No such thing as 5 minutes...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Tue, Nov 20, 2012

Sales in 5 minutesHow many times a week do you hear that request for "just five minutes" of your time?  Maybe it's from your boss or a co-worker, or maybe it's a non-business friend or your spouse as in... "Can you help me for just five minutes?" (spouse translation: "Can you go to the drug store/shopping/cleaning out the closet for me?")

While I'm all for helping others, and I purposefully provide hundreds of free hours for my students, two or three local business organizations and pretty much any entrepreneur in Boston who asks for a cup of coffee, it's critical as salespeople to remember that all of our time carries with it a price.  In the world of consulting, legal and business services, since time really is money, time needs to be carefully sifted out into buckets of...

  • actual work time,
  • marketing and bizdev time,
  • pro bono time...and then...
  • of course, there's that family-time thing

Considering these shifting demands, it's tough to juggle of of this when all we have is around 3,000 hours a year total-total to allocate to work-and that's assuming 60 hours of work a week.  Of course, of that 3,000, immediately 25% disappears in the shape of vacations, holidays, sickness and just plain old "non-utilizable" ("how was your weekend?", standing in line for copies, integrating a new app into Salesforce, and so on) time. 

Sales SuccessIn the world of sales, this allocation of time is even more critical since success is all about maintaining a very disciplined and careful balance of your time spent closing deals in your current active pipeline while creating more "beginning of the pipe" activities for next quarter and the quarter beyond that. 

With now only 20 or 21 selling days left in the year, it's absolutely critical to maintiain that balance of time to...

  • making quota
  • beating quota and getting into the President's Club
  • developing new leads for Q1
  • working on your own 2013 sales and marketing plans 
  • being harrassed by your boss/BOD/CFO/ for your 2013 forecasts
...is absolutely critical to your success both this year and in making sure that you get the resources you need to make next year's plans. 

sales time management

While there's nothing that you can do short of breaking the laws of physics to hold back time, in reality, there's a number of very practical activities that you could be starting right now-as in today.

You need to make sure that you're taking every possible means,  using every possible tool and getting rid of any time-wasters so that you're ending December with a ticket in your pocket to attend President's Club in Florida in February and not looking at your shoes thinking... "I should have..."

 
Today, I can...

  • ...take 45 minutes right now to block out specific selling time for 22 days
  • ...take the same 45 minutes to define specific ACTIVITIES for the next 15 days 
          (Activities=trips, co-selling plans, referral breakfasts, and so on)
  • ...plan to get in 90 minutes early for 3 days to finish my 2013 plans and forecasts
  • ...specifically block off business & family time until the end of the year
  • ...figure out which business holiday functions I must attend
  • ...manage the majority of my non-selling time by simply saying "no".
       (not to your spouse, of course, or else it's going to be a dark winter)

Although you can't "control" your quota, and you certainly cannot "manage" either revenue or bookings as your expected results, what you do have total control over right now are those Activities that will lead to those objectives that will lead to those results that you're being held responsible for for this quarter.

If you want to manage time, rather than have it manage you over the next month, you need to put time to work for you and not against you.  

Yea, it all begins with you doing something today to control your time!

Good Selling !!!

Jack,
Head Coach
Linked In and Sales

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sales listening skillsListening

Check out our latest addition to our Sales Toolbox on the subject of Listening Skills by clicking HERE. Too often as sales people, simply because we are sales people, we want to tell & sell rather than listen. What we know from our experience is that Listening is one of the most important skills practiced at the initial steps of Qualifying and Discovery in your sales process, which is why we put together this short Brainshark on listening.

 

 

Tags: sales productivity, sales coaching, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales management effectiveness, sales plan process, sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales tools, selling, sales management training, selling skills, sales training, sales listening, sales jobs