Sales Time Management
The Dynamic Manager’s Handbook On
How To Increase Sales Productivity
by Dave Donelson
Donelson SDA, Inc.
Copyright 2011 Dave Donelson
ISBN: 978-1458014788
Smashwords Edition
A note from the author
The Dynamic Manager Handbooks are for entrepreneurs, managers, and others who want to succeed in small business by learning more about management techniques, operations, and best practices. Each volume in the collection is devoted to a single topic. The material was extracted from the Dynamic Manager Guides, my series of books based on my experiences as a business journalist, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Chapter 1 - Time Management And Sales Priorities
Chapter 2 - Time Management And Sales Planning
Chapter 3 - Sales And Technology
Chapter 4 - Persistence Counts
Time Management And Sales Priorities
“You can make more calls and work no harder if you improve your sales efficiency.”
We are all born with individual levels of innate intelligence, physical strength and coordination, and widely different circumstances of poverty or wealth, to name just a few ways we vary from each other. But we all have the same twenty-four hours and some odd minutes in every day. The different ways you use that asset determines how you grow your personal worth.
There are many valuable things in life that contribute to the quality of your short time on earth. Your relationships with family and friends, the development of your artistic skills and athletic talent, your accumulation of knowledge and the growth of your religious or spiritual faith. All of these things make use of that asset, time. That’s not to give short shrift to making money, either, which is the greatest time user of all for most of us.
Since time is an asset, you should manage it to produce the greatest return on your investment of it. That return may be in the form of greater income or it may mean more time available to spend with your family or in other pursuits that give value to your life. But the principle is the same: you should treat time like any other asset. Don’t waste it; capitalize on it.
Sales, especially commission sales, is one of the few occupations where you can see a very direct and fairly immediate return on the proper investment of your time asset. If you were to look at thousands of salespeople as I have, you’d see that the way they use their time may well be the single most important determinant of their success. The best and the brightest don’t waste a moment. Even salespeople who lack good presentation skills or some other talent can make up for it by efficiently using their time. And, on the opposite end of the scale, the salesperson who is floundering and failing invariably has problems with time management.
Face Calls
There’s a simple principle involved in time management for salespeople. More calls means more sales. Simple. As Woody Allen said, “80 percent of success is being there.” You’re “there” more often when you make more calls. If you learn nothing more than that from this book, you’ll be ahead of the game.
Let’s define a term. A “call” is a face-to-face meeting where you ask a prospect to buy something. It’s not a telephone call to get an appointment or a service call on a current customer, although those activities are certainly important. But when I talk about making more calls in the context of business-to-business sales, I’m talking about asking for orders in person more frequently.
The technological advances of our society are wonderful. You have email, smart phones, instant messaging, video conferencing, and all kinds of other ways to communicate with your prospects. These high-tech wonders can make you more efficient. But they can’t take the place of the face-to-face call. The salesperson who tries to substitute electronic “virtual selling” for personal contact is going to be about as successful as the quarterback who tries to run a play from the bench. The rest of the team may run the play, but it won’t be the same without him there to handle the ball.
There is no substitute for meeting with the client in person. When you’re there face-to-face, you build trust. It’s really hard to believe in what someone’s saying if you can’t look into their eyes while they’re saying it. If you’ve done any telephone sales, you know how hard it is to create a trusting relationship with a prospect who can’t see you.
You also demonstrate your professionalism and transmit your enthusiasm much better in person. “Seeing is believing” is more than just a truism when it’s applied to a sales call. When the prospect can see your animation, can see how prepared you are, can see the masterful way you control your presentation, you gain tremendous credibility. When you’re there face-to-face, you find yourself much more focused on the client, too, which in turn will make your presentation just that much more persuasive.
Personal calls also show the prospect you care. They say you’re so concerned about the success of his or her business that you are willing to invest some of your valuable time in working on it with them. Use all the modern technology you want, but use it to get more face time with more prospects and current customers. That’s where its real value lies.
Efficiency And Effectiveness
This sure sounds like I’m pushing you to work harder, doesn’t it? Add a couple more hours to your 12-hour workday and you’ll make more money. Of course, you may lose a spouse or a couple of kids in the process, but hey, that’s just part of the price you pay. More calls means more hours, right? Not necessarily.
I’m really not advocating that you work longer hours. I’m suggesting that you find ways to work more efficiently. Because you can make more calls and work no harder if you improve your sales efficiency. And you can make more sales on those calls if you improve your sales effectiveness. You’ve read several thousand words helping you learn to be more effective, now let’s work on improving your efficiency.
There are three steps in building more personal worth through better time management:
1. Set Priorities
2. Plan Activities
3. Execute Effectively
There are many, many tools available to help you do these things, from computerized calendars and contact management software to personal coaching and time management seminars you can attend. But ultimately, time management is just like any other skill: it can’t be taught, it has to be learned by practice. And you will only benefit if you are the one practicing the skill.
Keep in mind that the time you are trying to manage belongs to you. It’s not your sales manager’s time or your company’s time, regardless of what they say or think. It’s yours. And in the end, you are the only one who can manage it.
