or not they have the potential to become an active prospect. You don’t want to give those people up if you haven’t gone through your process of determining whether or not they have the potential to become an active prospect of your practice.
So, those are the first two groups:
- your current active prospects
- and those who have the potential to become active prospects.
The third category and the third question is: Who’s wasting your time?
Don’t put people on that list of potential active prospects just because you want to have names on your list, it’s better to just be done with them, clean them off. If you’ve been dripping on them for years, they’ve never really given you an indication that they want to do business with you, but because maybe you think they have a lot of money or some other arbitrary criteria, they’re kind of teasing you by being on that list. By dripping on them, your tendency is to think, “well, I have room on the list why not just keep them?”
I say, no. Get rid of them. Those people are wasting your time.
You really want to pair your list back to those people who are your current active prospects and those people who have the potential to become active prospects. Just get rid of those people who are wasting your time.
I get the question all the time…how long is too long to drip on somebody?
Honestly, if you’ve had somebody on your list and you’ve been communicating with them for more than a year and they’ve not told you that they want you to contact them in the future, they’re probably wasting your time. Just get rid of them. It’s a way of cleaning up some space, being very clear as to who it is that you want to bring into your practice from the prospect pipeline you’re building.
So, that’s your exercise for day 9. I want you to clean out your pipeline of prospects.
We’ll talk more about what to do with that pipeline as part of this challenge in a few days. But, for right now, just like we got rid of some clients, we fired some clients, we reassigned some clients, I want you to clean out your pipeline of prospects. I want you to only focus on your true active prospects and those folks who have the potential to become active prospects…get rid of the hangers-on. You don’t need them.
That’s it for today. Let me know if you have questions and we’ll talk again tomorrow.