Could be your overall narrative is not that compelling OR
Your pricing or terms are too high with no flexibility perceived OR
You are not hitting enough people to build a pipeline OR
You are hitting the wrong target market.

Having said that, you have to gauge urgency in the first call. Depending on your market, you can gauge directly or indirectly.

Direct: You ask them for their timeline to start.
Indirect: Ask them if they have the budget and be super straight.

In either case, the first few points above must be handled - otherwise, they will never buy in the first place.

The organic approach is usually best and is more sustainable.
1. Build Your Narrative - which you convert into a sales funnel. a. what is your overall 'story' of how and what you address emotionally, functionally.
2. Build your target audience and engage with them in ways that they find easy to start with. e.g. free education, etc.
... Or you can try the fast approach and spend $10,000 per month on ad campaigns. :-)

This may pertain more to entrepreneurs than to a 9-5 job. You will have to create a LARGE HUGE Reason e.g. a vision that is much bigger than your concerns or resistance. if you pay enough attention to the vision and the bigger game, than your mind, you and your heart will find a way - no matter what.

First make sure that it is really important for you.

I would suggest some more 'soul searching'. What and Why and Who questions are good places to start. Like in most questions of this nature.

What: What do you really want? What kind of lifestyle, business success? How would you measure these?

Why: Why are these objectives important to you? What is the big deal?

Who: Who are the people you want to serve or market to? Who are the kinds of people you want to have on your team? Why?

Then find the mentors who have helped people achieve the results above.

Mentoring is a serious relationship - it should be. It is a partnership that is sacred - not in a spiritual context but in a honoring partnership context. The mentor usually gives of her or himself in terms of time, energy and opportunity cost. He or she typically wants to see you become successful - usually they operate at a higher level of a vision of helping people like you so that their view or vision of the world can be fulfilled. You have to demonstrate your clarity first or a very committed attention to discovering that clarity before any worthy mentor takes you on.

I agree with most of what the above experts have mentioned. I would add something somewhat contrarian - instead of looking to compete - look to see where you can create a monopoly. e.g. in areas that you have specialized skills or processes that are hand to duplicate. Then brand and message to doctors and create content appropriately. Also look to network at a higher level: creating joint ventures to exploit the specialized skills.

I think the question underlying this one is "How can you make biz dev programs work?" - maybe that is the more useful question.

Identify clearly what your end game is and identify the milestones that will help you track if your strategy and plan and team are working - and what needs to be fine tuned fast.

The review of these milestones need to be done very frequently and with rigor - i.e. don't postpone the reviews and don't ignore the numbers nor the reality or veracity of these numbers. Notice what you would like to believe about your progress versus looking into what you are likely to be avoiding dealing with in your milestone reviews.

Your team: You must be very clear that your team has these milestones clear in their heads - these are priorities to hit and ONLY under the scrutiny of harsh reality should they be modified. This behooves you to make sure that these milestones are win-nable - not ridiculous, over ambitious milestones that are going to burn your team out before they can get going. Rome was not built in one day: nor were Olympic athletes - your team must be groomed to win in the long run .. not bash themselves against the rocks in the first few months.

Practice effective communications: requests, promises and proper expressions of discord or concord. Up the ante in your own training of handling conflicts - conflicts may be good - they identify the areas to work on - they should not be avoided.

Thank you for asking this question. Impossible to do this question enough justice: It is a good question.. but there is so much to this game that the answers are discovered in a continuous and consistent daily, weekly, monthly and yearly set of practices.

a. Develop your network: both online and offline. This does not mean just merely develop dyadic (one on one relationships) but triadic (factor of three) or more kinds of relationships e.g. joint ventures, cross promotions, indirect connections between several parties. This involves new skills and a new mindset - necessary to grow and innovate over time.

b. Continue fine tuning your message and branding. In my estimate, branding is never a static (and now you are done) phenomenon. It is consistently upgraded and finetuned. As you sell, fine tune your branding. As you brand, fine tune your selling.

c. The concept of consistency is key: this involves developing the ability to focus. This involves two areas
a. The ability to keep and account for promises
b. The ability to manage your communications promptly and effectively. This has to be practiced realistically: over ambitious (a euphemism for unrealistic) declarations and promises should be treated with capital punishment :-) Reward the realistic attainment of win-nable promises that make sense and win the war.. not merely short term battles. This is key and so basic that most teams fail at it. It is the ah-duh.. not the ah-ha that gets the team and business moving.

* Train everyone in the team to sell - today's soccer teams have players on the team that can play mostly all if not most of the positions on the field. You never know when a critical call comes into the office - if your frontline person has no clue on what questions to ask and how to listen and have a sales conversation, you are leaving money on the table potentially and increasing your risk while avoiding a simple and low cost investment of training.

* Build up the relationship with discipline and accountability - not as a Nazi policeman - but develop the art and science of effective, graceful and straight forward accountability for numbers and promises for sales and marketing projects.

Hope that helps!

First lesson, validate your market first. Start with small experiments in selling and marketing before you take on bigger deals. Start with first base before you try for a home run. There is no magic answer - if there were, there would be tons of very rich people which may not make sense. Start doing smart experiments - research, go to conventions, get online, interview people in different markets, look at the trending stats on google and youtube.

It depends on your charter or mission as well as your long term vs. Short term objectives. If your mission involves a larger more expansive view - then you will need to spend a lot more time on unique problem solving that has a strong potential ROI feeding the fulfillment of the mission.

It kind of boils down to ROI (return on investment) vs. risk for me: I look at the ROI and risk (opportunity cost) for almost everything that I choose to do - this helps me compare various choices for what to focus on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

Having clear objectives for the month, week and year also help in selecting what percentage of time as per your question. If the solution of this problem feeds the fulfillment of your objectives vs. the solution of this problem prevents a risky situation: that may be the question to answer.

I hope this helps. Feel free to interact so that I can delve into the complexities and nuances that are inevitably there.

There are a couple of distinctions. One is to avoid two extremes: a. rigidity and b. Chaos. If you or your partner have very rigid conditions, then it may be difficult to handle the unpredictable (p.s. the unpredictable is always predictable to happen) and the tough situations that will arise. On the other hand if there is chaos in your partnership (e.g. lack of boundaries and clear agreements), then you may be facing avoidable troubles (shame on you for not thinking it through). The third option is flexibility which may be more dynamic (i.e. moving and changing with the situation, growth and maturing of both parties and other unpredictable conditions) - this may require practices of honest communications, unfettered listening, bravery to face the truths (not just courage).. and the willingness to learn what to let go off and what to fight for in the relationship. These are abstractions I admit: lets talk if you want to regarding specifics. Kind regards