One of the smartest ways you can improve your business is by improving your time management ability.

Now, you know that you can’t really manage time any more than Microsoft Project models reality.

The most important thing you can know is what are your priorities, and how you intend to get them done in a set amount of time. If something urgent comes up, you’ll be able to make an informed choice.

The best thing I got out of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was realizing that urgent doesn’t always mean important. And by knowing what was important, I was in control of what I did next.

Learning good time management principles will help you push your company forward. You’ll know where you’re going, what needs to be done, who needs to do it, and by when.

Obey the Laws (There’s Laws?)

I’ll mention the two biggest “laws” that have the largest impact on your productivity.

When you can use these to your advantage, you will be amazed at how much you get done during the day.

Parkinson’s Law

This principle states that any task will grow to use up the time scheduled. For example, if you set aside 3 hours to do a report, it will generally take you 3 hours to complete.

You might have been able to get that same report done in an hour had that been the time limit.

You can use this to your advantage for time wasters like checking email or social media. Set a timer for five minutes, and stop at the end.

Pareto Principle

This law you’ve probably heard many times as the 80/20 Rule. A minority of effort, inputs, and causes leads to the majority of results, outputs, and rewards.

It’s been expanded as well for dealing with people. Eighty percent of your revenue is brought in by twenty percent of your clients.

For time management, it could be that 20% of your employees take up 80% of your attention and time.

And 80% of your tasks can be done in 20% of the time. Therefore, you may want to get them done first. Or have that first block of time set aside for that 20% that needs your mind when it’s fresh.

It’s a good idea to record and track what you do and how long it takes you. Then you can start identifying trends and adjust your calendar depending on how you work best.

Good Habits Help You Go from Good to Great

A habit is something we knew was good for us, and we kept reminding ourselves to do it, until we didn’t need to remind ourselves anymore.

Brushing our teeth every day is an example.

Going to the gym could be another.

Time management habits include focusing, prioritization, planning, and rewarding ourselves for achieving our goals.

Learning to Prioritize

When you spend the time evaluating your priorities for the day, week, month, and year, you will know when to say “yes” and when to say “no.”

It’s so easy to get distracted.

For example, your plan is to build out your presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Pintarest. Along comes TicToc.

Should you drop everything and start building that up?

Well, it really depends on your target audience and your goals. (But chances are, you should just stake out your real estate, and then add in building that up in another quarter or year)

Knowing your priorities helps you make better decisions and stay focused on what’s important for you and your business.

Learning to Delegate

This is the biggest stumbling block for entrepreneurs. You started with only you doing all the work. And so you think you’re the only one who can do it right.

Even if you’re small, it’s a good idea to step back and take a hard look at what you’re doing, and how to outsource it.

Always have success metrics defined. Otherwise you’re setting the other person up for failure. And give them some leeway to try different things. They may find a better way.

Learning to Use A Timer

There are many ways to use a timer for time management. As I mentioned under Parkinson’s law, you can use it as a hard stop for an activity that could turn into a time suck.

Another way is to set work sprints. The most famous is called The Pomodoro Technique. You choose one task on your list and set your timer for 25 minutes.

With total focus, work on that selected task until the timer goes off. Take a short five minute break. Then go for another 25 minute sprint with another break. For every four sprints, take a 15-30 minute break.

There are other variations on this including working 45 minutes, 15 minute break, 45 minutes, 1 hour break. You can find many resources on the internet about it.

Evaluate your tasks, and how long you like to work. You will find that your focus improves as you consistently do this.

Keep a notepad nearby and hand write down things that pop up into your mind. That lets your brain know you heard it, and you will deal with it later.

What Do You Really Need to Know?

Systems and tools are there to help you achieve your goal. But a system and a tool won’t do your work for you. Give yourself time to play around and find what works best for you.

Having a routine will help you manage your time better. Your mind will know that it’s time to work, and your focus will improve.

Doing a weekly plan will help you pre-think any problems that may come up. And you’ll be aware of major deadlines and appointments so you’re prepared for them.

And do plan rewards for achieving your goals. You want work to stay enjoyable.

You probably know what a sales funnel is by experience if you’ve bought internet marketing products online.

First you read an interesting sales page with an irresistible offer, and you click through. You buy something usually for under $25.

Then you go to another sales page with more goodies for a higher price point that’s usually under $75.

