Hitting your sales quota on a consistent basis requires getting enough deals through your funnel in a month, quarter and year. As such, being thoughtful about your sales time ROI will be the foundation upon which your sales success is built. If you are prepared to buck a few sales conventions, you can improve your sales time ROI – and your commissions.
There are three sales activities that when performed the traditional way take huge chomps out of your available selling time. Execute them differently and you can put hours back into your day and increase your sales bandwidth. This can also be accomplished while increasing the effectiveness with which they are performed.
Let's start with the most traditional method of business development going – cold calling. To start with, stop doing it! It is the most frustrating and least effective way to find new business.
Start saving time by setting up your LinkedIn profile. Next, up the ante and cough up for a business account. Then, work through your contact database and add everyone you have ever known to your professional network. Now, when there's a prospective client you want to crack, search LinkedIn to see who you know that knows the party you want to connect with. Ask for a warm referral to them. If you don't have a first-degree connection to them, search for someone in your network who knows an employee at that firm and get connected in that way. This method of generating warm referrals is far more effective than cold calling and generally gets you further in less time.
The next big time-eater is windshield time. Many salespeople habitually make their first meeting with an early stage sales suspect a drive-to face-to-face event. Even a one-hour face-to-face meeting is never just one hour. In just about any city it will consume at minimum three hours – packing up, getting out the door, driving, finding and paying for parking, walking to the client's door, etc. Worse yet, some will fly to such meetings!
Make it a habit to hold all first sales meetings on the phone whenever possible. In a well-planned telephone meeting you can accomplish all you need to, and then some, in less than 20 minutes. You can qualify the lead, determine the pains they have that you can relieve, and most importantly confirm their desire to spend money (or not). Many leads don't pass this litmus test, but if one does, only then does it make sense to invest the time required for a face-to-face.
A third time-waster and frustration-causer is the sales two-step. This traditional dance is performed by salespeople who won't invest the three minutes required to create a sales meeting agenda. They run from the Ford Taurus into meetings without a plan. As such they are constantly doubling back to get that last bit of critical detail they need to produce the proposal, plan the demo or whatever. Create an agenda. Email it to the buyer before you meet so they arrive prepared to get the absolute most out of your time together. Eliminating the sales two-step will make you both happier.
Despite all of the electronic gadgets of convenience we are so tied to, mastering time is still no easy task. Put time back into your sales day by selling effectively, efficiently and non-traditionally.
