There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient.  Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance.  At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light.  Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact.

Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means.  People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, we have much greater insight into our customers, pipelines, opportunities, and so forth.”  Or implementing powerful research tools to provide great sales intelligence–without providing a foundation the sales people can intelligently use these tools.  Or providing great content and email marketing tools that are used to blindly inflict content on people who have no interest or desire to get that content.

 We too often forget about the fundamentals–the basic blocking and tackling, the foundations of sales effectiveness.  None of these tools replace the need for this, but the amplify the impact of the sales person using it.  A high performing sales person, executing a well defined sales process will get phenomenal benefit and create much more value using these tools.  They will be able to leverage their time and presence in ways they couldn’t without the tools.

We have to continue to focus on building a sound platform based on the fundamentals:  Do we have a well defined sales process aligned with the customer buying process?  Do we know how to develop and execute high impact sales strategies?  Do we have the knowledge and business acumen that enables sales professionals to connect with their customers discussing their issues, concerns or helping them discover new opportunities?  Do we understand what customers value, how we create, communicate, and deliver differentiated value?  Do we understand how to listen and really understand?  Do we have the ability to confront the customer–appropriately, to ask for money in exchange for value and to defend that value without resorting to discounting?  Do we understand how to manage our time, leveraging it for maximum impact?  Do we understand how to prospect and gain the attention and interest of people we may have never met?  Do we understand how to create, build and maintain relationships?  Do we understand how to trust and be trusted?  As managers, do we understand how to analyze performance, how to coach and develop people to achieve their full potential, how to measure performance and hold people accountable for that performance?

All of these are the foundations of high performance selling.  Implementing tools, whether they are CRM, sales intelligence, analytic, content management/delivery, presentation or other tools on this sound foundation can magnify the impact and effectiveness of the sales team.

Absent these foundations the tools can be harmful.  Not only do we waste time, resource,  money on tools that aren’t used, used well, or used properly.  But we run an even greater danger–used improperly they can have exactly the opposite affect.  They can alienate and create great distance with customers.  They can magnify poor strategies and stupid execution.  Recently, I encountered a sales person selling a marketing/lead development tool–his thoughtless use of the tool he was selling caused him to spam 1000′s of people.  My feedback to him was that his use of his tool made me certain that I would never use his tool and would actively recommend people avoid his company.  He didn’t seem to understand.  This week, I get prospecting calls from a person selling a tool that was to provide great insight into customers.  His first question was, “What does your company do?”  I get endless offers for content, newsletters for thing I never requested, things that I have no interest in. 

I talk to people who are considering the acquisition of very powerful tools.  I ask a few questions.  For example, powerful analytic tools–but are you asking the right questions?  The quality of the analytics is dependent on the quality of the question you are applying the analytics after–or the quality of the data being analyzed.  Bad questions, bad data give you terrible answers.  The greatest presentation, storytelling, whiteboarding tools are meaningless if your people do not understand the customer, what they value and how to create value.

I can’t imagine any high performing sales professional not leveraging these tools to their full potential!  They are very powerful.  But the tools are the means, not the end.  If you don’t have a strong foundation in place, they are worse than useless.  Before wasting time, resource, and money on these tools, make sure you are building on a strong foundation.

We all take shortcuts.  We want to find the path of least resistance, we want to get to the goal in the shortest time possible.  It’s natural human behavior.

Too often, however, the shortcuts we take are the wrong ones.  It’s too hard to research a company and individual before a prospecting call, so we just call and talk about the only thing we know–ourselves and our products.  We’re pressed for time, so we don’t prepare for a sales call–we shoot from the lip, after all, we’ve made hundreds of calls before.  It takes a lot of time to develop a sales strategy, so we just go to meetings, respond to the customer in meeting after meeting, hoping they will buy at some time.

