#134: Surprisingly Simple (and Effective!) Tips for Getting Your Prospecting Done

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more in less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 1 3, 4 and those notes include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources mentioned during the show. Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that I'm about to work with a handful of writers and copywriters to help them develop and deploy their own customized prospecting plan. And by that I mean an actionable plan that you can deploy right away to get tangible results. If you haven't been prospecting consistently because a you're overwhelmed with all the options, b you haven't had great success in the past with your prospecting, or C you're always too busy, or a combination of all three of those, then this might be for you. This is specifically for writers and copywriters who have already launched their business, so they've already had some clients. You could still be new, but you've already been working with some paying clients. If you'd like to learn more, send me an email@edwauncher.com put the word prospecting in the subject line and I'll send you all the details. Since we're on the subject of prospecting, I wanted to address one of the elements that so many of us have trouble with, and that is getting it done right. So many times we have some ideas at what we want to do, but getting it done is really an issue, right? It's actually doing the activity. For many writers and copywriters, prospecting is something that only happens when we need the work, when we have plenty of time to get it done, when we happen to think about it, or a combination of all three things. In fact, in extreme cases, it's really all three things have to intersect in order for us to get this done. But most writers I meet want to prospect consistently. They just can't seem to find a time where they do it too haphazardly to get consistent results. And if that's you, this episode is going to be right up your alley, because I'm going to share some very effective and surprisingly simple tips for getting this stuff done. You'd think it'd be A lot easier that it would just be the Nike thing, right? Just do it. But let's face it, right, that's, yeah, sometimes that works, but it's obviously not working for so many people out there. And if you're nodding your head, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So let, let's, let's get down to business and let's, let's talk about some very practical things you can do and to get this done, get your prospecting done consistently. Now, I'm just going to come right out and say this. Your prospecting won't get done until it becomes a habit, period. And by habit, I don't mean that you have to spend hours and hours every week knocking on doors. By habit, I mean that your prospecting activities need to become more automatic. In other words, you don't have to think about doing them, you just, just do them. Much like you brush your teeth in the morning or you take a shower, or you, you know, go to your kitchen and brew some coffee. According to a 2006 Duke University study, 40% of the actions we take each day are, are not the result of conscious decision making. They're just automatic. If these autopilot actions take us where we want to go, that's obviously great, right? But if they don't, we. That's where we veer off course. When we do something habitually, what happens is we think less, our neurological activity actually decreases, and that's why the behavior feels automatic. In fact, you know, many times we think of habits as kind of a chore. It's like developing a new habit or breaking a bad habit. I know that's how I used to think of it. But habits are actually a wonderful thing. There are brains way of automating processes because when you think about it, the brain has been designed to be as efficient as possible. And if it's using, you know, full throttle, full cognitive load, and all the things that you do throughout the day, it would just burn out. It just wouldn't have the energy to get all that done. So the brain has been trained and conditioned over a long, long time to save as much as possible, save as much energy and resources as possible. So the way it works is it tries to really make as many things as habits as possible because it uses a different part. Things become automatic, and it doesn't require the same energy and effort to get it done. So what we want is, we want to make these activities as habitual as possible so you don't have to think about them. Just that the Cognitive energy involved in just deciding, you know, should I get this done? And just, you know what I'm talking about. It's like, oh well, you know what, I'm going to get another cup of coffee, like that kind of thing. That takes a huge toll on our brain capacity. There's a classic book out there that talks about this at length. It's a fascinating read. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. But there are a couple other resources that I want to point out. One of them is Mini Habits by Stephen Guise Small, I believe it's a self published book and get it on Amazon, it's fantastic. Much smaller. And it gets right down to one of the things that we're going to talk about today, which is breaking things down into incremental actions. And then one of my favorite people who write about this all the time is James Clear. You can find him@james clear.com and just a wonderful writer. And again, his stuff is fascinating, very engaging and he's talking about the science behind all this stuff and he makes it very, very interesting. So the first thing I would suggest is, look, just accept the fact that it needs to become a habit and it's going to become a habit by just wishing it were so. You need to cultivate that habit. And unfortunately, the hard part with habits is creating those neural pathways that help these activities become automatic. That's the painful part of the habit. Those are the things we think about when we think of habits. And again, at least I do. If you can get through that part, which is painful and time consuming and arduous, then you know the rest. Once you get to the autopilot stage, that's