Escaping the Feast-or-Famine Pipeline
Most consultancies I work with can tell me exactly how busy they are right now. Fewer can tell me, with any confidence, what their pipeline looks like in three months. That gap is usually the real cause of feast-or-famine trading - not bad luck, and not really the market either.
Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail
It’s an old line, used by the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt, but there’s is an uncomfortable amount of truth in it. If new business development only happens when there’s a spare afternoon, it tends to happen rarely - and rarely on purpose. Proactivity is key.
Make Time or Chase Time
Here’s a simple question: do you make time for business development, or do you chase time for it once things go quiet? Three habits tend to help:
Start the day with a short self-meeting, rather than the inbox, and set the day’s priorities before anything else lands on top of them.
Work out what you need to do, what you need help with and who form early. Take a look at my Time Management Plan for Sales in Resources.
Block the time in the diary to get stuff done e.g. Friday afternoon for planning, Tuesday/Thursday mornings for follow-up calls - and protect it the way you’d protect a client meeting.
When Do You Prospect?
Timing matters more than most people assume. In my experience, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, roughly nine until eleven, tend to work well - people are settled into the week. Monday mornings are usually spent getting the week in order, and afternoons often get eaten by whatever’s already underway.
The Golden Hour
There’s also an excellent window late on a Friday morning, somewhere around eleven, when people are winding toward the weekend and generally a bit more receptive to a call. None of this is guaranteed of course, every client and every industry has its own rhythm - but it’s a reasonable starting point if you don’t already have one. From experience, the Golden Hour has and still works for me!
Three Goes to Get a Go
Patience matters as much as timing and a trap many in sales can fall into is thinking they have to “sell” at every opportunity. Every interaction should be laced with intention, but building rapport and relationships takes time. Face to face, the first meeting is often “who are you?” The second is usually closer to “oh, you again - what was it you did?” By the third, it’s often “right, I’ve actually got a problem, maybe you can help.”
Three goes to get a go is a simple mantra, but a useful one to hold onto when a new relationship feels slow to warm up. In my experience, it usually isn’t going nowhere. It’s just early.
Block It or Lose It
None of this needs a big system. It needs a diary that protects the time. If prospecting only happens once everything else is done, it won’t happen - there’s usually something else. Blocking real time for calls, even 30 minutes, same slot every week, is what tends to turn “we should really do more business development” into something that actually occurs. It’s worth noting this is only half the picture. Business development is really hunting - finding new clients - while growing existing accounts is more like farming. Both need deliberately set-aside time, not leftover time.
Ready to Build the Habit?
If your team could use some real structure around this - proper business development training for engineers with follow-up activity, not just a pep talk - that’s exactly the sort of thing I run.