Ten Great Excuses for Avoiding Business Development

When it comes to excuses, pick your poison: it’s too early in the morning, it’s too late in the afternoon, if you get into a conversation you will need to get your boss on the phone and she’s not around.

Here’s our Top 10:

1. I’m booked for at least six weeks. I couldn’t handle another deal if it landed on my desk.
2. My business development discussions, if I get into a good one, take an hour. I only have 45 minutes to make calls now so I should wait until I have more time.
3. This isn’t a good use of my time. Somebody else should source leads and I should deliver work.
4. I’m not good at it so what’s the use? (And I sure can’t tell anyone this, so I’ll make up another reason.)
5. In my business, leads only come through referrals. Proactive outbound business development, even networking, doesn’t work. Why bother?
6. I’m deathly afraid of selling.
7. If I reach out to prospects, I will sound like a used car salesperson. Since I’m a professional, I can’t set up that dynamic.
8. I know how to talk about what I do (I think). Yet, for some strange reason, the words never come out right.
9. I don’t even know who to contact. I have the time and the will, but what do I do?
10. I hate selling.

Regardless of your reason, the end result is the same; another day goes by and you don’t work on business development.

Most CPAs (or technology consultants, or lawyers, or management consultants) show up in the morning and start doing accounting. They crunch numbers, manage teams, and take client meetings. Maybe there’s an hour and a half window in their schedule in the late afternoon. Here’s what most of them won’t do with that time: business development.

That’s right, 9 out of 10 professionals agree that engaging anything but business development in their open time slot is best to whiten teeth and freshen breath. The number one reason that professionals fail at business development: finding something else to do, or doing nothing, when they could be developing business.

Fortunately, the answer is simple: Start selling now.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to take a deeply embedded behavior (not selling), flip a switch, and be able to do today what you did not, or could not, do yesterday.

And it doesn’t work like that for professionals who want to develop business.

You can’t just magically develop a hankering for dialing the phone. For the most part, it takes a robust personal change effort to make the transition from business-development-avoider to focused-client-developer.

3 ways to break the cycle:

1. Respect the effort. Realize that it takes significant time, effort, energy, and sometimes resources to develop business and stick with it.
2. Leverage your team. Seek help if you are stuck in a sales avoidance rut. Breaking out of a rut alone is extremely difficult. You will find help in the form of a peer, coach, boss, or someone else. Whoever it is, involving the right people increases your chance of success.
3. Develop an ongoing strategy. Before you engage in ongoing business development, know what tactics you are going to employ and why. If you have a clear end goal, and know how each tactic you undertake helps to get you there.

We make light of excuses for avoiding business development in order to raise the issue. Breaking the cycle of excuses and starting to develop business is never as easy as it sounds. But you can do it. Do what you need to do to prepare for success, know what you are going after, and then “just do it”