Whether you buy or not, you are then directed to another sales page with either a subscription or a high priced coaching or all-inclusive package.

Sometimes if you say “No, thank you,” you’ll get directed to a similar offer with less functionality. Maybe if they were offering more training, you only get the ebook but not the videos.

The first two are called upsells and the last one is called a downsell. You’ll also see cross-sells for a different product. If a marketer is just starting out, they may refer you to someone else’s product.

Or if they’re very established, they’ll offer one of their other products and try to connect the dots for how it will help you if you purchase it.

Quick Tip: If you don’t see the No, search on it. Sometimes, some marketers try to hide it to force you to say yes, which I think is wrong.

And if there isn’t that option? I check my email inbox to see if I was charged, and if I have enough information to access my purchases. If I do, I’ll just leave the page.

If I don’t? I’ll thank my lucky stars I didn’t get charged and move on.

The First Step for Your Funnel

So how do you set up these sales funnels for your products or services?

Let’s look first at your offerings. You need to have offers that lead from zero cost up to your highest paid offering.

What Is Zero Cost?

A zero cost offer is one that only costs the prospect their email address. These include:

• Free reports
• 15-20 minute phone call
• Email series
• Video training series
• An ebook

Your goal is to get the person’s email address on your mailing list so you can build up a relationship with them.

We’ll go into this more in another blog. It’s effectively the top of the funnel. You want to try to get a whole bunch of people in and have them qualify themselves to move along your sales pipeline.

Place the Stepping Stones

Your next level would be a very low cost option. You would want it to be under $20. Perhaps you’ve seen “dime sales”, but they often stop at $19.

The next level is medium priced from about $50-$200. Then you could have a subscription for recurring revenue.

Ultimately you want a high priced item such as private coaching. You may never have done it before, and that’s okay.

They important thing is to have multiple things to offer your clients.

And it’s important to place them one after the other.

Customers may skip and want to go straight for the expensive item because they think it will solve their immediate problem. Congratulations! That’s a wonderful problem to have.

Additionally, you will want to create a “downsell” for your higher priced items. For example, if you were selling a course with 10 videos and 2 coaching calls, perhaps you could offer just the videos for a lower price.

What could you create?

• Video training course
• Ebook
• Group coaching
• Done for you solutions
• Phone calls

Don’t Do This Alone

You don’t have to create everything yourself.

Most people outsource the actual creation of videos or ebooks or courses. All you have to do is review it to make sure it’s high quality.

It’s your name on it after all.

Setting Up the Actual Sales Funnel

When you’re ready to send people to your list of product or services, you will have completed many steps to get there including lining up affiliates, and testing the whole funnel.

Two of the best programs I’ve purchased and used are:

• John Thornhill’s Partnership to Success
• Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula

If you have any questions about either of these programs, let me know and I’ll be happy to answer them.

Have you been trying to build up buzz for an event or a launch and not seen the results you were hoping for?

I’ve recently seen some events that didn’t go as well as the organizers would have hoped, and they both made the same mistakes

Do You Do This Simple Thing?

If you want people to show up for your event, you need to remind them. And you need to clearly state what they need to do.

Is it a webinar? Remind them of the link they need to click, and when they should be there.

Is it an onsite event? Remind them of the date and time and offer suggestions for parking or public transportation.

Are you more likely to attend an event that helps you to show up? I know I am.

Once I debated with someone about this. He felt that people are adults, and if they say they’re going to show up, then it’s on them.

I countered that even a doctor will call to remind you of the appointment. They do that because they know it works.

How to Begin with Buzz

We’re taught to build suspense to get people’s interest. And that is a great way to start.

But you have to tell people enough eventually.

This one onsite event that I thought I was interested in going to lost me.

Why?

Well, here’s what they published a few weeks ago when one of my clients asked if I wanted to go with her.

This is interesting. They don’t say what the new feature is, but it’s clear that it’s something that’s going to help my small business.

They say there’s networking opportunities. Well, this doesn’t interest me very much. But learning and exploring sounds potentially interesting.

There was a nice agenda that clearly showed how the 3.5 hour event would go.

It sounds pleasant, right?

You won’t believe what they didn’t do next

They didn’t email. Nothing.

My client RSVP’d for us and they sent her an email that she had been registered.

But they dropped the ball.