But it turns out, these aren’t shortcuts.  In fact, they take more time, they slow us down, they adversely impact our effectiveness.  We make unresearched phone calls, blabbing on about ourselves, not understanding the customer need, wondering why we can’t get a meeting with a prospect. We ramp up the number of calls and emails.  We find ourselves making dozens to hundreds of calls, only getting a couple of meetings.  

If we took a little time to research—Are we calling customers in our sweet spot?  Do we understand what they might be interested in, based on researching their companies and them?  Have we thought of new ideas, insights that we might provide which would have a great impact on them?  Have we thought of the questions we want to ask to better understand what drives them?  It takes time to do this, but it enables us to connect more effectively with the prospect.  As a result, the number of calls we have to make goes down tremendously.  And when we talk to the prospect, they’re engaged, they’re interested, they want to hear what we have to say.  They may invite us to a second meeting, then another….

Sales call planning—we know we’re supposed to do this, but we’re busy, and it’s just another call–we’ve made hundreds.  Research tells us that sales people make as many as 3 times the number of calls necessary to close a deal.  The reasons, poor preparation and execution.  Think about the last call you went on, after the call did you say to yourself, “I forgot to ask this,” or “I should have done this.”  This doesn’t happen if you prepare and plan the call.  Think about it from a customer point of view.  If we use their time poorly, if we aren’t prepared, they don’t want to meet with us.  If they don’t meet with us, they may not understand our solutions and might not buy from us.

We don’t take the time to think about our deal strategy–again, we’ve done lots of deals before, we can do it on autopilot.  But after a number of calls, we’re surprised–there are people involved that we didn’t know, we don’t really understand the customer buying or decision making processes.  The competition does something unanticipated, we didn’t really understand the customer requirements.  We didn’t take the time to develop a business justification then find the customer is struggling to get funding approved.  We find there’s a lot of stuff we need to know, we have to schedule more meetings, but the customer is impatient—”Why didn’t you do this the first time around?  We’re almost finished with our evaluation, you are slowing us down?”  or worse, “You really don’t understand what we are trying to achieve.  We feel more comfortable with your competitor?”

It turns out the “easy” shortcuts aren’t really shortcuts at all—we have to re-do things, we have to add more meetings and more time.  We test the prospect’s or customer’s patience, we never get their confidence or engagement.  The odd thing about these “shortcuts” is we never have enough time to achieve our goals if we keep using these shortcuts.

The real shortcuts involve work—research, planning, preparation.  Understanding our customer and competition, taking the time to understand what they need.  Figuring how we can strengthen our competitive position and create great value for the customer.  Thinking about how we can accomplish more in each call, how we can compress the buying/selling cycles.

Are you taking the right shortcuts?  Do they really enable you to maximize your impact in engaging and creating value for your customers?  Do they improve your ability to win and reduce your sales cycle?  If they don’t then they aren’t shortcuts.

Virtually everything we do can be recovered.  We make a bad call, we can fix it and recover from it, we lose a deal, we can learn from it and win the next ten deals.  The one thing we can’t recover is time–once we’ve spent it, it’s lost, we can’t re-do it, we can’t recover it.  So it’s critical we manage our time to maximize our impact and effectiveness.

If our job is to sell—to acquire new business, orders, and revenue; then clearly we want to maximize the time available to sell (as well as maximize our effectiveness for the time spent–but that’s a different post).  This seems obvious, you might be asking, “tell me something I don’t know.”

However, when we start looking at how sales people spend their time, increasingly we find more time is spent in non-selling related activities than in selling related activities.  Surveys show time spent in sales related activities at a little more than 40%.  In surveys we’ve done with a number of organizations recently, we are seeing sales related time significantly lower, sometimes south of 20%.

We’ll never be able to spend 100% of our time selling, there are things we have to do as sales people that aren’t sales related.  But we want to do everything we can to maximize the time we have available to sell.

Generally, we find two categories impacting time available for selling:

• How we, individually, manage our time.
• Organizational impacts on our time.

In maximizing time available for selling, we have to look at both.

