How to do biz dev even when you’re busy

Leah Neaderthal0:00

Welcome to the smart gets paid podcast with me. Leah Neaderthal, I help women land higher paying clients in their B2B, consulting, coaching and service based businesses. But I've never been a salesperson. My background is in corporate marketing, and when I started my first consulting business, I learned pretty quickly that it's about 1000 times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. So I taught myself how to do it, and I created the sales approach that I now share with my clients so they can feel more comfortable in the sales process. Get more of the right clients and get paid way more for every client contract. So whether your client contracts are $5,000 $100,000 or more, if you want to work with more of the clients you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever thought you could, then you're in the right place. Let's do it together. Thanks for tuning in, and don't forget to rate this podcast. Review it and share it. Thanks. Hey there, Leah here, and thanks for joining me in this episode, wherever you are, wherever you're tuning in. I hope you're having a great week, making some good progress in your business and also taking some time for you. So back when I was running my consulting firm, the marketing and web development firm, that was my first consulting business, it felt like my business partner and I had two modes, or like two settings. We had getting clients mode, where we were trying really hard to get clients and we were like hustling, trying to get meetings. And then we had doing

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work mode, where we got super busy heads down, doing the work these website projects that we had sold in. And it always felt like we were in one mode and only one mode at a time. And when we were in getting clients mode, we were like, really eager, dying to get a new client. We needed to get a new client. And then when we were in doing work mode, we didn't do any business development at all. We were like, heads down, totally focused on the work. But it felt like we were always swinging from one mode to another. And we'd get to the end of a project and we'd be back in getting clients mode, and we'd need to, like, figure out where we were and how to make something happen. And it's not like we didn't know that we needed to still work on getting clients even when we were busy with the clients we were working with. It's just that it was so hard to prioritize that when we were already busy. And that's something I hear from a lot of the women I talk to, which is how to balance doing business development with doing the actual work in your business. So I wanted to talk about that today. This problem goes by a lot of different names, and I hear it described in a few different ways. Sometimes it sounds like saying, I really need to balance doing business development and doing the work. Sometimes I hear it sounding like someone saying, My biggest challenge is doing marketing or doing business development when I'm so busy with client work. And sometimes it comes out in the form of something that sounds like this. The challenge for me is consistency, I tend to get in the business and then I stop working actively on the business while I'm focused on my clients. And sometimes you straight up, might not feel like you have time to do business development. And all of these are really the same problem, which is that you get so busy doing the work of your business and working with clients that you aren't able to spend time doing what you know you should be doing, which is doing business development to create new opportunities for clients and more client work. And it's easy to fall into this because, we might say, pursue a client opportunity or a few different potential clients. Maybe you get them through referrals, or maybe you get them through some sort of proactive way. And then you feel like, All right, okay, I got the clients. Now I don't need to get the clients anymore. And you kind of take your foot off the gas and shift your attention to working on the clients. But you probably know on some level that you should be doing business development all the time. You should be doing something proactive for business development, I tell my clients that business development isn't an event, like something you just do once. It's a process, something you do consistently. Because what happens when you don't do some type of proactive business development continuously is that when you are ready for a new project or a new client, you don't have the work lined up, and then you're in the position of having to, quote, unquote, like, drum up business. You know, you're on the back foot, which is a really difficult position to be in. And it's especially difficult in B to B when you're working with businesses as your clients, because the sales process can take anywhere from three to 18 months. Like, there's no situation in B to B where you realize you need a new client, you send an email to your list or reach out to someone who's referred you in the past, and then you get like a new client the next week. Like it just doesn't happen that way because of the sales process. So if you wait until you need a client, then you're still looking at a three to 18 month lag time to actually. Getting a client, and then there are all these downstream effects you might take on work that isn't a perfect fit or might not pay you enough just because you need the work, and it's really, really stressful to be in that position. But when you can do business development continually, you can have what we call a full pipeline of potential client opportunities. You can be nurturing potential client relationships, and you can create potential client opportunities among clients that are ready to work with you. And all of that reduces your anxiety, it reduces that scarcity mindset, and it reduces the revenue ups and downs in your business. And of course, that also has downstream effects, but they're positive, like when you have a full pipeline, you don't have to take on work just because you need the money, and you're less likely to agree to a fee or payment terms that aren't great just because you need the work and on and on. There's so many benefits to having a full pipeline, but the problem, of course, as we know, is, how do you do that when you're already busy with client work. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So first, let's define what we mean by business development for our purposes, because that term business development, biz dev, whatever it can be, a little loose for our purposes, business development means creating and nurturing opportunities for potential client work. Anything you do to either create a new client opportunity, like a new project or any new piece of work, or nurture an opportunity that's already in progress, like somebody that you're already talking to. So anything you do to bring new client work, new revenue, etc, closer to you, and I'm going to assume that you already know that you need to do business development consistently Even if you're busy, you know, we just talked about it, right? So I'm not here to convince you that you should. I'm here to tell you how to start and what to do. So I want to share my top three tips to do business development even when you're busy with client work. And these are not going to be like block your calendar, you know, time blocking, batching tasks or whatever, like time management tips, I'm going to assume you're pretty smart and you don't need me to make a podcast to tell you to block your time. But also it's because that's not going to work. If blocking our calendar were the real solution to this problem, then you could fix it by setting a little appointment on your Google Calendar. But we all know that that's not the solution. So this is not like those tips. These are tips that are actually going to work, but they're going to require a little more thought from you. All right. So tip number one, know your pipeline, your sales pipeline refers to the new clients you're talking to, and how much money that represents, how much potential revenue that represents and where they are in their sales process with you. So we talk about your sales pipeline, and I asked my students, so you're talking to this person, where are they in your sales pipeline? Because when you know your pipeline, you know where you need to focus your business development. So should you be spending time creating new potential client opportunities. Or are there potential clients that you can help along in the sales process and guide them forward to a close? You know, one reason that doing biz dev when you're busy can be difficult is because it feels like you have to go out and do all these things to create new opportunities. You know, you need to go out and get featured on like 50 podcasts, or you need to get a speaking gig on stage or on a virtual stage, or, you know, do like all these things, write an article and get it featured everywhere. Blah, blah, blah, right? That can feel really overwhelming. It can feel like a big project and a lot of work. But when we talk about doing business development for B to B. It doesn't mean a huge campaign or like some huge marketing push. Sometimes it just means knowing who in your pipeline can be moved forward to a close and focusing there. It can be a strategic email. It can mean following up with somebody who might have gone quiet, who's already in your pipeline, that can move them closer to signing on and closer to revenue. One of my clients was feeling really anxious about doing biz dev, because she felt like she needed to do, you know, all the things. But when we looked at her pipeline and started filling it in with the actual potential clients she was talking to, it turns out that she already had about $600,000

