Most reps have never been trained how to effectively manage their time. This is evident when you compare it to other professions. Consider a day in the life of a surgeon.
As soon as he’s in the hospital, his entire day is already mapped out down to the minute. He knows exactly how many surgeries he has planned for the day, his patient’s backgrounds, the types of operations to perform and when they will be occurring. Can you imagine a surgeon entering the hospital and thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what I should focus on today?” It would be absurd.
In order for reps to reach the highest levels of success, they need to manage their time with the same level of focus. The way to do this and master your time management is through the creation of an Ideal Calendar. Without one, you’ll never reach your full potential.
In this post, you’ll learn the essentials of creating your Ideal Calendar. However, we need to discuss an equally important topic first: your mentality.
In order to manage your time effectively, you must first check your belief system.
You must first believe that you are good at what you do. You must believe that you are in a market where there are plenty of people. Your issue is not to see enough people, but your issue is to see the right kind of people.
Most importantly, you need to believe that the people who are fortunate enough to see you will be greatly impacted in a positive way and forever grateful. With this mindset, becoming efficient with your ideal calendar is simple. All of these beliefs demonstrate that you think abundantly.
However, if you feel that in order to succeed, you need to drive all over your community to talk to anybody who can fog a mirror, then you’re operating from a mentality of scarcity. If this is the case, then I would encourage you to step outside of your box, try to understand it and work on it. (Developing your mindset is covered more in depth in my Sales Cycle Mastery program and will also be discussed in future posts.)
The first step in creating an ideal calendar is to identify how your week would look in a perfect, most efficient world from a geographic stand point.
For example, in my city of Chicago, my ideal calendar would state that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are reserved for all downtown Chicago appointments at my office. Thursday is reserved for meetings in the north suburbs and Friday for the western suburbs.
The second step is determining your time slots. Just like the surgeon, you should have timeslots on each day. These slots define when you:
Client meetings will take up the largest number of slots on your calendar – so it’s important that you know how many appointments you need to keep each week to hit your goals.
Let’s say you need 15 meetings every single week to hit your goals and you know that you have a cancellation rate of 50%. This means that you need to have 30 appointment slots in your ideal calendar every week in order to keep the 15 meetings.
This calendar is followed on a week-in, week-out basis. It’s critically important when you have staff that they also know and operate by your ideal calendar. One critical mistake that I find reps make is that, despite good intentions, they don’t follow their own calendar right out of the gate. This shows their staff that it’s not important.
For instance, imagine you have a set time for your telephoning, however a client requests a meeting during that slot and you agree to it. That is a slippery slope because you’re telling yourself and your staff that telephoning isn’t really that important. That’s a real cardinal sin – don’t do it!
When you put together an ideal calendar, do the best you can to live it every day.
You should always know exactly where you stand in filling up your ideal calendar. At the end of every day, you should know how many of those appointment spots are filled for next week and how many you still need the book. Additionally, you need to know where these appointments should be located and when they should occur during the day.
It is this sense of awareness and intentionality that will provide a greater sense of urgency for picking up the phone and making additional appointments. With this mindset, you can work in relentless pursuit to have next week booked by the end of your current week. This creates a system by which your business can achieve exceptional performance.
While there are many important aspects to maximize the efficiency of your time, the ideal calendar is a great starting point. In my upcoming post, we will build upon this foundation by mastering the art of phoning to efficiently and effectively fill meeting slots with the right types of prospects.
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Why do you prospect? It’s a simple question that does not always have a simple answer, especially as you achieve success and the need for prospecting is not as readily apparent.
For new financial reps, the reason for prospecting is obvious: it’s your life blood. As the youngest advisor to qualify for Forum the first two times I qualified (Northwestern Mutual’s top advisor honor), I can tell you firsthand that prospecting is of vital importance in the first year.
Our industry has around an 80% failure rate for new reps in the business, and a large part of this is due to an unwillingness to continue to prospect. Quite simply, it doesn’t matter whether you are supremely knowledgeable, confident or influential; without people to call on, a new rep has no business.
However, once you’ve been in the business for three or four years, you’ve built some level of a self-sustaining business. You have enough current clients to see, over time they may be providing new leads, and therefore your relationship with prospecting and reason for doing it changes. If prospecting is no longer necessary to sustain your business at its current level, then why prospect?
Before I share this reason, I want to address a common misconception about prospecting. Many reps believe that prospecting is about generating as many names as possible and then pounding the phones until someone agrees to a meeting. There is some truth to this in the early stages of the career of a financial professional.
However, once you are past the first year of your career, prospecting is really about creating genuine referrals. These are not just names provided by your clients, family members or friends. Obtaining the name is just the start. A real referral is when someone introduces someone they care about to someone they trust. Honestly ask yourself, how many of your referrals meet that definition?
Prospecting is all about getting someone to nominate you so that you can get in front of their associates on a very favorable basis. That’s the art of prospecting, and it’s a major shift from the goal of simply maximizing the number of names on your list.
Think about it this way: If you were purchasing a car, wouldn’t you trust the car salesperson far more if your friend had already purchased a vehicle from him or her and raved about the experience? Similarly, as a financial professional, you want to be put in a position of trust rather than someone trying to meet a sales quota. When you have established trust, you will get referrals to potential clients as someone who will care about their interests. Now that’s a genuine referral.
With this in mind, the reason you prospect throughout your career is so that you can continue to work with more of your ideal clients and grow your business.
If you introduce me to a rep who is bored or whose career has stagnated, I guarantee you the reason is because he is bored of the cases he is working on. He is not being challenged anymore in his career and is not excited by it either. Professional prospecting can get you out of that rut so you can live your career and life by design and with intentionality.
You can regain that excitement and enjoyment in your career by taking control of your practice through prospecting. This is not about building a list of potential new clients. Instead, you identify your ideal clients – people who are engaging, enjoyable to work with and in your desired economic markets and careers. Then, through prospecting and referrals, you begin to incorporate these types of clients into your practice and grow your current business into your dream business.
This is a simple, yet transformational, concept and you may be wondering why more reps don’t do it. Part of the answer has to do with not having a proven prospecting system that accomplishes this goal and, at an even more instinctual level, it has to do with mindset. In future posts, we’ll take a closer look at both of these factors, showing how to prospect from an empowered mindset and my 8-step system for becoming a master prospector.