where you really ride the wave. That's the wonderful stuff. Jim Rohn, the late motivational speaker, used to say that motivation is what gets you started, but habit is what keeps you going. And that is absolutely true. One thing we need to understand, I didn't really learn this until recently, is that motivation and willpower are depletable resources. They don't last. You know, you only have so much motivation to kind of get the engine going. It's kind of like that, you know that rocket boost that's designed to get the rocket off the ground, but after a while, that's it. That's all the fuel we got to get you off the ground. We rely on momentum after that point. So it's the same thing here, motivational willpower. If you're consistently relying on that throughout the day and throughout the week to get you going and to do the things that you need to do, including prospecting, it's not going to work. You need to turn these things into a habit. Motivation can only get us started. They don't keep us going. Habit needs to take over. All right, the second tip I have for you is something I alluded to a couple of minutes ago, which is to think in terms of micro actions and not in terms of just taking over the world and launching a big project or a big initiative. It's much easier to develop a habit by working on it day by day, little by little, than by setting a big goal. If you set a big goal and then assign a deadline, what happens is you risk getting off course. It's almost impossible, I've found, to perfectly reverse engineer a big goal from achievement date to start date. In other words, anything that's really complex. Right? So I'm going to, for example, land five clients, new clients, great clients, over the next six months. Let's just say you set a big goal like that, it's almost impossible to figure out exactly what needs to happen in order to land those clients on by certain dates. It's just there's too many variables. You have no control over the outcome, but you do have control over your actions. And we'll talk more about that here today. But the point here is to think in terms of what can I do today? What little action can I do today? And in fact, that's the key operative word, small, little action, small step. So think in terms of not just small step, but ridiculously small step or action. An action that's so small that you have no reason not to do it. And that's what will lure you into taking the action. So Stephen guys, who I mentioned earlier, the author of Many Habits, he talks about the golden pushup. He says, look, if you're having trouble getting yourself to work out, says, you know what? Start with committing to do one pushup today. Can you commit to that? And the answer is, well, of course. All right, well, set a time. And at 10 o' clock this morning, I'm going to get down on my office floor and do one pushup. It's so ridiculously small that if you can't check that item off your to do list, there's something seriously wrong with how you're prioritizing things and what you pay attention to. I think most of us would just go ahead and just get it done. And let's face it, once you do that, there's a pretty big chance that you'll do a few more, you know, if you're able to do that. So the point here is once you commit to a small micro action that's ridiculously small, once you take that action, it becomes much easier to do more. Plus something key starts happening, you start developing the habit that will make taking future action mindless. So let's talk about how this applies to everyday life. If you're very, very busy right now with client work, don't fall into the trap of well, I got enough work, I just don't have time to prospect. You do have time to prospect. Start by committing to 15 minutes a day or 15 minutes a couple of times a week. Just whatever the timeframe is. Just think about what would be the most ridiculous commitment that I could make. Ridiculously small, that is micro action. And think of that, write it down and commit to doing that this week. Once you can consistently take those micro actions, work your way up to, in the example of 15 minutes a day, work your way up to 30 minutes a day or every other day, whatever the frequency is going to be. Now on the other extreme, I want to point something out because I'm seeing a lot of this out there and I'm just going to put it out there. If this is where you are, this is important. If you have zero to little work right now, you need to make prospecting your full time job. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you have maybe right now one hour of billable work a day and let's just assume that you are freelancing full time, let's just say 40 hours, right? So one hour billable work a day right now, so you're really hurting, that's five hours. That leaves you with 35 hours for the rest of the week. If you're not spending those 35 hours prospecting or most of those prospecting, then you're going to pay the price. Okay? So that, that's going to show up in the results you get the, the blessing you have with that time is that you can actually spend that time prospecting. You need to be a good steward of that time and you need to just go all out until you fill your pipeline. Okay, I'm making a lot of assumptions here, right? I'm assuming that you know this is the right time for this, that you don't need the time off that, that and that you do need work as soon as possible. But assuming all that is true, that needs to be your full time job. When you start getting busier and busier with client work, then you can go back to what I said earlier, don't just say, no, I don't have time now revert to that micro action, let's say 15 minutes a day. Anyone can do 15, 20 minutes a day of prospecting. There's just really no excuse. The trick is to know ahead of time what you're going to be doing during that time period that you've allocated. Otherwise you'll spend the whole 15 minutes trying to figure it out. So that's, that's a key point there. I, I've tried this before and if you don't know ahead of time how you're going to spend that, that 15 minutes, then it's going to be wasted. So the day before or that morning, as you're planning a day and you're carving out that