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4 top tips to balancing strategic focus and client workload

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might be wondering where I’ve been the past few weeks. The truth is that I’ve fallen victim to the common (but good) problem that I’ve taken on some new clients which have kept me so busy that I haven’t had time to keep up my blog.

Yes, this is a good problem to have. After all, isn’t that what all this blogging and social media posting is for? To generate interest in me and my business, and win new clients, earn revenue and grow my business?! Of course it is.

So why do I feel guilty? It’s because I know that the “right” thing to do is keep my balance…

  • The balance between working in my business and working on my business.
  • The balance between keeping a strategic focus and dealing with the day-to-day.
  • The balance between doing the current work and maintaining my sales pipeline (through lead generation activities and cultivating prospects).
  • The balance between delighting my new clients while still maintaining my existing client relationships.

Some may scoff at the above but I truly believe that the moment you take your finger off the pulse, your pipeline dries up. It’s like dating someone new and losing touch with all your girlfriends only to find the relationship ends and you’re all alone because you didn’t support your friendships. OK, maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but you get my point, I’m sure!

So this week, I’m writing this article for me. To remind myself of the top 4 things I need to do to help me achieve my balance again. And hopefully it’ll help you too.

1. Admit you have a problem.

Clearly it’s not a serious problem. It’s great to have lots of client work on. It’s more than great. It’s brilliant! By this point, I just mean that it’s important to acknowledge that you have momentarily lost a bit of your strategic focus and that you need to just take a step up the ladder and take a more big picture view.

2. Take a moment to check your strategy.

I’ve deliberately used the word “strategy” here. Strategy can be defined in a few different ways when it comes to running your business. It could be reviewing your business plan. Maybe you just need to take a glance at your marketing strategy. Or you could check the health of your pipeline – have you got many leads, have some hot prospects gone cold? How long has it been since you last contacted your clients, especially your most loyal ones?

3. Do 1-3 things to reset your strategy focus.

Some examples are:

  • book in to a networking event
  • do a few cold calls or send a few emails out to new prospects
  • follow up some prospects that have gone lukewarm or cold
  • call and check in with a couple of clients
  • update a small section of your business or marketing plan
  • action 1 or 2 items from your strategic action list
  • schedule a bunch of posts to your social media pages
  • publish a blog article, or
  • publish your newsletter.

The aim here is to take your brain out of the day-to-day for a few moments and just remind yourself that you’re running a marathon not a sprint and you mustn’t neglect your strategic work.

As you can probably guess, writing this blog article was one of the 3 things I did today to get myself back on the strategic band wagon. I’m also going to work on my monthly newsletter over the weekend. Which leads me to my final point…

4. Be realistic about what you can do.

Do what you can. You don’t want to jeopardise client relationships by neglecting them or doing a bad job in delivering your product or service, which invariably happens if you are spreading yourself too thin. You’ve probably heard the related stats:

“5-20% chance of selling to a new prospect vs 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer.”

“It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.”

Source: “75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics” by Help Scout.

 

I hope you enjoyed this week’s article after a short hiatus from my blog. I’ve got some great articles coming up relating to recent projects, including topics such as best practice techniques to improve staff engagement and what to look for when creating a risk and compliance framework for an organisation. So if you’re an SME especially, you won’t want to miss those. I’ll also be publishing some articles for Expert360 and Modewest Magazine over the coming month, so stay tuned for those.

* Image sourced from Unsplash.

Peer-Business-Consulting-Angeline-Zaghloul-5What did you think of this article? Post your comments and questions below. And if you found this useful, please share with your networks.

About the Author: Angeline Zaghloul is an expert in business strategy, client management and business processes, and is the Principal of Peer Business Consulting, a Sydney-based consultancy providing strategy and operations support to startups and SMEs. Angeline also publishes a weekly blog which provides research, advice and tips on key issues facing businesses.

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