If You Only Had 8 Hours to Create an Opportunity

Let’s say you have eight hours to prospect and it is absolutely essential that you generate the very best possible results. You need to create an opportunity, and that means you need to book an appointment. Failure is not an option.

What would you do with those eight hours?

• You’ve got a lot of Twitter followers. That’s super helpful. You can do some social listening and try to search for keywords that indicate that someone is a prospect for your product. You could tweet at them, or you could send them a DM.
• Your LinkedIn profile is the envy of your peers. It’s all tricked out with posts and videos. It’s impressive. You could comment on some posts, hang out in a group and try to engage with prospects, hoping that someone engages with you. Maybe you’ll start sending InMails. That’s got to be faster.
• You could write a blog post that exactly describes your dream client’s challenges and explains to them why they should change what they are doing with your best ideas as to how to do it. Optimized for SEO, that post will get traffic, likes, and shares.
• Nothing gets more attention than a motivational quote. You could create a sweet inspirational graphic and post it on Facebook and Instagram. You’re going to get tons of likes, and attention is what you need. Maybe you’ll work on a story for SnapChat.

All of these are valid and valuable methods for generating attention, building your reputation, nurturing relationships, and marketing yourself as a thought leader. What they are not, however, is prospecting. While these activities are important, they are anything buy fast.

If you need velocity in opportunity creation, these are not the best methods with which to create opportunities. They are all choices you make when you are playing the long game. The thing is, you are likely playing both the long and the short game. You need to create opportunities now, and you need to build future opportunities. The method you use for “now” and the method you use for “future” are different.

If you only have eight hours in which to generate an opportunity, you will have to choose a faster prospecting method.