time, we'll talk about that here in a few minutes. Then make sure to write down exactly what you're going to do, make that decision ahead of time. So when that time comes, let's say 8 o', clock the morning, you can get right to work and you make the most out of those 15 minutes. So James Clear, who I mentioned earlier, has an excellent article on this topic and I'm linking to it in the show notes. It's@jamesclear.com small habits and he talks a little bit more about this idea and the science behind it and then some practical suggestions on how to make it work. The next tip is actually related to this and it's to focus on action and not outcomes. So what do I mean by that? Well, I talked about this earlier where, you know, sometimes we get so obsessed over, I'm going to get, my goal is to get five clients over the next six months, for instance. And many times we also set that timeline too, right? Six months. So rather than setting that outcome, hey, five new clients and a timeline by the end of October or whenever, focus instead on taking a concrete action or set of actions today and this week and make those your goals. So taking a really short term view in making the goal an action instead of an outcome, and the reason for that is again, you cannot control an outcome. All you can control is yourself and what you do. As long as the actions you're taking are going to be effective, as long as you know you're doing the right thing and you're being consistent, then you cannot help but get results. So commit to a system. Commit to, by system, I mean of something that will ensure that you're taking the right actions at the right frequency at the right time and take the focus away from the outcome. As best as you can, try to detach yourself emotionally from generating a very specific result by a very specific time. I think it's okay to have that as a vision and maybe kind of what you're going after, but it's not the thing you're keeping front and center every single day. You have it out there. You look at it every once in a while. But from a daily execution standpoint, you're really focusing on what you can do today, what you can control, and just trust that if you do these things, the results will come. This shift in focus and mindset, I'm telling you, just drastically increases your chances of getting the outcome you want. The next tip I have for you is to treat your prospecting like a recurring project. So let's say you had a recurring project with a client. You might have a few right now, let's say a weekly newsletter, for example. And let's just say that that project required about three or four hours of your time every single week. Would you blow off the project one week if he just didn't feel like doing it? So you know what, Jill? I just didn't feel like writing this week, so I'll just pick it up next week. No, if you have a deadline every week and you know it's about three or four hours of work, you probably carve that stuff out into your schedule. At least you have it on a to do list. And, you know, you might procrastinate a little bit. Don't we all? But there comes a point where you can't wait any longer, and you just have to put your head down and just get it done. You just get it done. So think about your prospecting the same way. Think of it as a recurrent client project that you can't just ignore. It's got to get done. If you shift that mindset and you really think of it that way and you make that commitment, hey, I can't do this. I know that nothing will happen, okay? I know. I'm just pretending, but I really need to treat it this way. You will get it done. Another tip is to schedule that prospecting time into your day like you would a project or doctor's appointment. You know, for example, 2pm to 4pm on Wednesday. And yes, I do believe that actual times are important in your schedule because they're much more likely to get done if you've actually scheduled it, if you treat it like a real appointment. And the reason is no one blows off a doctor's appointment, do they? I mean, we wake up One morning we realize we got a doctor's appointment at 10 o' clock and we're gonna have to, you know, get dressed and put makeup on and you know, get in the car and go, well, I don't put makeup on. But you know, just, just assuming you do. It's, it's, it's not necessarily the thing we might want to do. But you can't blow it off, right? So even if you don't feel like going, you have to go. What have we started thinking about our prospecting that way? I think it would really change what we get done during the week from a prospecting standpoint. Something else that can help in terms of scheduling is to schedule, carve out your prospecting time first thing in the morning when there's nothing else behind that activity, a task will get done. So, and we've all been there, right? That's why so many people work out first thing in the morning. They know it gets done. If you've ever tried doing it the other way, well, when I get back from work or at the end of the day, just so many things have happened. You're behind, you know, somebody needs help with this, now you got to get dinner going, whatever. It's just all these things happen. It just doesn't get done. So schedule it for the first activity. And again, if you're having trouble following through or you're slammed with client work, start with just a 15 minute session. You know, if I'm going to start at 8 o', clock, from 8 to 8:15, that's what we're going to do. By the way, just a quick aside, I am a big believer in work times. I know for a lot of freelancers that is not the most desirable idea because you probably left the traditional workforce for many reasons, including the fact that, you know, you're on a time clock and you know you have to be there at a certain time. And there is something to be said about the discipline that work times create. Now that doesn't mean that you can't be flexible between, let's say 8 and 4. Let's just say those are your work time. Doesn't mean that you can't take time off throughout the day, you know, to go to whatever. But what it means is you make a commitment to be at your desk at a certain time into knockoff at a certain time. It really, really builds in a lot of