Sales coach Ryan Dohrn breaks down his 20/60/20 time management framework: 20% new business, 60% meetings and customer service, 20% retention activities that go beyond standard service. He warns that chasing new deals while neglecting existing clients is a common mistake that costs renewals.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach, answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. And by the way, I love answering these questions. These are great. All right, uh, next question, JD from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Hey JD, I was just up that— in that neck of the woods at a place called Gull Lake, which was pretty cool. All right, JD's question. Ryan, I'm struggling with time management. Every day I seem to get stuff done but not enough done. I feel like a fireman. What do I do? So, um, JD, I wish I could say that it's like an easy answer, but time management is a skill. It's really not something you're necessarily born with. Now, some people tend to be a little more organized than others, but the way that God designed my DNA, or whoever you believe designed you, you may or may not be an organized person. So what I like to do, and you've heard me talk about it before, JD and others, is the 20/60/20 time management plan. So the 20/60/20 plan is I want to spend about 20% of my time each day on new business development. 20/60/20. The 60% is everything— is a lot of everything else. And that is, you know, doing my follow-ups on meetings, getting things off of my to-do list, doing my customer service and stuff like that. Now the 20/60/20, the other 20% that everybody tends to overlook, JD, is is retention. You are about 60% more likely to renew somebody that's already working with you. So if you spend too much time in new business development, your boss gets happy, but you lose clients that you might have been able to keep. So you're a lot more likely to keep a client than to get a new one. So 20/60/20 is all about 20% new business, 60% meetings, customer service, that kind of stuff, and then 20% on retention. I would say that very rarely, JD, and the rest of you that are listening, I don't meet people that do a great job with retention. See, what you do is you confuse retention with customer service. Customer service, now that's expected, right? Retention are the things you do above and beyond the call of duty to keep a client for a lifetime. So, JD from Kalamazoo, thanks for your question, and I hope you keep those questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com, and I'm very happy to answer those questions as you send them in. Hey, I've got a blog. podcasts, articles, and so much more. So check out ryandohrn.com. And if you're in the ad sales business, like a lot of you that watch me, uh, media sales, go over to 360adsales.com. All right, friends, don't forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. We're the chosen few, and we found careers that have fed our family and will feed our families for a lifetime. All right, we'll see you next week.
