The biggest challenge faced by most small business owners is keeping a steady flow of work passing through our businesses. The reason; you are the chief marketer, chief doer, in short the chief of everything.

This challenge is why it is so critical to schedule time to market for new business. This is especially true when you are busy. We tend to focus on the task at hand or live by the tyranny of the urgent. We must plan our days and time, often to the hour, to make sure that what needs to be done gets done. Marketing for new business is a critical task. Without new business, your company will cease to be. The quickest way to acquire new business is through direct customer contact, but it takes more than one contact with a potential client to generate the desired result of new work. It can take a year and minimum of five contacts to open the door for a new proposal request.

Over this time, you are selling your experience, your product and your commitment. The second key to success is timely follow up. If you promised a list of recent projects to your potential client by Friday, then deliver that list by Friday. Remember your still in the audition phase; how you deliver now directly reflects how you appear to respond in the future.

Tracking your customer touches can be accomplished in several ways. After twenty-five years in business and I have seen owners use paper and pen, spreadsheets (most common) and data bases to help manage the effort. The fact remains the effort needs to be managed and scheduled. Without a system in place contacts will be lost, touches missed and deals lost. One of the best tools I am presently using is SharePoint. Sharepoint is easily configured, can be cloud based and is very inexpensive to implement. It is often included in your Office 365 subscription. It can be built to have similar features of much more expensive CRM systems at a fraction of the cost. You can build it yourself or have the system built for you. The best part of this system is that it is a customized data base client management system that fits the way you work, versus you adjusting to a third-party system. It can be robust or simple. You make it work for you.

Using Sharepoint you can keep track of every touch, keep notes of your conversations, set automatic reminders for follow up touches, create email notifications of events and manage the data from anywhere since the platform is cloud based.

Planning marketing into your schedule requires discipline and repetition so that it becomes a habit. Set aside time every week to review your schedule. Plan your days and schedule the critical tasks, including marketing for new work. Build marketing into your calendar, invite yourself to a marketing meeting and be sure to schedule enough time to accomplish at least three customer engagements. I find scheduling time in the middle of the week to make customer relationship contacts works best for my clients. The middle of the week offers you a better chance of speaking with someone who isn’t catching up from the weekend and planning their week or being crushed by an end of the week deadlines.

I recommend spending an hour before you leave the office at the end of the week to clean up your inbox and outbox. Update your task list and do the next week look ahead. Look at your calendar of meetings for the next week. Did you schedule time for marketing? Organize your other tasks by priority, plan the time required for each and then set you schedule. This should be part of your overall time management process, but more on that in our next post.