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in her pipeline currently. So instead of sort of freaking out and feeling like she had to do all the marketing stuff, we started focusing on, how can we move some of these opportunities forward? She was immediately relieved and a lot less stressed, and she could focus her energy where it's going to actually translate into revenue. So the first tip is, know your pipeline, so that with the limited time you have, you can spend it where it'll have the biggest impact. Tip number two is, have a system. Have a plan that you can activate, because what really keeps you from doing biz dev consistently isn't time. It's wasted time. It's the time you spend ramping up to do biz dev, because you have to, like, make up the steps every time, like, even if you did block your calendar, it's sitting down in that time and being like, okay, all right, well, what should I do now? And that's wasted time. But even more than that, it puts you into unfamiliar territory, because you're not totally sure what you should be doing, and that's really uncomfortable. So of course, you're going to gravitate back to doing client work, because there you know what to do. That's way more comfortable, whereas with biz dev, it's like, well, what do I do now and then having to start whatever it is you're going to do from scratch. It's kind of like the difference between if you wanted to wake up in the morning and go running, and you woke up and you had to go get your clothes and go get your shoes and figure out what route you were going to take, or what music you were going to listen to, or any of that, versus if you woke up You had your shoes ready. You had your clothes ready. You had your playlist set up, you had your route set up, you had your running plan set up, and all of that was ready to go, you'd be a lot more efficient in getting on the road and getting started, because when you have a system, you know what to do and how to do it. And so that means that if you have 10 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour to do a biz dev, you can just dive right in. And instead of doing things ad hoc, you know, like random acts of business development, you can activate the system. You can jump right in where you already know exactly what to do and how to do it and how to make progress quickly. So like the pack your pipeline system for LinkedIn that we teach students in the academy is a complete system, and the women who are using that system, they don't have tons of time, but they know that the time that they do spend is going to be efficient and effective. Or the shoulder tap system that we teach for how to restart conversations with warm prospects, you're not staring at a blank email wondering what to say, because you have a system that you can activate, you have a format of what to say. You know who to say it to, and you can just fill in the blanks and press send. And that Term Activate. That's the really important part here. You know another benefit of having a system is that you can dial it up or dial it down. All of my clients are also super busy with client work, and sometimes with the system they're using, their foot is on the gas right. They're putting a lot of energy into it. And sometimes they get busy and they can go into maintenance mode with the system, but you have to first have a system that you can do consistently and repeatedly. One of my clients needed to do business development, but was going through a lot of stuff in her personal life. So she still continued to post on LinkedIn and use the system, which didn't take her much time at all, and she still had clients coming to her during that time wanting to work with her. That's what's possible. When you have a system, you can activate and dial up or down depending on what's going on in your business or what's going on in your world. So that's number two, have a system. So Now tip number three, separate your pricing and how you're getting paid from the work. And when I say the work, I mean separate your pricing from time or deliverables or scope. So this is the case if you're charging hourly, or if you're charging a retainer that's sort of loosely based on a set of hours, or if you're getting paid based on what you're doing for your clients. And a lot of women, nearly all women, Believe on some level that to get paid, well, you know, to charge and get paid a lot, you have to do a lot for your clients, like you have to do a lot of things and promise a lot of things, and over deliver. You know, to get paid, well, you have to be busy working on your client's business, and that ties you to the work, because you know doing the work is how you get paid, and when that's the case, it causes your time to be committed to doing the work. So client work takes up a lot of your time because that's how you get paid. So you end up only squeezing business development in around the work, instead price your work using value based pricing, so that you get paid based on the value that your work provides to the client's business, not time or deliverables or scope, not in the activities you do for your clients, what we call the tactics in The value based messaging framework, get paid based on value, because when you can get paid based on value, you can charge a whole lot more. And most of my clients are getting paid anywhere from twice what they were making before to five times what they were making before. So one of my clients, who's an agile marketing consultant, used to charge $130 an hour for her work, which is like Not bad for an hourly rate, but when we redid her pricing using the value based pricing formula, she was able to sell in $30,000 contracts with less work, no hours. And at the time, this was all on site, and this had no on site work. So that separated the time for money exchange and really freed up. Per time. So the first benefit of value based pricing is that