Managing our time available for selling:  We are responsible for setting our daily schedules and priorities.  Too often we don’t manage our time–we let interruptions manage us, our time is consumed with reacting or responding.  Or we get into an avoidance mode.  We know we have to prospect, we find all sorts of excuses to avoid prospecting.  Or we just don’t have a plan at all.  Soon our time available for selling disappears.  Vicious prioritization of our time, focusing on where we invest our time, blocking time focusing on the activities that enable us to achieve our goals is critical.

Track how you spend your time.  Look at how much time you spend in selling, look at the other time drains.  Block your time, schedule yourself, make sure that you are conscious about how you invest your time–invest it in activities that enable you to achieve your goals.

Organizational impacts on time:  Sometimes our ability to manage our time is out of our control, people in our company start consuming time.  Most of the time it’s unconscious, it’s people, our colleagues doing their jobs.  They may have questions, they want to understand what’s happening with customers.  Sometimes, roles and responsibilities are unclear, as things start falling through the cracks, in order to serve our customers, sales people step in to take up the slack.  Sometimes, our organizations just impose a lot of bureaucracy.  We have to work with our colleagues.  We have responsibilities within our own organizations, but too often–and inadvertently, the internal meetings or requests can start to consume our time.

We see systemic issues impacting selling time within organizations.  Often it is the result of poorly defined roles and responsibilities, sometimes it is poor mechanisms for managing communications in the organization.  It’s important to understand where the time drains are.  It’s important eliminate those that you can.  For the others, it’s important to see how you can minimize the impact.  For example, often product managers want feedback from sales on new features they may be considering.  They may survey 100% of the sales force.  Get a few product managers surveying 100% of the sales force, all of a sudden you have a huge time impact.  If each surveyed only a portion of the sales force, the impact on each sales person could be significantly less.  Usually, there are pretty simple solutions, but first we have to know we have a problem.

Organizations and systemic impacts on selling time are difficult for sales people to deal with.  Typically, a sales person cannot refuse to comply.  Managers need to be attentive to these organizational and systemic time drains, seeking to eliminate or reduce their impact.

One of the easiest ways to improve sales productivity is to simply make more time available for selling.  Moving from 20% time available to 30% time available can improve results by 50%.

• Are you using your time as effectively as possible–maximizing the time you have for selling?
• Are you looking for the time drains on your schedule, seeking to eliminate or minimize them?

Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute.   Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching.

When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken.  They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance.  We want to see progress and change. 

But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see  the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions.  Coaching is an ongoing dialog, we want to continue to reinforce and build on our discussions.  We miss a tremendous opportunity by neglecting to follow up.  Rather than having an ongoing dialog, our coaching becomes a series of isolated discussions, often missing the progress that may or may not have been made.

Too often, managers simply neglect to follow up, more often, they just forget.  Follow up can be easy.  After each meeting, schedule a “To-Do” in your calendar — write a note to your self, schedule the follow – up.  If it’s something tactical, for example, checking the outcome of a meeting or some other activity, write an email to the person, copying yourself, and schedule it for advance delivery.  For example, if there is an important meeting in 10 days, schedule a follow up email for the 11th day–”How did it go?  Let’s talk about what happened.”

Follow up can be simple and easy if we schedule them immediately when we agree upon them with our people.  Follow ups improve the results we get from coaching, they improve our own personal effectiveness.

Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager.  Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically.  I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits.  It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management.

The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly.  Let’s start with the areas in which we are in real alignment.

The biggest impact a sales manager at any level can have is by being out with their people in front of customers.  Yet too often, exactly the opposite thing happens–managers spend too much of their time internally focused.  They are chained to their desks, conducting internal meetings, conducting internal reviews, spending time reporting on what’s going on.  Some of this is necessary-we need to communicate to the rest of the organization, we need to get resources and support for our people, we need to get help for our customers.  But too often, managers are consumed with this.  They stop visiting customers, they stop visiting their people.

