Success is the product of daily habits – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

– James Clear, Atomic Habits

Just as James Clear wrote in his best selling book Atomic Habits, success in business development is the sum of your daily habits and not a once-in-a-career pitch win!

To this end, while most professional services firms employ sophisticated Client Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, my experience has been that the greatest success in building daily business development rituals and habits comes from utlising the existing tools you have and are already familiar with – namely your Microsoft ‘Outlook’ and ‘To Do’ apps.

So for this week’s BD Tips Wednesday post I thought I would take a very high-level look at how you can be using Microsoft’s Outlook and To Do apps to advance your business development efforts:

Tips with using Outlook for your Business Development

• Block-out 15 minutes each morning in your Outlook diary to post and comment on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn.
• Block-out 15 minutes each lunchtime to call or email 1 client, prospect or referrer to catch-up and see how they are doing and whether there is anything you can be doing for them.
• Use your Outlook email scheduling function to write marketing emails at a time more convenient for you (in my case 11pm!), but to be sent when they are more likely to be read by your target audience (say, 8am the next day!).
• Use the email ‘categories’ function to organize your business development and marketing emails by campaign, client or project. This should make searching for emails in the future much easier [trust me, Future You will love Present You if all you do is do this!].
• If you are working as part of a team, sync your Outlook calendar with the other members of your team so you can easily see when team members are free.
• Schedule time each month in your Outlook diary to review and assess how your business development activities are fairing and determine if you need to make adjustments to your strategy/methodology.

Tips with using To Do for your Business Development

• Schedule To Do reminders for re-occurring tasks, like writing and scheduling your social media posts.
• Set To Do reminders ahead of time for important dates and events. An example here might be to schedule a reminder in your To Do app that the birthday of a client is coming up next week and you need to send them a handwritten card!
• Use your To Do app to schedule follow-up reminders for people you meet at events, emails you have sent that have not been responded to, or actions you have promised to complete.

Used properly, your Microsoft Outlook and To Do apps can be very powerful business development tools. Ones which are typically very much under utilised by most professionals.

As always, get in touch if you need help with your business development strategy and activities.

Richard & GSJ

[Note: This post was first published on my LinkedIn BD Tips Wednesday page]