97. Prospecting Productivity: How I Built a £60K/Month Pipeline in 18 Months

Hey peps

Every week, I’ll share three short, actionable insights, tools, and tactics that help me sell in the Construction and Property Services space.

Enjoy!

In today’s email:

Speed to Lead
Prospecting productivity
30 Minutes to Inbox Zero

👇🏾 Listen: Still searching for your ideal client?

Speed to Lead

This Harvard Business Review report highlights the importance of responding to leads quickly.

Customers and prospects want information faster. That’s why speed to response is key. Quicker response times are crucial for customer satisfaction, lead conversion and increased revenue.

The Challenge

Quotes sitting in your inbox for too long without action mean you’re missing business.

Action Plan

Acknowledge all quotes within 10 minutes with email templates that save time.
Prioritise credibility and fit over speed alone. Clarify your customer’s needs before providing a quote. Pick up the phone for high-value, complex quotes.
Use a CRM to manage all quotes and track follow-ups.

Use these phone scripts and email templates to get started.

Remember: Speed is key.

Prospecting Productivity

On January 1, 2024, I had zero clients, no prospecting lists, and very little insight into the waste industry.

These five habits helped me go from £0 to generating £60K a month in 18 months:

Work in sprints

Inspired by this Basecamp article, the concept is simple

Run 6-week sprint cycles focusing on one market.
Develop a playbook with learnings from the sprint.
Analyse the data at the end of the spring - calls made, emails sent, open rates, booking rates, new business gained.
Refine, rinse and repeat for the approach for the next sprint in a new market

Each sprint focused on input and output goals:

Input goals: min. 250 calls and emails per week
Output goals: new opportunities, clients, bookings, and revenue generated per week.

I tracked my results in this sprint tracker. For a deeper dive on how I ran my sprints, go here 👇🏾

Time Blocking

These are my current time blocks:

I dedicate set blocks for specific activities:

Yellow = Meetings
Green = Prospecting
Pink = Account Management
Red = Admin tasks

Colour coding also helps me identify where I spend most of my time so that I can make adjustments.

Right now, yellow is the dominant colour. I need to figure out how to spend less time in internal meetings so I can prospect more and manage my accounts.

Regardless, time blocking has made me more effective.

Prioritise Tasks

I (try to) say no to calls or meetings during my blocked time. My priorities are prospecting and account management.

My role has evolved over the last 24 months. I've moved from consulting to outbound to account management.

I used to spend 4-5 hours prospecting each day. My main priority now is growing enterprise accounts, which means focusing on account management, research, and engagement.

I still sprinkle in some prospecting (”Always fill your pipe”), and I need focused blocks of time to get shit done. Effective planning and calendar management allow me to do that.

Organise tomorrow today

This Productivity Game video changed how I approach my day:

The key takeaways is this: to improve time management and increase productivity, plan for tomorrow today.

Now, I spend 15 minutes at the end every day organising tomorrow.

Absolute game changer.

Review and Adjusts

Recently, I’ve been adjusting my schedule monthly. My evolving role brings new targets and different priorities which I have to factor into my day.

Here’s a perfect example of how my schedule has shifted over the last few months:

I wasted A LOT of time in between calls with this schedule. So I switched it up:

Working in 60-90 minute blocks increased my output.

Now my schedule looks like this:

9.15-10am - Quote Follow Up

10-11.30am - Outbound Power Block

1-1.30pm - LinkedIn Engagement

2-3.30pm - Account Management Power Block

6.15-7pm - [Tier 1 Prospecting]

Reviewing how I manage my focus time enables me to improve and make adjustments.

It helps me improve and achieve better results.

30 minutes to Inbox Zero

Here’s my 3-step SPR Method for managing my inbox:

Scan: Scan your inbox. Look for urgent subject lines or important senders. Mark them as high priority/important.
Process: Take a top-down approach. Review one email at a time and decide “What needs to be done about this?”. Now action:
1. Reply (if it takes 2 minutes or less), then archive.
2. Complete the task immediately (if it requires 2 minutes or less), then archive it.
3. Create a task, then archive.
4. Add to calendar, then archive.
5. Forward, then archive.
6. Send to Reference app (e.g. Evernote, Notion, Notes), then archive.
7. Send to Read Later app (e.g. Readwise, Instapaper), then archive.
8. Archive.
9. Delete.
Respond: Here’s my order of priority;
1. Tackle the most important emails first.
2. Send a brief acknowledgement to important emails requiring a detailed response. Confirm receipt of the email and when the sender can expect a complete response.
3. Finally, reply to emails that take less than 2 minutes to respond.

TTO (Touch Twice Only) is the most important rule I follow using the SPR Method. Avoid opening emails many times and putting off a reply. It’s ineffective and wastes your time.

Open emails once for processing (either reply there and then or schedule for later) and a second time to send a response (if scheduled for later).