Want a consistent pipeline throughout the year? A project list filled with ideal clients every month?
What you do during your busiest months is often the single biggest factor in whether that happens.
Here’s the cycle I see over and over with small business owners who have fewer than 15 employees.
Things slow down. The pipeline looks bleak. You’re not sure where the next client is coming from, so panic sets in and you pull out all the stops.
You go to networking events. You follow up on proposals that went cold. You make calls, reconnect with old contacts.
Then it works.
You get busy, breathe a sigh of relief and stop doing the exact work that filled your pipeline. Attention gets shifted back to client work, because delivering great results is why people hire you.
This cycle keeps you stuck because business development work you do today shows up as revenue three to six months from now.
It’s tempting to blame the slow month when revenue drops, because that’s when you feel the pain. But the slow month isn’t where the revenue was lost. It’s just where you see it.
It may have been lost in June, in the middle of your best stretch of the year, on the mornings you were too busy to look up.
The months you feel best about are quietly creating the months you dread.
Why Business Development Loses
When you’re at capacity and something has to give, business development feels like the logical thing to cut.
The client project has a deadline. The install is Thursday. Payroll is Friday. Business development has no one waiting on the other end. No one calls to ask where it is.
So you make a rational tradeoff between something urgent and something that can wait.
That’s precisely the problem.
Business development is one of the only functions in a small business that has no external deadline and, in many companies, no clear owner.
Accounting has filing dates. Operations has a schedule.
Business development has a vague sense that someone should probably be doing more of it.
And work without an owner and a plan usually doesn’t get done.
There’s another factor, too: many business owners don’t enjoy selling, making it the first thing to go when things get hectic. Much of that dislike comes from a misunderstanding of what good business development actually looks like. But that’s another column.
Setting that aside, a responsibility without an owner or deadline will lose to responsibilities that have both. Every week.
Build a System That Survives the Busy Months
The solution is to treat business development like every other function your business depends on.
First, give it an owner.
In a company of six people, that may still be the founder. That’s fine. What matters is that someone is clearly accountable for making it happen.
Second, give it a number.
Not a revenue goal. Revenue happens downstream, and you can’t control it.
Choose a number tied to an activity you can control: conversations started, prospects contacted, follow-ups completed or new relationships developed.
You should be able to look at the number on Friday and know if it happened.
Finally, create a system that survives your busiest week.This is where many owners get stuck. They leave a planning session committed to spending a full day a week on sales. It works for a few weeks. Then things get busy, the habit disappears and they’re back to starting from zero.
Your system should be simple enough to keep running even when business is booming. Thirty to sixty minutes a day is enough. That’s one meeting and you don’t cancel meetings.
Focus on three things:
The right people: Specific prospects who are a strong fit for your business.
The right frequency: A consistent cadence for staying connected.
The right message: A clear statement of what you do, what makes you different, and why that matters to the people on your list.
The systems I’ve seen work best are rarely complicated. A short prospect list. A weekly review. A few intentional conversations started every week. Consistency matters more than intensity.
Last month I wrote that the answer to slow growth isn’t more leads, it’s the right ones. Choosing your clients only works if you’re choosing them in June, when you don’t need one. By the time you need clients, you’re not choosing them. You’re taking what’s available, at the price that’s offered. That’s how a portfolio of work you didn’t want gets built, one rational decision at a time.
The goal isn’t to sell harder when things are slow. It’s to build a business development system that keeps working when things are good.
