In selling you
are paid for results, not activity.
In sales, you are measured and rewarded not by the hours you put in
but by what you put in the hours. The quality of selling time is a function of
what you spend it doing, where you spend it, how you spend it, and with whom you
spend it.
Here's a study we've made ourselves and encouraged many people in
sales to make. You'll find it quite revealing.
Get a stopwatch or a watch with this feature. You
will need the kind used to time athletic events - not the kind that resets to
zero after every stop.
Take the watch with you every day for a week of normal
selling. Turn it on and let it run every moment you are actually
in the presence of a prospect. It goes on only when you are talking to a
prospect about your products or services -- in other words, while you are
selling. Don't let it run while you wrestle through paperwork in the office or
while you are having coffee, or chatting with a prospect. Let the watch run only
while you are making an actual sales call.
Keep the experiment to yourself. You can tell your
manager and associates about it later when they start noticing your improved
production records and larger commission checks. Since the stopwatch readings
are for you, and you alone, there will be very little temptation to cheat. After
all, you are trying to bolster your income, not your ego.
Add up the daily readings at the end of the week. If
you find (as most who make honest measurements will find) that during the whole
week you spent less than ten hours of new, creative sales effort in front of
your prospects, don't be discouraged. Don't be discouraged even if the readings
for the week total less than five hours! It's okay to be shocked - but
don't be discouraged.
After you recover from shock, you'll realize that you have gotten to
the heart of your most important problem: time. The problem is that you aren't
earning the kind of money you could easily be earning because you aren't
spending enough hours actually selling. Sure, you're putting in the hours! But
now you know that few of those hours are productive, selling hours.
To increase your productivity and income you won't need to work any
harder - but you will need to work smarter. Working smarter means you need to
spend less time on:
- paperwork during your most productive hours
- expensive cups of coffee
- pleasant but expensive conversations
- unnecessary footwork
Regardless of where those extra hours go, if you have timed your
actual selling time, you know exactly what your most important problem is --
it's managing your time so that you are spending more hours selling and fewer
hours on activities that are not result producing.
Give yourself a raise today - spend your time on result-producing
activities!
2016 - BE A DIFFERENCE
MAKER!