Time management is all about mutually exclusive choices. You can only do one thing at a time. You can’t be in two places at the same time. No matter how you express it, you have to choose which account to call on at a particular point in time and you have to choose what you’re going to do on that call. That’s what priorities are all about.
In sales, there are two sets of priorities, account priorities and activity priorities. The relationship between the two—how you manage your activities to produce the greatest revenue from the chosen accounts—determines how successful you will be in increasing your personal worth.
Active Account Priorities
Account priorities are pretty straightforward. Which prospect has the potential to yield the greatest revenue for the amount of time invested in them? Let’s start by quantifying the importance of each current account. In most businesses, the major accounts count and they count big. That’s where the ever-popular “80/20” rule came from.
Of course, you generally like to think that you give your full attention and top notch service to every account. But in reality, which is where you live and operate most of the time, the constraints of time force you to make choices about how much time and what type of service you render to each account.
I suggest you assign priorities to each of your active accounts based on their potential for contribution to your personal revenue stream. I divide them into three groups.
Must Have Accounts
These are just what their name implies. They represent such a large share of your total business that you must have them or your business’ very existence may be jeopardized. Here’s a breakdown of the contribution various sized accounts make to a year’s revenue for one of my clients:
Five Largest Accounts = 26 percent of total revenue
Next Five Accounts = 10 percent
Next Five Accounts = 9 percent
Next Five Accounts = 7 percent
Total of Twenty Largest Accounts = 52 percent of total annual revenue
My client does business with about 350 different accounts every year, but over half of the revenue comes from just twenty of them—and less than half comes from all of the other 330. Look at the top five! In a very simplistic way, if the company’s profit margin were five percent, the loss of any one of these top five accounts could push the income statement into red ink territory.
As a salesperson, you have a few personal Must Have Accounts. I once had a sales position where I handled about 50 different accounts, but two particularly large ones were crucial. The commission on one was large enough to make my mortgage payment each month and the other basically paid the rest of the household bills. If either one of them cut back their spending or, heaven forbid, cancelled their contract, I was in deep trouble. I’m sure you know which ones of your accounts are Must Haves.
Priority Accounts
The second priority group for current accounts are Priority Accounts. These are fairly large accounts now but have the potential to spend a lot more—to become, in essence, Must Have Accounts. In the list above, the accounts ranked 6 through 20 would fall into this category. These accounts are important in their own right but not individually crucial to your company’s survival.
The Priority Accounts’ importance lies in their potential. They deserve an outsized portion of your time and effort because they could be much larger contributors to the revenue stream. Also, because they are active accounts, they are often the most fertile ground in which to plant new business seeds. They’re profitable, they know you and your company’s products, and they can grow if you give them a reason to do so.
Other Active Accounts
The third group of active accounts is simply Other Active. These are the accounts that do business with you but are generally limited in growth potential for some reason. They may be small businesses that don’t have the capital to grow, or even large businesses with a use for only a limited number of your particular products or services. They may be seasonal accounts for you, buying only during certain times of the year because of some constraint peculiar to their business. For whatever reason, Other Active Accounts don’t have a lot of growth potential.
You can’t ignore them, though, because they can represent a significant portion of your business in total. The key to efficiently servicing these accounts is to stick to the business at hand with them and not go off on non-productive tangents.
New Account Priorities
The account priority groups I’ve been discussing consist entirely of current accounts—ones you do business with today. But you have to give some degree of priority to developing new accounts as well, or your business will stagnate. In fact, I suggest you place a priority on new accounts equal to that you give to existing ones. It’s the only way to make sure you give them the attention they deserve. Again, I’m going to divide the prospects into three groups.
Target Accounts
The first are Target Accounts. These are prospects who have the economic potential to be Must Have Accounts but who, for one reason or another, don’t spend any money with you now. Maybe you sell widgets and they are dedicated woudget users. Maybe your largest competitor has a deep consultive relationship with them. Or maybe no one in your company has yet found the magic button that will convert the Target Account from a prospect to a customer.
You know who your personal Target Accounts are. Most good salespeople have a couple of “dream sales” they’d like to make and they’re usually to the great big accounts that no one else has been able to sell. You not only get rich off of them, but you become famous in the sales annals of your company as well. What you have to do is make yourself stop dreaming about that sale and start making it happen.
There is usually at least one if not more major obstacles to selling the Target Account. If it were easy, it would already have been done. So setting a high priority on getting their business—the same time priority you dedicate to working with a Must Have Account—is the only way you will succeed.
Unknown Potential Accounts
The next group of prospects is the Unknown category. I use that name because you don’t really know what their actual potential is for any number of reasons. Maybe they are a new business in town. Maybe they have new owners whose plans and policies aren’t apparent yet. For whatever reason, you don’t really know what their potential is, so your first activity priority with them has to be to find out. But since you already know what the potential revenue is from a Target Account (and it’s big) you have to rank them slightly lower.
All Other Prospects make up your final group. These accounts are the ones that you are pretty sure will fall into the Other Active category when they are sold. They’ll be small accounts for the same reasons and you’ll assign them the same place on the list of priorities.