Being chained to the desk, being focused on reporting, staying internally focused on internal politics do not produce revenue or improve the capabilities of sales people.

Without a doubt, the number 1 and the number 1 priorities of sales managers are Customers and Your People!  If the majority of your time isn’t spent in the field working with your people and visiting your customers, you are prioritizing things incorrectly.  Nothing trumps spending your time here–period.  A number of years ago, I was EVP of Sales for a large organization.   I was scheduled to do a presentation at our Board of Directors.  It was an “important” presentation.  As the day approached, a critical customer situation arose.  It was clear that my involvement was needed and, unfortunately, the only time available with the customer conflicted with my ability to present to the Board.  The decision was easy for me–I conveyed my apologies to my boss, the CEO, and to the Board Members, saying Customers and this situation were more important.  Fortunately, my boss and the board applauded that decision–and we did get the order.

So managers need to prioritize time with customers and with their people.  We need to unchain ourselves from our desks and spend the majority of our time in the field.  Take a moment right now and look at your calendar for the past 30 days.  If you haven’t spent a minimum of 50 percent of your time in the field with your people and with customers, you’re not maximizing your impact.

Now once we’ve committed to spend our time in the field, where do we have the most impact?  This is where I think the article is dead wrong.  It suggests that managers spend the bulk of their time with A players and calling on their customers.  I don’t want to ignore the A players, but this is not where the problems are, this is not where managers have the most impact—both in driving performance of sales people and in contributing to closing business.  By definition, the A players really don’t need your help, so it’s irresponsible to focus the bulk of our time with them, unless all you want is “feel good” meetings.

Where we as managers have the greatest impact and leverage is with our B and even C players.  Maximizing the performance of that huge middle range of our people—the B players has the highest return on a manager’s time.  Working with them, we have so much more impact, so much greater room for helping them improve.  Likewise, the impact we have working with them, on their deals, helping strengthen their competitive positioning and moving the deal through the customer’s buying cycle.  (For a different perspective the value of focusing on your B players, look at what the authors of Challenger Selling have to say.)

It may be more fun hanging out with A players and their customers, but that’s not our job as sales managers.  Our job is to maximize the performance of our organization.  We have to invest our time where it has greatest impact, and frankly where we’re needed.  By  definition, it won’t be with our top performers.

This doesn’t say we ignore our C players either.  Our job is to maximize performance, this includes dealing with performance problems.  Coaching our C players–either getting them to be B’s or A’s, moving them into roles where they can be B’s or A’s (and that may be out of the company) is our responsibility as managers.

Whatever level of manager you are, spend your time where you have the greatest impact–it’s always with customers and sales people.  Once you get out to the field, don’t hide out–head straight for the people and customers where you can bring the greatest value and impact, and where you are most needed.  Don’t ignore your A players or your great customers, but they don’t really need you as much.  It’s your B and C players that need you and your attention.  It’s the tough customers where you can help both your people and the customers the most.

Serve your people, serve your customers, the rest takes care of itself.

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Sales people are notoriously bad at writing things down and documenting things.  I talk to thousands a year.  When I start talking about documenting something–a deal plan, an account plan, territory, call plans, even a to-do list–all of a sudden you can see the resistance in their faces. 

They sit back, fold their arms.  Most say nothing, but a few courageous one’s will say, “Dave, you don’t get it.  I’m  too busy to do this.  I don’t have time to document these things–it’s too bureaucratic–I’ve got a plan, it’s in my head!”

I’m used to this.  I respond, “OK, I get it, let’s talk about your plan for this opportunity………”  It’s always the same, they start talking, they tell me about the deal, they tell me about what they’ve done.  I start asking questions, “Where are you in the sales process, how do you know you are aligned with the customer buying process, what are the risks to the customers in this project, what is your positioning vis a vis the competitors, ….. the list goes on.”  I get more data, but as we proceed, it gets sketchier and sketchier. 

We then talk about “What are the next things you need to do, who do you need to do it with, when are you going to do it?  What’s the positioning you need to win this deal?”   They respond, they outline action plans and strategies, I take notes, writing down the next steps.  Ususally they don’t.  They say, they’re under control, they can do the deal, they don’t need to document the plan.  I smile and thank them.

At the first milestone, I call or email, “How did it go?”  You know what happens–the majority of the time, the response comes back, “I forgot to do it, I’ll get right on it.”  The second milestone, “How did it go?”  You know…..

We sit down, I pull out my notes from the last meeting and ask “We developed these strategies to position ourselves to win.  We committed to these steps and actions to execute the strategies.  Where are we in executing the plan?”  The discussion usually involves a lot of hand waving, some apologies, a re-commitment to execute the strategy, then a quick escape.  This time they write a few things down, but too often, they’re forgotten.

Sales people are right, they are busy, they’ve got a lot of things to do, different deals, different accounts, different sales callse.  Changing customer requirements, shifts in our strategies.  It’s impossible to keep it in your head.  You lose most of it–you may remember one or two things, you may have jotted down a couple of reminders, but most of the time we’re busy with activities, responding customer requests, reacting to what may have happened in the last call.  We drift further and further away from our plans and strategies.  Sales cycles get lengthened, deals go away.

It is impossible to keep it all in our heads!  We need to document our plans, we need to use the plans to guide our actions, keeping us focused, on target, moving forward purposefully in the execution of our strategies.  We need to document our plans–they provide the basis for what we do every day.  They provide the foundation of taking our daily activities and transforming them into accomplishments.

Being too busy to  document your plans–whether it’s a deal plan, prospecting, call, territory, account or other plan–is just an excuse.  It’s an excuse for being less productive, it’s an excuse for winning less, it’s an excuse for not being accountable.

Writing it down, keeps us focused, having it documented, means we don’t have to remember and we never forget.  Many of us work with teams–a documented plan keeps the team focused, well coordinated and moving forward.

• Do you take the time to maximize your productivity, impact and effectiveness?
• Are you documenting and updating all your deal/opportunity plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your prospecting plans?
• Are you documenting and updating your account and territory plans?
• Are you prioritizing all of these in your day to day activities?

It’s the end of the year.  The New Year often represent a time for a fresh start.  We have new goals and quotas.  New initiatives and priorities will be launched in each of the thousands of Kickoff meetings that occur around the world.  We may have committed to some New Year’s resolutions.

Yet, it’s really only a New Year from the point of view of the calendar.  We each come into the New Year with a lot of baggage.  Deals in process, all the things that were on our to-do lists that haven’t gotten to done.  With the New Year, a fresh start that is really not a fresh start, and a lot of new initiatives, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just fall back into old habits.  Or it’s easy to be cynical and just keep doing the same old stuff.

I believe there’s merit to reflecting on the past year and looking at what worked and what didn’t work.  I think it’s important to enter the new year shedding as much baggage as possible.  Use this as the opportunity to clear some “space,”  on your calendar, in your day to day routine, in your mind.

Pull out a sheet of paper, draw a line, vertically, down the middle.  On the left side, title the column:  “What Worked,”  the right, “What Didn’t.”  Don’t focus on the broad strategic issues, look at the little things, the details.  Things like, “I kept putting off updating CRM and doing reports,”  “I didn’t spend enough time prospecting.” 

Set a goal for yourself–identify 25 things that worked and 25 things that didn’t work.  Write them down, don’t stop until you get 25—they may be ridiculously trivial, but make sure you write down 25.

For the time being, focused on the things that Didn’t Work.  Prioritize the 25.  Rank them so the biggest problem, the thing that had the biggest negative impact is first, the next is second, and so on.  For the top 3—no more—write down what you are going to do to eliminate or fix them.  Treat them as projects–develop an action plan, milestones and target dates. 

