Many salespeople lose sight of the profit implications of time. Know the value of your sales hour and keep the number in your mind as you service your customers and accounts. It will improve your sales effectiveness. Needlessly extended conversations, oversocialization, and idle chitchat can cost you money.
Even the most conscientious salespeople waste time — not intentionally, but because they lack time management skills.
Here are the six biggest time wasters for salespeople:
• 1 – Too much time in the office. Beware of sticky carpets! It’s hard to get out of the office once you get in there. Make a prospect, not the office, your first call of the day. If you have to go into the office at all, make it your last call of the day.
• 2 – Spending time with unqualified prospects. Some salespeople would rather spend time with a poor prospect than no prospect. Why waste time on people who don’t want or need what you’re selling. Use the time to find better prospects and learn to quickly qualify them.
• 3 – Hesitant to ask for the business. Reluctance to close the sale results in too many callbacks and lost sales.
• 4 – Poorly planned sales territory. Too much time spent travelling around the territory. Some salespeople spend more time behind the wheel of their vehicle than in front of their prospects.
• 5 – Poor record keeping. Get organized. The time you spend looking for lost or misplaced information is time you don’t have for selling.
• 6 – Poor use of commuting and waiting time. These times are often missed opportunities to catch up on our professional reading or paperwork. Always carry a file folder full of want-to-read material in your briefcase.
Avoiding these six time wasters will improve your sales performance.
For more information on this topic, please refer to The Right Skills.
Salesforce Training & Consulting is a professional sales training firm and registered Salesforce.com Consulting Partner based in Toronto, with offices in Boston and Chicago, providing sales coaching, sales management consulting, salesforce implementation, sales training and sales personnel assessments.
by