discipline from a scheduling standpoint, it makes things a lot easier. You'll have a much better feel for your capacity. So it's really not about working more hours. It's really about being committed to when you're going to start and when you're going to end. The other thing I was going to say regarding treating it like a recurring project, this is an idea that came from my good friend and colleague Elise Bennen from marketing-mentor.com She's a big proponent of this. I've tried it, it absolutely works. And it's about creating a theme for each workday. So here's the way it works. It doesn't mean that you're going to do only prospecting on, you know, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, et cetera. It's just that whatever prospecting time you have allocated for a certain day, you have a theme for that prospecting activity. It's going to be about something specific. So let me give you a couple of examples. So you see what I mean. You could allocate Mondays to prospecting prospect research. So Mondays for the, you know, 30 minutes that let's say that you allocating to prospecting, you're just going to do prospect research. Tuesdays could be knocking on doors. So doing outreach. Same thing with Wednesdays, knocking on doors as well. Thursdays is your follow up day. So for again for the 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever, you're allocating that day to prospecting work. That's when you follow up with people that you've sent warm emails to. That's when you're doing your nurturing of not yet ready prospects and so forth. And then Fridays could be your content marketing day. That's when you work on your blog, your newsletter. Maybe you're working on developing a talk to give to an organization or to have kind of a master talk that you give to different groups. But whatever, that's still content marketing. So that's just an idea. I'm not suggesting that you follow that specifically. Here's another way you can could look at it. Let's say Mondays are prospect research, Tuesdays are outreach or knocking on doors, Wednesdays are follow up, Thursdays are content marketing and Fridays is your networking day. And maybe you do it that way because there's the two groups that you're involved with or the one group, Friday is when they do have a meeting, it's going to be on a Friday. So might as well just reserve that day for networking. And networking doesn't have to be physical or local. So some of your networking work on Fridays could be online. That the point is, is, is you're trying to again kind of reduce that cognitive load because you already know what that day is going to be about. So there's fewer decisions to make. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to. And it just again, just lubricates the process a little bit more. We talked earlier about how with habits you're really creating neural pathways that make the process automatic and you don't have to think about it. It's the same thing here. We want to remove the obstacles, reduce the friction. I just know today for that 30 minutes, it's Monday, I have to, today's my, my research day. You know, there's, there's no overthinking it. A similar approach I like is to bucketize the week into three categories. Production days, buffer days, and free days. So let's just use an example here. So let's just say Mondays are a buffer day and buffer days is when you would take calls, make calls, do your catch up. Like if you caught up from the week before, things you didn't finish, that's when you do your reading. That's when you catch up on your training. Let's say you got a couple of courses you're, you're taking. That's when you would carve out time to go through a few of the lessons, take care of personal stuff and so forth. Again, kind of a catch all. It's a buffer day. Let's say Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays you have allocated to production. Those are your production days. Production days are client work. Many people do will do prospecting work on those days. They kind of lump that into production instead of buffer. You could do it either way. It depends on how you look at it. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays are production days. Fridays could be another buffer day. Let's just say that one is not enough. And you find that you need another day for calls for catching up, reading, training, personal stuff, maybe meetings, lunch meetings, etc. So Friday's a buffer day, Saturdays and Sundays free days. Again, you could do this however you want. The point is, by bucket ties in your week, you're able to make better decisions about when to schedule things. Because you already have some basic rules and you don't have to, the decisions become easier, tasks become much more automatic. By this structure really does help. And again, you can start each workday knowing exactly what type of marketing activity you need to focus on. If you then add that other specific layer of okay, on the days I, I am doing production work for the prospecting part, what is, what am I going to do on Tuesdays? So the next Tip. And the final tip is to consider gamifying your prospecting. What do I mean by gamifying? Well, this is the interesting thing. Many times when you look at the psychology of motivation, we won't be motivated by things you might think would motivate us the most. So I wrote a series of white papers a few years ago for. For a company that sold wellness programs to Fortune 500 companies. And one of the things I learned in all my work with them is that when it comes to physical health, somebody's health, they will not. They're not as likely to get healthier on their own for the reasons you would think. Meaning, you know, just to live longer, to have a better lifestyle, to. To be sick fewer times. Those. Those sorts of reasons, right? Which are the logical reasons why you'd think somebody would want to get in shape. And what they. What they found was if. If you added a game to it, if you made it into a game, and specifically a game that had a competitive element to it. So in the case of. Of this company, if they got employees in the company to compete against each other and against themselves, and they could earn badges depending