Time Management Strategy for Agents and Advisors: are you Focused on Attracting the Right Clients?

The wrong client base prevents you from being able to manage your time no matter what time management strategies you use. The wrong clients take up the bulk of your time. They are low value and they prevent you from being able to grow your business. They are the first to complain, and the first to cancel their policy or transfer their funds. No matter what you do it’s never enough, and they’re always price shopping. Early in your career you have the misguided notion that you need these people. You don’t, if you’re new don’t even start working with these high maintenance folks and if you’ve been in business for a while identify these clients and help them to find another agent or advisor. These folks are time vampires and success killers.

The best time management strategy you can use is the strategy of only working with your ideal clients. To do that you have to identify who your ideal clients are. If you aren’t sure make a list of your favorite clients right now simply writing their name on a piece of paper. Once you have your favorite clients listed, the ones you just love working with and would like a lot more of, beside their name write down what you know about them. Start looking for the commonalities. Through these commonalities you’ll identify your target market(s). These are the clients you want to focus your energies on. If you find you love your Grandma but working with seniors gets on your nerves, don’t work with seniors. Work with the people you love to work with. Usually you love working with these people because there is some sort of shared experience or connection.

So you know who you want to work with now you need to paint a clearer picture. What are the qualities or characteristics held by your ideal clients? Again these are often a reflection of your own values and what is important to you. If punctuality is huge for you eliminate people who view time as relative from your business. This will help you to not only know who you want to work with, but from among those folks the ones that will most appreciate you.

When you start meeting and working only with your ideal clients you’ll have lots more time. To get to this point though you have some work to do. How do you communicate to existing clients and prospect who your ideal clients are? Ideally your marketing messages save you time because they are filtering the world at large down to the world that’s relevant. You no longer need to prospect anywhere and everywhere you only need to prospect where your ideal clients are. You can use everyone else as a filter for who they know that is an ideal client match.

When you’re focus is on attracting the right clients you get the right clients. When you build a business of right clients you end up with a referral based business. You have room in your business for lots of clients because your ideal clients value and appreciate you. They rarely if ever complain and are generally very low maintenance. Plus ultimately you have more free time for you than you do now.