Retrain Your Customers
A new client told me he was an awful procrastinator.
When I asked him to elaborate, he gave me this long list of things he promised himself (and others) he'd do the first couple weeks in January, but he hadn’t gotten to any of them.
Things like:
Calling prospects he had met in the last 3 months.
Creating proposals for prospects who wanted to hire him, but needed to know pricing and scope of work.
Reaching out to some of his strategic alliances to find out how he could help them and in turn, what they may have for him...
Instead of doing those things, he found himself mostly responding to fires with his existing customers. He said he had to do that stuff because it's what his clients expected.
I told him he had it wrong. He wasn’t an awful procrastinator, he was a damn good one!
He had trained his clients to dump stuff on him that was clearly outside of his scope of work and that he wasn’t getting paid to handle…
He was doing Free Consulting!
He said he was so busy now that he didn’t have time to call on, much less take on, new business...
And he lost 2 clients at year end, which caused his revenues to drop 20%.
I asked why he thought he was putting off the things that would make him money, and instead doing the things that aren’t revenue generating?
His response: He was afraid of losing more clients...afraid of failing.
After we dug into that for a while, I made another observation.
“So you’re telling me that bringing on new business now sounds like more of a headache than a solution…”
When he agreed, I said “You’re already failing.”
By not working to get new business, he was allowing his current customers to dictate how much money he could make and what his business looked like.
If you're letting your customers/clients dictate how you spend your time and how you run your business, you're delegating your own success to someone who probably doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
This is happening to you right now as well. You’re proving in your behavior that you are afraid of success.
Here’s what you gotta do: for 30 minutes per day, 4 days per week, turn off email notifications, close your door, and make prospecting calls to your ideal prospects. If someone calls during that time block, send 'em to voice mail!
Focus all of your efforts during that time block on getting new revenue into your business. By doing that, you insulate yourself from customers who want to control you and keep you from reaching the success you deserve.
You’re already good. Let me help you get better!
Bringing Honesty, Transparency, and Selflessness to Business.
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