from Focus on Rainmaking by Sara Holtz

Are you a business development optimist, always thinking you'll have more time next week or next month to devote to cultivating new clients? Do you think that all marketing has the potential to be good marketing?

Let's get real. It's unlikely you'll have more time next month than this month. Rather than hoping you'll have more time for business development in the future, I suggest that you make the most of whatever time you have by investing your time wisely.

Determining how much time you can realistically devote to marketing requires answering these questions:

• How much time did you spend on business development in the last year?
• Have circumstances changed so that you're likely to have either more or less time to spend on business development in the coming year?

After you've analyzed last year's marketing time and considered whether you're likely to have more or less time this year, decide whether you feel that this is enough time to devote to business development in the coming year.

If, like many of my clients, you feel that you want to devote more time to marketing in the future, take a look at your current commitments and analyze what you can let go of. (Remember, the time you spend with friends and family, exercising, or sleeping is off-limits--you're probably not spending enough time on these things as it is.)

Perhaps you can resign from some of the administrative activities you're involved with, such as the Summer Associate Committee, the Associate Evaluation Committee, or the Hiring Committee. (If you need help extricating yourself from these commitments, see my article "Do You Know How to Say No?".) Maybe you can delegate some of your management responsibilities or even some client work.

Once you have determined how much time you realistically have for business development, including any time you can reclaim from less productive activities, you have a filter for measuring whether any given activity is a good use of your limited marketing time.

Say that you have two hundred hours per year (an average of four hours per week) to devote to business development.

You're invited to speak at a PLI conference in a distant city. Giving a speech typically takes about forty hours. (Does that seem high? Factor in the time to research the topic, write the speech, prepare the slides and handouts, travel to and from the event, give the speech, and attend the conference.) Consider whether that forty hours is a good investment of time when you only have two hundred hours to devote to business development. Is it worth twenty percent of your available marketing time?

Certainly, some opportunities are worth twenty percent of your business development time, while others simply aren't. To analyze your particular marketing activity, answer these questions:

• What results have you previously gotten from similar events?
• How else could you spend that time?

  If a typical lunch with a client takes three hours, perhaps setting up a dozen lunches with existing clients and referral sources is a better use of your time than accepting this invitation to speak.

• Will it help you achieve the results you want in the most efficient and effective way possible?
• Can you tweak it to get even better results?

  In the case of giving a speech, for example, could you improve the payout of the opportunity by inviting all your clients (whether or not they're likely to attend) or hosting a "faculty" breakfast during the event?

You can make the most of your limited business development time by running through this simple analysis. Make sure that you are investing your time in all the right places.