Building the habit

Everything else in this playbook is technique. This page is the part that makes technique pay, which is a rhythm you can keep on a normal week with a van to load or a payroll to run.

The businesses that do well with these reports are almost never the most polished. They are the ones who do the same small set of things every weekday morning.

The daily rhythm

Morning, twenty minutes. The report lands. Read the websites of the two or three that fit you best. Send a connection request to everyone on the list. Write to the ones that looked right. Then ring the two or three you would most like to win. Write down what you did, which takes about two minutes.

Afternoon, ten minutes, if you have it. Try anyone you could not reach this morning, see who has accepted on LinkedIn, and deal with anything your notes say is due today.

That is the whole job. On a quiet day it is half an hour. On a good day it runs longer because you are talking to people, which is rather the point.

Keeping track without buying anything

A notebook works. A simple spreadsheet is better. Six columns is plenty.

One rule makes the whole thing work, which is that everybody has a next step with a date against it. Written down, tomorrow morning runs itself. Left in your head, warm prospects quietly slip away, and they were the reason for the exercise.

A quarter of an hour on a Friday

At the end of the week, count four things.

1. Connections made
2. Emails sent
3. Conversations had
4. Next steps agreed

Then three quick jobs. Notice what worked, which will usually be one particular way of opening a call or one email that pulled replies, and do more of that next week. Tidy up anyone who has reached the end of their fortnight, sending the last friendly email and moving them to the list to try again later. And put an actual date in your diary for everybody who said to try them again in a few months.

Then close the book for the week. These numbers are not a judgement. They are there so that you can see movement, and there usually is some.

What a month looks like

Week one. The first calls are rarely smooth, which matters less than you would think, because everybody on the list has already shown an interest. The routine exists by Friday, and that was week one's real job.

Week two. The opening stops feeling like a script and starts feeling like something you say. First proper conversations, and probably a first request to send something over.

Week three. It starts paying you back. Callbacks arrive from voicemails you had written off. People accept your connection requests from a fortnight ago and reply to a message. Somebody tells you to try again in the autumn, and you put it in the diary.

Week four. You can see the shape of it now. Today's report being worked this morning. The last fortnight's names, each with a next step. People you have politely finished with for now, some with dates against them. And a handful of live conversations, outlines sent and quotes out.

By the end of a month you will have connected with somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people in your own market, written to around fifty of them, and spoken properly to the handful you most wanted. We will not promise you conversion numbers, because your trade and your offer are your own. But that shape is dependable, and it is the same shape every customer who does well describes.

Keeping yourself honest

• Count what you did, not what you read. The only question at the end of the day is whether the connection requests went out and the emails were written.
• Anchor it to the report. The same trigger every morning. Report lands, first coffee, twenty minutes, before the day fills up.
• Do the list before your own inbox. Your email will wait twenty minutes quite happily.
• Be kind to yourself about it. Any day where the connection requests went out is a day that counted. If you miss one, start again the next morning. Doing it steadily matters far more than doing it perfectly.

The whole playbook in one paragraph

You approve one email and choose your audience. We send it steadily on your behalf and watch what comes back. Every weekday morning you get ten hot prospects, named and reachable. You give them twenty minutes, connecting with all of them, writing to the ones that fit, and ringing the two or three you would most like to win. You keep a simple note of who is due what, you leave people kindly when the time is not right, and you look back for a quarter of an hour on a Friday. After a month the evidence is in your diary.