I had a bit of a revelation recently. I found out that I could spend one-eighth as much time marketing my business while making twice as much money.
Let me start from the beginning…
In early 2013, I struck out on my own and began consulting full time. If you’re a consultant, you know that business development—the process of marketing your services, getting leads, and moving them through your sales process—is a full-time job. A lot of consultants I’ve talked to spend about 80% of their time doing this kind of “rainmaking” and only 20% on actual, billable work.
On the advice of other entrepreneurs, I developed a number of “channels” that I was marketing through, including:
- Content marketing (writing blog posts, emails, etc.)
- Networking (going to networking groups, conferences, Chamber of Commerce events, etc.)
- “Call everyone you know” (calling friends & family & other contacts, explaining what I do, and asking for a referral)
- Offering a free site analysis to prospects
I was spending nearly 40 hours each month doing the networking dance, and another 30 hours creating content for my Web site. These two activities were taking up the vast majority of my time—to the point that I wasn’t able to spend near as much time working on the other channels.
As time went on, I developed a sneaking suspicion that what I was spending time on wasn’t what was producing results for my business. That is, I would spend 40 hours networking, but I wasn’t getting much out of it.
So I went back through my calendar for the last few months, and I totaled up all the time I spent on each of these categories. I did this in Excel—and it was a bear to work with. Here’s what I came up with:
Well, that makes sense… Obviously I spent a lot of time on the time-consuming marketing activities. Nothing surprising there, right?
Then I went through and totaled where my actual clients came from in that same time period.
Yikes. This doesn’t look great, right? Some of the places where I was spending the least amount of time appear to be doing as well or better than the really time-consuming activities. Let’s look at the value-per-hour of my marketing efforts:
Holy cow. What’s wrong with me?! Why in God’s name did I spend nearly 120 hours to make less than $2000 when I could have spent one-eighth that much time to make twice as much money?!
That’s when I realized: this is something I need to always be tracking.
If I’m going to track the productivity of my marketing activities in the long term, I need to fix the broken process I’m using right now—Excel is great for a prototype, but it’s a pain in the ass to use in the long term.
I need to be able to:
- Evaluate at a glance where my time is best spent—I don’t want a table of numbers, I want rich, informative graphs
- Log the time I spent on a marketing activity (or a sale) in < 10 seconds, from whatever device I have with me
That’s it. I don’t need a $10,000 CRM with a billion other functions that just serve as cognitive noise. I just needed to be able to track and visualize my marketing.
So I built a Web app. It’s called GoldPanning, and I’m taking signups for it now. In September, I’m going to open up the beta to 15 consultants, and if they like it, I’ll start taking orders for it from the world.
If you want to start spending less time on bullshit and more time booking clients, you should sign up.