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you have to actually just do less business development period because each client is paying you more, so you don't actually need as many clients, so you're less busy with client work. But the second benefit is that it really frees up your time, so you actually have time to do business development, and you have time to work on the business, not just in the business, on your client work. And you're not squeezing in business development or working on your own business, or anything else you want to do that's not client work. You're not squeezing it into the cracks between the client work, all right, so that's how you do business development, consistently, even when you're busy number one, know your pipeline. Number two, have a system you can activate, and number three, get paid based on value. I know it takes a little bit of thought and it takes a little bit of work, but we sort of knew that was going to be the case, right? Because for B2B, businesses like yours, there is no one silver bullet to getting clients, and I have a feeling that you if you're like the women I work with, you're not afraid of doing the work. You just want to make sure it's the right work. So when you can do the right work and put the right elements into place, you can do business development even when you're busy with client work, and you can do it more consistently with less effort and more effectively. Hey, everything we're talking about in this episode is part of the system. Women like you are learning in the academy. In the Academy, we help women consultants install the two systems. Every B to B consultant needs a marketing system to consistently attract the right clients and a sales system to lead a sales process to a yes and get paid more for every contract. So even if you've only gotten clients through referrals or word of mouth in the academy, you'll learn how to attract and sign clients outside your network, how to lead a sales process with confidence, and how to get paid for your value, not your time. And There's no cold calling or cold emailing involved, no changing your services or making a course, and you won't use any pushy sales tactics. That's just not our vibe. So if you like what you've heard here, the academy may be your right next step to learn how you can get these two systems in your consulting business and make progress faster and with fewer roadblocks. Head to smart gets paid.com/academy and apply, and we can chat about next steps. All right, see you over there. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai