Have you ever gotten to the end of the day, knew you had been incredibly busy all day, but been unable to identify exactly what you accomplished?
You knew that pursuing the lead generation techniques that you have identified as critical for your organization needed to be a priority, but somehow you just couldn’t get to it.
Maybe you started the day with a list of important things that needed to happen, including that blog you were going to write, or that offer you were going to finish up and get out on your website, but that list got thwarted somewhere along the way. Odds are you got caught up in the good old tyranny of the urgent. You might have seen this grid that identifies the things that need to be done in any given day or week in terms of their importance and their urgency.
For those of you who like words more than visuals, here are some examples:
Urgent and important:
Client deadlines
Something broken that has to be fixed immediately
Important but not urgent:
Implementing your ongoing lead generation techniques
A team member needing assistance to move forward on a project
Reading key industry news to stay educated in your area
Urgent but not important:
100 emails a day that I feel like I should respond to right away
Somebody else’s emergency that I should not get caught up into
Not urgent and not important:
Making sure I watch the latest rerun of Big Bang Theory
If you are anything like me, your desire is to make sure that you and the people who work with you spend the bulk of their time and energy every day on the upper half of the diagram, focused on what is important. The Urgent and Important stuff is the stuff you absolutely have to do, and some days those lists do steal away our days.
Sadly though, the bottom half of the diagram takes up more of our time than we want it to. We give way to the urgency of others, or we simply twiddle away our time doing things that are neither urgent nor important. This doesn’t just happen on the weekends, it happens at work too.
So, why write about this in relation to lead generation techniques?
If you have been following our blog at all you might have noticed a theme. The theme is a simple one and it is this: Success at inbound marketing requires that you stay committed to the top right quadrant.
You establish solid lead generation techniques like writing 3 blogs a week, creating solid offers online that are based on what your potential customers are looking for, posting your content out to social media and interacting with your followers. The commitment is made and everyone agrees if you are going to grow your company and gain new customers, this is really important. The problem is that the sense of urgency will come and go depending on the day, your list of tasks and the tyranny of the urgent. Pretty soon a couple of weeks go by and you haven’t
done anything to move your lead generation plan forward.
What can you do?
There are options for you if you are wrestling with staying on task.
First of all you can revisit your plan and re-commit. If you do this, make yourself or your staff a tangible and visible goal that everyone can see:
- Reach 50 blogs posted by Christmas
- Create 1 offer each month until we have 20 offers
- Have daily interactions on our LinkedIn page and Twitter feeds
Second, if it becomes very clear that your growth goals and your resources are not aligned well, consider outsourcing some of the work to someone who can help you. Whether you find a writer you can subcontract to, or an agency like ours who can help you with implementing a larger strategy that can meet your growth goals.
Our desire is for you to be successful as you grow your business and implement long term lead generation techniques. Let us know if we can help and best of luck as you re-commit!
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