on achievements and meeting goals and beating goals and so forth, and there was a leaderboard based on not who's getting the fittest, but based on who's actually reaching their own individual goals, people were very, very motivated. Now, I'm not saying this works for everybody, but I find it fascinating that you could take something that maybe you're not really getting it done, even though you know it's good for you. So let's say prospecting, you know, you have to do it, and you know the reasons why, and you know what the benefits are, and you know what the. The disadvantages are of not doing it right. What's the downside? But it's still not getting done. It's a. It might be a good idea to try to gamify some of it. So I got a couple of practical ideas for you to turn some of this into a game and find some motivation that will. Will get you going, at least started. One idea is something you may have heard before. So this has been attributed to Jerry Seinfeld. I'm not sure if I really believe the story, but the story goes that he was talking to a young comedian, and a young comedian asked him, Mr. Seinfeld, what can I do to improve my comedy? And he told him, you have to write every day. You have to write comedy every day, and you have to be consistent about it. And in fact, I have A trick for you. And he said, look, just take a huge sheet of paper, tape it to your wall and draw boxes, kind of like a calendar. So 30 boxes for this month. And if you write that day, then I want you to fill that box in green with green. If you don't write that day, I want you to put a red X in that box. And the whole idea is you want to kind of keep that chain going, the chain of green boxes. And if you didn't write that day, that red X is just going to be right there in front of you, showing you in a visual way that you. You failed to do what you're supposed to do that day. And for some reason, this actually works really well for a lot of people. You know, nobody wants to break the chain. Some people actually get obsessive about this. They want that continuity. Visually, if they see something awry, they really bugs them. So the motivation here is really superficial, but it's much more powerful than the motivation of, well, if I write today or if I do this thing today, that's going to be good for me. So that's something you could try. I tried it before. It didn't work as well for me. I didn't really like the manual aspect of it, which is strange because I'm really more of a paper and pencil kind of person instead of an app person. But I found an app that was actually more useful for me, and it's called the Way of Life app. Way of Life. I'm not sure if it's available for Android. I know it's available in iOS, but enables you to do the same thing, but digitally. So you add the actions that you want to take, the habits you're trying to form, and every day it asks you, okay, did you do this? Did you do this? And then you tap it? Yes. And it creates a green box. And if you tap it. No. Or if you. Then it does the. The red box. So you see the actual chains with red in the middle. And it's cool because it allows you to create, to look at trends, see where you're improving, allows you to see charts and you know where you. You're failing in that way. You could see maybe where you need to make progress. I think many times we do know, but sometimes it's surprising, especially over the course of 30 to 60 days, you'll. You'll see some really cool stuff. So something else to try there. The Way of Life app. Finally consider getting an accountability partner. This is also part of gamifying, by the way, but It's a. It's a different kind of gamifying. It's when you have accountability, when you know that there's somebody you have to call, somebody who you made a commitment to, and now you have to report on your outcome. It can really drive you to just get it done just for that reason alone. Again, interesting, isn't it? Right? It's a superficial external reason, not an intrinsic reason. But sometimes those tend to work a little better. So if you've tried this before and it's worked, consider getting an accountability partner just to keep you on track with prospecting. You guys can. It could be reciprocal. You could work with each other. And if you haven't, give it a try. You know, find someone. And by the way, it doesn't have to be another writer. It could be somebody else, but you need to let them know, look, I need you to hold me accountable, if you don't mind. Every Friday, could you set an alert to just send me an email and check on me? Or it could be the other way around. It's every Friday. I'm going to send you a quick email letting you know how I did this one thing. And if you don't hear from me, let me know, but I'm going to set an alert. So, you know, that could be very powerful because nobody wants to look silly, right? Nobody wants to look like they're. They're dropping the ball. You could do it once, but if it becomes consistent, it's embarrassing. And shame is a very powerful emotion. We. Nobody wants to go there. Nobody wants to feel shameful. So just another idea to try it. So those are my basic tips, practical, simple tips for getting this stuff done, and I hope you found them helpful. And as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, if this is an issue for you, and if maybe the issue is a combination of that, but you're also overwhelmed with all these different options. We feel like you just haven't had great success in the past. So many times you ignore these activities because you just don't feel that it's worth doing. Then let's talk. I'm working with a small group of writers over the next few weeks to create a simple, very powerful action plan that's customized for you and your situation. I'd love to work with you if this makes sense and the timing is right. You want to learn more about it, send me an email@eddblauncher.com and just put the word prospecting in the subject line so I know what you're looking for. And I'll reply to you with all the details. So that's it for this week folks. Hope you enjoyed this. Hope it was was useful. Have a great rest of the day and we'll talk real soon.

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