The madness of your calendar

Almost any sport that has ever been played with a clock, the effort to score increases as the time decreases, especially during the last 2 minutes.  This urgency is especially true in most professional sports and business.  When you put the restriction of time in your favor, good things are only to come of it.  At least the effort. Wins and losses come a dime-a-dozen.  The effort to fill your calendar is not as challenging as it may seem, and very rewarding.

Filling up your calendar is essential.  Before randomly filling the calendar to take up space, let's do some planning. Blocking out time in your schedule is crucial. Allowing the time pass or taking the day as it comes will always leave you short of your goals. We all need to win big, and it starts with your calendar.

Start with blocking out time to do the activities that lead to generating money.  The time blocking could be email follow-ups (not checking email), phone calls to clients, prospects or networking partners.

The first part of the time block is to contact the prospects that generate new money. Schedule a meeting with them within 1-3 weeks.  If you are in a slump and no appointments, skip the current week in scheduling.  Use the current week to generating meetings for the next 1-3 weeks. Otherwise, you will keep scrambling. Backlogging is good and reschedules are great too. I'll explain why shortly.

Then call your current or past clients and schedule a time to share something new that you thought they should know. Please make sure you do bring something new to the visit or call that will interest them or they should know. Before the meeting is complete, let them know you are looking for introductions in a specific area to share this information.  Then schedule another follow up meeting with them.

Now call anyone and everyone you know, especially other networking or business contacts, that are willing to hear your story and ready to hear anything new in your work. When you are scheduling these meetings, ask if they can bring someone along that you can meet and you will do likewise.  Do your best to double book these meetings to make cross introductions. Cross introductions will keep other people's interest in you and what you do by making introductions to others.  It's a great and productive way to fill your calendar.  If either one cannot bring someone, that is fine. It just increases the productivity of the meeting.

Content and Marketing is the next part to fill your calendar.  Since it does not make a direct impact on the bottom line, it is very easy to let it escape from you and blow off your schedule.  Even if it's on your calendar, its very easy to move right past it with a client call, an email, or whatever.  But we need to hold true to ourselves to get this done.  Content sharing will generate introductions and potentially future clients by staying in front of them with fresh material created or shared by you.

One of the easiest ways to do this is engaging others online.  This includes liking posts and commenting on sites that you are targeting, such as LinkedIn (R).  The comments are important to engage the conversation as if you are there.  Liking or sharing a bunch of content without engagement is merely just a billboard hoping someone will see it.

Make a video. Sure we are all afraid of the camera or speaking in front of people.  If you know your stuff, it'll be easy to share the information on video that you share with people every single day in your business. This needs to be something that can benefit others.  It needs to be something they can engage with now.  Doing a data dump of your industry knowledge is entirely useless.  How I can use one segment of that data to benefit me (yes I'm selfish, and so is everyone else), then you might get my attention with a catchy headline.

Write articles, ebooks, books etc. Content writing is good for keyword searches online if you post them to your website.  What's great about spending time on these is you can print them and bring them to the meetings that you set as well as email them to those who might benefit.  Create value for them and do it often.

Another great reason to create and share content is it will create opportunities to meet with people. Someone will be interested in something you say or do.  This is a great reason to meet and talk about it. It's the activity that leads towards sales.

Backlogging meetings keep your calendar full. If your goal was to have 15 meetings scheduled a week, coming into Monday with 8-10 already set takes the pressure off. Backlogging meetings also allows you to reach a higher number of meetings, even 25-30 scheduled meetings in a week.

These are not all sale appointments. You want the meetings to create new opportunities that lead to sales.

With the above activities, you are sure to fill up your calendar. This will create more urgency to get more done.  The more we get done, the closer we can get to our goals.  If we are hitting our targets and creating new ones, we are off to do something massive in our lives.  Keep the ball moving