Ah, spring! The birds are chirping, the days are getting longer, and the world feels ready for a fresh start.
While it’s likely you are planning on some spring cleaning around your house, when was the last time you did some cleaning at work? What long-neglected areas of your business development life are due for a tidying up?
To help inspire you, here are 17 spring cleaning ideas for your business development work life:
- Open Deals – Go through your open deals in the CRM. Make sure the stages, dates, to-dos, etc., are all correct.
- Testing Lead Forms – Check all of the lead forms on your website and landing pages to ensure they are working and going to the correct people.
- Contact Labels – Clean up the labels and tags of your contacts and accounts in your CRM or marketing automation platform. Make it easy to quickly generate lists for marketing campaigns.
- Email Signature – Check your email signature and see if it’s due for a change. Either with new information or a small promotional call to action.
- LinkedIn Profile – Do a quick run through your LinkedIn profile and see if there are any changes that need to be made. Look at the images, the about section, the headline, job descriptions, skills, etc.
- Reference Lists – For prospects that want references, it’s good to keep a current “reference list” available. Does yours need to be updated?
- Recurring Calendar Items – Clean up any recurring calendar events that are no longer relevant.
- Your Voicemail – If you are not in the daily voicemail greeting update camp (I’m not), double-check that you have a good voicemail greeting set up for people to listen to.
- Task Management – Review your to-do list or task management tool. Close out items you’ll never do, and re-assign items based on your current priority.
- Books Wishlist – If you are like me, you have an ever-growing list of books you want to read. Go through your list and purge those that no longer interest you, and buy a couple to read in the coming months.
- CRM Data Fields – Do a review of the data fields in your CRM for accounts and deals. Are you collecting the data you need to do your job and run analyses? If not, add/remove data fields based on your needs.
- Filing Cabinets – We all have those cabinets/bins with old notes in them. Give them a purge.
- Marketing Collateral/Swag – Are you handing out outdated marketing collateral? Go through your current pieces and see if anything needs to be removed or replaced.
- Your laptop – Literally clean your physical laptop so you don’t look like a slob.
- Desk Pictures – Update the pictures of your kids, pets, vacations, or whatever will inspire you on your desk.
- Website Bios – If your website features pictures and bios of your team members, take a minute to make sure that content is current. Were there staff changes? New biography changes?
- Presentation Templates – Take a fresh look at your proposal documents, powerpoints, and other presentation templates that you regularly use. Is there anything that needs updating? Is there content that can be improved upon?
Good luck and happy spring!