If I were running this campaign, I would have sent out more teaser emails about this big product and how it will help people like me with a small business.

And I would certainly have sent out reminders.

My client called me this morning and was annoyed that they didn’t send anything. She felt like they’d forgotten us. Or worse.

Maybe we hadn’t been properly registered.

And maybe, it had been cancelled but we didn’t know.

Have you experienced this?

Once I was signed up for a Bing onsite event to learn more about their advertising and how to get certified.

They did send out regular emails. But in one of them, they mentioned meeting in San Jose. But no address. Microsoft’s offices are in Mountain View.

So, ok, I replied to the message. And it was sent from a no-reply account.

There was no phone number. I had no way of getting in touch with the organizers.

So I thought it really funny when I got an email saying “Sorry we missed you.”

Build Your Buzz

As I mentioned, you can be coy about what you’re offering so long as people are clear what you want in return.

Do you want them to show up for a webinar? What will happen on the webinar? How long is it? What will they learn?

Then start a drip feed with a little bit more information to partially remind them of what’s coming up, and keep them interested in the topic.

This also builds up their micro-commitments. More on that in a second.

We have way too much noise going on around us. Let your campaign be a sweet sound that they want to hear more about.

Ask people to share it with others that may find it useful or interesting. You could offer them some kind of gift.

Have you seen the web pages where it asks you to put in the names and emails of friends?

I haven’t seen it as much lately but it could be an easy way of building up your buzz.

Keeping the Ball Rolling

You’ve reached the end of the event. Now is the time to get a commitment.

If you’ve been staying in touch and building up the micro-commitments, it’s easier for them to say yes to a larger commitment.

If you’re not selling anything, but want to build a relationship, give them a challenge and tell them to email you when they’ve completed it.

This gives you an opportunity to email those who didn’t by sending out an email after ten days asking how they’re doing, and if they’ve run into any questions.

Remember to thank the people who attended with an email. And email those that didn’t attend saying they were missed and ask if they had any questions.

Yes, I did say I found it annoying before. But what was annoying was that I couldn’t email in questions beforehand. I like when webinars email me the replay.

If you were selling something, and people didn’t buy, you have an opportunity to reach out and find out why they didn’t purchase.

At a marketing conference, Perry Belcher said he did that once and landed six more sales. Mostly the people couldn’t figure out the financing right then, so he put together a special package for their situations.

So go plan your event and create the steps you’ll take to keep people engaged and showing up.

Have you heard that using LinkedIn to prospect is a great way to find better clients for your B2B business?

Using LinkedIn for Prospect Research

The first step is learning who your prospect is. You will want to spend time researching decision makers’ job titles and company size.

You can also research competitors, as well as industry related groups that you could join.

How Do You Break the Ice?

Then you can look for other areas that you may have in common with the prospects. Perhaps you’re both members of an honor society.

Finding something in common is great for an “icebreaker” when reaching out to them.

Discover Acres of Diamonds

When you look at a prospects’ history, you may find some companies that you didn’t know existed.

This is an easy way to expand your prospect list.

Research the company in your usual ways. If it’s a good fit, you can ask your connections for referrals.

Find Your Former Customers

If you’ve been in business for some time, you can use LinkedIn to research former customers to find where they’ve landed.

This gives you a warm prospect since they would remember you fondly. And you’ve found a potentially new company to add.

Is LinkedIn Premium Worth It?

LinkedIn Premium may not be worth it for you just starting out. You may not want to have the expenditure until you’ve tested out your sales funnel.

When starting out, your’e going to make mistakes. It’s best to make those mistakes before you spend money. As of right now, Premium Business is $59.99/month.

You need to test:

• Companies
• Titles
• Sales scripts
• Landing pages
• Offers and packages

Once you have tested and have a good feel for your sales funnel, then you may want to consider going to Premium Business. It provides additional information on people and companies as well as unlimited searches.

Sales Navigator Pro as of right now is $79.99/month and provides better search filters as well as the ability to make notes. It’s more like a true Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).

LinkedIn Groups Are A Goldmine

You can prospect in LinkedIn groups in a few different ways.

First, you can post an introduction of yourself and your offerings. This will let others know what you can do for them.

You may wish to search and see if others have posted similar offerings. Then you can tailor your introduction differently. Maybe you will be a specific industry or a niche within it.

Either way, you want your value proposition as well as your uniqueness front and center.

