Things You Do Not Have Time Not to Do

• You don’t have time not to prospect. Prospecting isn’t ever going to be something urgent enough to capture your attention until is too late for prospecting to be of any use to you. Once you fall behind, it’s impossibly difficult to catch up because you can’t do anything about the sales cycle.
• You don’t have time not to nurture your dream clients. Your dream clients are going to take a long time to win. They are already working with your competitor, and they have relationships that they aren’t going to throw away because you call them. The best time to start nurturing your dream clients was two years ago. The next best time is right now.
• You don’t have time not to develop yourself personally and professionally. You live in time of accelerating, disruptive change. Keeping up with this change is going to require that you reinvent yourself, over and over again. You don’t have time not to work on that reinvention. You are going to need a different mindset and skill set in the future, and you need to build that now.
• You don’t have time not to say thank you. The little things are still the big things. Gratitude is one of them. If your prospective client makes time to meet with you, send a note of appreciation. If they give you their business, you should be grateful enough to send a personal note thanking them for their trust in you.
• You do not have time not to have a presence with your clients. You have time for your email. You have time to open a browser. You are present on Facebook and Instagram. If you have time for that, you have to show up and have a presence at your client’s location. Presence is proof you care, and you don’t have time not to be present. Complacency and entitlement are things that catch up with you without warning.

• You don’t have time not to come up with the next idea. The way to retain clients is to go from one valuable initiative to the next without interruption. That’s quarter after quarter, and year after year, always pressing forward. A lack of new value is what opens you up to being competitively displaced.

You have time for whatever you believe is important. If you don’t have time for what is important, you need to pause and reevaluate your priorities. There is no time to do this when it’s already too late.