The beginning of each day at this point is spent building yourself up. You are gaining valuable knowledge and journaling your ideas and creating daily priorities. Let us now inject a very simple hack, but one that has a great amount of power.
You are now at the office, you might give direction to your troops and coordinate some activities. Early into your day, I want you to pick up the phone and call one of your current clients. You can print out a list of all your clients and randomly pick one per day, or find your 20% (remember the 80/20 rule….20% of your customers will provide you with 80% of your revenue) and concentrate on them first.
What do you talk about? The beauty of this exercise is that you don’t need a script. You don’t need to have a product special to talk about. You are not pushing a new service…you are simply calling and asking them how things are going with their business.
TIP: Search the web for an interesting article about their field of business and refer to it. “I was reading an article this morning about the financial industry and I thought of you. Are you being affected by <topic>?”
Let’s turn the tables and imagine the effect of one of your suppliers calling you simply to see how you are doing, with no sales agenda. Now answer these questions:
- If an opportunity arose, would I give that supplier priority?
- Does this supplier see me as an individual rather then a client?
- Do they care about my success?
Most likely, the answers would be very positive. That simple 5-minute hack will change the dynamics of the relationship from vendor/client to advisor/peer.
Try it for a week and let me know how it affected your business.