Secondly, you can provide useful help when people ask questions. They will remember how you helped them when the time comes to hire someone.

Finally, you can reach out in a message. It doesn’t count towards any limits because you’re connected in a group.

Create Your Fishing Hole

Depending upon your business type, you could create your own group, and invite your prospects to join.

This would allow you to share useful information with them as well as keeping them up to date on your services.

Subtlety is the key. If they feel you’re trying to sell to them too much, they’ll leave the group.

The prospects need to feel the value first before they’ll be interested in learning more.

Also you’ll need to ensure that others aren’t trying to prospect in your group. You will need to spend time regularly in there answering questions and removing improper posts.

Skills Endorsements Provides Unusual Leads

Inspecting the skills endorsements for a prospect allows you to see who endorsed them. And that can provide you with some highly targeted contacts.

You can quickly see people who are on the same title level as well as one or two levels above.

Then you can scale your sales script based on the hiring level of the prospect.

Think Differently

Review your contacts’ activities. They may be congratulating someone on a new position at a company you’re wanting to get into.

Or perhaps the person they’re congratulating got promoted into a decision maker’s position that aligns with your ideal client.

Your next step is to ensure you have a warm relationship with your contact, and then ask for introductions.

Tips to Get Around the Dreaded Commercial Limit

If you haven’t run into the commercial limit, it’s when LinkedIn cuts you off from searching for people.

Their warning message is that you appear to be using LinkedIn for a more commercial rather than personal use.

The limit restriction resets at midnight Pacific Time on the first day of the calendar month. And there’s no appealing.

LinkedIn is constantly changing, so you may have a different limit each month.

Usually you can still search, but the results are a subset of the full amount you could have gotten.

See What Is Recommended for You

LinkedIn offers suggestions. It used to be called People You May Know. And I’ve seen that show up occasionally.

These results do not count towards your monthly limit, so explore away!

Starts With A …….

One easy way to get a lot of good results that don’t count towards your limit is to type in a name like “Peter” or “Lara.”

When you hit enter, you’ll get all the results that you can then narrow down with filters.

If you’re looking for new people ideas, try typing in a job title and see who pops up.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn is a great tool for prospecting. You can learn a lot about a person, and find out additional people and skills. And you can meet new people in groups.

All of these are free.

If you use LinkedIn for a lot of prospecting, you may wish to consider one of their paid plans. It’s best to wait until after you’ve tested your sales offerings and scripts so you know it will be most effective.

Want to connect to me on LinkedIn?

If you haven’t, you will want to hurry and set up your account for Bing ads.

Getting Set Up With Bing Ads

If you haven’t already, go to Bing Ads and create an account. I had one automatically because of my Hotmail email account. However, I didn’t want to use that since it was a personal email account, and I wanted my ads to be associated with my business.

This section is short because so is signing up. It’s a lot easier than other online advertisers.

The next step is to either import a campaign from Google Ads or create a new campaign. For this post, let’s only look at importing your existing Google ads.

Importing Your Google Ads

What can you import? Almost everything.

• Campaigns
• Keywords
• Negative keywords and negative keyword lists
• Ad Groups
• Labels
• Expanded text ads
• Shopping campaigns and product feeds (if available)
• Targeting

It’s not exactly a one to one; however, it captures a lot.

With ad group level ad extensions (site link, call extensions), it can’t be imported. You can only import the account-level extensions. That includes:

• App extensions
• Call extensions
• Callout extensions
• Image extensions
• Location extensions
• Review extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Structured snippet extensions

Broad match keywords will come in as a keyword phrase.

Targeting will capture

• Age & Gender
• Device
• Ad scheduling
• and Location

You can only import active campaigns by default with the Bing ads interface. There is a checkbox if you want to be able to see the paused campaigns.

What’s Up Next

Once you’re in, the interface is a nice blend of Google and Facebook.

In the next of this series, I’ll go over setting up an ad and an audience.

Normally I’d be posting a series on goal setting being as this is the last week of the year. And I will get to that tomorrow.  Today I felt it was important to pick apart a small business that just failed near me.

I have to say I don’t know exactly why it failed. But I have my suspicions. And it’s a good thought experiment for you as well.

The bottom line is I doubt they did their homework before opening up the shop.  It was a small bakery that specialized in allergy free products.  So no nuts. No gluten. And no customers. So now it’s stripped bare with an eviction notice on the door.

