With the evolution of technology, sales analytics, lead development and now artificial intelligence the sales ecosystem has vastly improved to deliver valuable sales insights. In pure irony, the tools and systems developed for salespeople created a new issue, time management. Of a 49 hour work week, how many hours are sellers actively engaged in sales activities? Sales activities include prospecting efforts from research to outreach, phone and in-person meetings with customers and prospects along with creating and delivering presentations. Would you guess 30 hours, 20 hours, 15 hours, the average seller spends 11 hours a week engaged in sales activities that lead to revenue. The data is available from Pace Productivity who tracks how salespeople spend their weeks. They look at factors like selling, admin, data processing, customer service, and planning.
Next question, how many hours is a seller doing administrative and data processing functions? This includes data input into the CRM and other systems, filling out paperwork, forecasting for management, internal meetings, product training and company meetings. Would you guess 16 hours a week, or 5 more hours than selling? In hopes of driving more revenue using data drive decisions, we absorbed the most vital part of selling, the sellers. We have created data processing centers instead of sales floors.
A lot of trainers, including myself, have highlighted time is your most valuable asset. Organizations are making sales attend more useless internal meetings, enter more pointless information into the CRM and populating paperwork with more details to make sure someone in accounting is happy. Organizations suffering revenue shortfalls are the worst. Instead of focusing on sales, they double down on tracking and activities that are typically useless. I am not saying don’t track activities; only track activities that help close revenue.
How do you shift focus back to selling activities? Everyone is a little different, but the core concept is the same, own your day and schedule sales activities, not ancillary sales work. Go through your PACES – Prioritize, Aim, Cluster, Enter, Streamline
Prioritize: Evey morning set aside time to review your goals for the day and prioritize work according to these goals.
Aim: Establish a daily number of new prospects and outreachs you will make. Set your target and goal to make this number every day.
Cluster: Do like items together. If you need to write proposals for your prospects, take notes during your meetings and submit all of your proposal requests at once. It takes time for your brain to jump from one activity to another. By staying focused on one action, you will get through each task faster.
Enter: In your calendar enter times every day that concentrate on sales activities. The average salesperson gets interrupted every 16 minutes. Either reserve the time on your schedule or someone will inevitably fill the time. Don’t think about it, establish sales time on your calendar.
Streamline: Streamline essential sales activities. My favorite Salesforce (CRM) functionality is email templates. Having templates that correspond to the sales stage can move a sell ahead using less time. I used these email templates for each sales stage. Within a minute of being off the phone, I logged a call, sent the follow-up email to the prospect and was onto my next call. After firing off the email, it closed my task and set up the follow-up task. Post-call follows up would take less than 3 minutes. (Salespeople argue that each email is tailored, but trust me, you are not writing Shakespeare.)
Take back your time, and do your job.
