Best Ways for IDM Providers to Manage Time

Are you an identity management provider struggling with time management? Do you find yourself wasting time on prospects who turn out to be cold leads? Read this article to learn tactics and strategies to help your identity management business better manage its time. 

Product/Market Fit

The number one thing IDM providers struggle with when they move from start-up to scale-up is product/market fit.

A good acid test for this is if you were going to develop buyer personas for a CEO, CTO, and a compliance officer. Would you have at least five clients in each of those buckets that you could interview, analyze their LinkedIn profiles, and see what’s being said about them on search engines? If so, more than likely, you have product/market fit. If not, you may be a little too early to have product/market fit.

To be more productive and better manage your time, nailing product/market fit sooner rather than later is critical. 

Understanding Your Metrics

Track the heck out of everything!

Most of the time, when business development reps are following best practices, they are obsessed with metrics, deal stages, and working everything through their CRM.

Time tracking can be very helpful because it enables businesses to analyze their efforts. For example, you could wonder “What are the 20% of activities that are bringing 80% of results?” and figure out the answer to that question. Time tracking also allows your business to invest its time and resources wisely, ensuring you are not spending 80% of your efforts on things only bringing in 20% of the results.

Segmentation

Don’t talk to everyone like they are the same. People have vastly different goals, plans, challenges, and ways of evaluating and interacting with identity management vendors.

Automation

Automation is super important because people are researching 24/7. You may have someone researching at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning or 2 o’clock in the morning on a Thursday. You want to make sure you have as much information as possible in place to help you attract, convert, nurture, and accelerate that sales cycle--even if you do not manually touch it right away.

Also, having the right templates setup in your CRM system allows for consistency and productivity.

Defining Your Deal Stages

Define deal stages, so your sales and business development directors know where each lead and opportunity is in their sales cycle. The last thing you want is for your data to live in someone’s Excel spreadsheet on their local drive. It is terrible for group productivity. Moreover, when that person leaves, a lot of intellectual property and relationships will walk out the door with them.  

High-Leverage Activities

Make sure you are investing in more high-leverage activities. Attending a webinar is a pretty good high-leverage activity. Getting together with your executive, marketing, and sales teams to figure out how you can influence more content creation, ideation, and process iteration is also another excellent high-leverage activity.

Most sales teams are not spending enough time forging those kinds of relationships. Is that something you are struggling with? Is your leadership team paying enough attention? 

What time management tips do you have for other identity management providers? What’s worked for you? Let us know in the Comments below. 

If your identity management company is ready to accelerate its revenue growth and learn more initiatives to take you to the next level, check out our webinar “Identity Management Revenue Growth Acceleration Q&A Webinar.”