On an online community forum, there was a heartfelt plea at the end of November for people to go support a local business. Oh yeah…and how yummy the food really was. It was her friend’s store.

I don’t have food allergies. It never spoke to me.  Plus, I don’t eat many baked goods.  Honestly I’m more of a deer. Waive some pretzels or chips in front of me and I’m a goner.

Don’t Be Negative

Anyway, when this store opened, they highlighted all of the gluten free and nut free and how it helps people with food allergies.  They had banners and signs and handing out samples extolling the allergen-free-ness of it all.

When talking with my husband, he pointed out that it’s negative advertising.  Who wants to be seen going to such a place….won’t it tell the world you have a medical problem?

It also inherently excludes people who didn’t have allergies. Why would they go there?

The bottom line is they first should have focused on delicious baked goods.  Then the fact that it’s healthy.  Maybe that it’s allergen free.  But first, hook people in with something positive.

I need to step into my own soapbox lecture and say that it is good to have something unique to stand out.  And that’s something your business and marketing plan will need to cover.

But if you’re trying to drain traffic from the supermarket bakery next door (with $5 for 24 large chocolate chip cookies) and the Starbucks baked goods at the end of the strip mall, you need people to immediately think “Yum.”

Don’t Ask Your Mom

I suspect that it was someone who learned to bake for their family. And then had a friend or two who said “Oh these are so good. You should open a shop.”  Anthony Bourdain mentioned this syndrome in one of his books. And it was in the chapter on why most restaurants fail. Just because you bake good things that your friends like doesn’t mean it will work as a business.

Plus, friends won’t be truly honest. I had a client who was working on a liquid vitamin business.  All of his family swore they’d buy if he made it.  Well, he invested $10,000 in product and filing for a copyright and setting up a website, etc. etc. etc.  Being a good marketing consultant, I recommended talking with stores where it would be sold.  He didn’t.

And sure enough, his family reneged and no one bought any of it.

Invest In A Marketing Study

You need to find out if your target market really will buy from you.

One program I’m a part of is Internet Business Mastery Academy.  You can listen to their podcast on iTunes. I’ve been listening to them since 2005 and have learned so much.  But I digress.

Jeremy Frasden talked about a friend of his who spend thousands of dollars making yoga mats. And then was astonished when no one bought them.  He designed what he thought would be the ideal mat. But he never asked the people if they would buy it.

Asking people also helps you identify your price point.  Maybe a yoga mat is worth $100 but no one would ever think of spending more than $40 at the local studio or gym. So you shouldn’t invest in a yoga mat that costs you $50 per piece and be surprised when no one is buying at twice the expected cost.

You also need to find your partners as well. Who will refer customers to you. In the case of the specialty bakery, I would think about partnering up with nutritionists and doctors. (I mean, if they can pass out free samples of medicine, why not pass out coupons for food which is nature’s medicine).

Know Before You Need to Know

I’m a huge follower of Michael E. Gerber and the EMyth. He just released a new book which I’m about 1/3 of the way finished. But start with the basics with the EMyth Revisited. I enjoy my Audible version for when I’m walking. You can find it for free in your library, I have no doubt. It’s a well known book.

Then there’s the Emyth Mastery which goes into a ton of detail about what facts and figures you need to put together.  But by the end you’ll have a solid plan. You’ll know what people are willing to buy and for how much.

Also if you want to open a brick and mortar store, learn from the big companies. You can’t buy into a franchise unless corporate is certain it is in a good market.

Conclusion

1. Really get to know your customer before you open your business
2. Get partners to help you build your base
3. Don’t rely upon negative advertising
4. Focus on your business as a business

I suspect the former owner of the bakery wouldn’t have opened it up. Or perhaps she would have known better ways of finding customers. I won’t know personally. And I doubt I’d ask.  When I was actively looking for marketing clients, I found that most people wanted to do everything themselves and really didn’t like someone coming in and asking them questions about how things were going. Despite what a lot of sales training tells you.

I hope she keeps on baking. She could publish a cookbook. And have a website with an email autoresponder to generate revenue. She could publish baking classes on Udemy or Skillshare.

We’d all be stuck in the dark if Thomas Edison hadn’t been afraid to keep failing.  Just because the initial idea doesn’t work out doesn’t mean you should give up the dream.