For the remaining 22 items, look at the things that you can outright stop doing.  Usually it’s at least the last few, it could be more.  Look at the things that you were doing that were a waste of time, effort, or just didn’t work.  Draw a line through them and just stop doing them.  Be as aggressive as possible.  The more you can eliminate, them more you will free time up to focus on what works.  Some of this may require you to sit down with your manager to discuss what you are stopping and why.  You may need to negotiate some agreement, or your manager may need to take on the task to coach and train you on things you will not be permitted to stop doing.  Get your manager to put some skin into this and supporting you.   

Keep the list in front of you for the next few months to remind yourself, so you don’t fall into bad habits.

Look at the things that Did Work.  Again, prioritize them, ranking the thing that had the highest positive impact on your success first, the next second, through the entire 25 items.  This time, look at the bottom 5 on that list.  Could you stop doing them–even though they worked–without having a significant impact on your success?  If you can, eliminate them.  Then look at the top 3 things.  Ask yourself the question, “How can I spend more time doing these things?”  Develop an action plan with milestones and target dates.  Ignore everything else.

Try this over the weekend.  Be thoughtful about it.  Make sure you write it down, then post the results at your desk–just above your phone.  Let the list constatnly remind you so you can build good habits in the next couple of months.

Enter the New Year with as little unnecessary baggage as possible.  Free your time to focus on the things that really impact you.  Stop or ignore all the rest.

Best wishes for a healthy and productive New Year!  Thank you for following this blog and your active participation in the discussions here, on LinkedIn an other forums where this appears.  I deeply appreciate your engagement.

Time Management is a top issue impacting sales productivity.  It’s tough to establish measures on  time management.  Some people keep an inventory of what they’ve gotten done, for example to-do’s completed.  One of the things I like tracking–not on an ongoing basis, but from time to time is:  Time Available For Selling.

There are lots of ways to look at this.  It’s important to establish your own definition and maintain consistency  in how you track it.  Many tend to define it in the following way:  Time actually spend meeting with customers and prospects (whether in person or on the phone/web conference), plus time spent in preparing for the meeting and in direct follow up.

Most of the market survey’s on “Time Available For Selling”  is reasonably in the same range, 37-45%!  This means 63-55% of our time is spent in non sales activities!  Surprised?  We’ve done some assessments where we have seen time available for selling as low as 18-30%.

It’s kind of amazing,  our jobs are to be working with customers, yet the marjority of our time is spent in other activities.  A lot of those are important activities.  Training meetings, some time spent in customer service/non selling activities, some necessary administraioon , travel, and other things.  These are all part of our jobs and part of what we need to do to be sales people.

Time Drains: 

However, when you start monitoring how you spend your time, it’s important to look at “time drains.”  These are things that detract from your time available for selling.  As we’ve helped organizations assess this, we find some stark contrasts between sales people in large organizations and sales people in small organizations.

In large organizations, there are lots of distractions to selling activities.  There tend to be lots of internal meetings–they may be well intended, but they are drains on people’s time.  For example, in one Fortune 25 organization we worked with, we found marketing, product managers, customer service and all sorts of people interested in “understanding what the customers thought, what was happening in the field,” and other things.  These were well intended people, doing their jobs, but when we looked at the collective impact of hundreds of these people vying for sales people’s time, the impact was great.  In this same organization, there were continual new programs and initiatives.  Again, each product manager was anxious for their initiatives to be successful, they spent time with sales people, getting mindshare, training.  Each effort, alone, was a small impact, but when you looked at all the things going on across the entire organization the impact was enormous.

Many of these things are important.  However, it’s important to look at the overall impact of each of these little time drains.  In the case I cited above, everyone–sales, marketing, product managers were simply unaware of the impact of these time drains.  Once they became aware of them, we were able to look at doing things differently.  In the case of this organization, we were able to free up 20% of the time–without changing anything about how the people sold, we were able to almost double time available for selling, consequently double productivity.

Every large organization has these time drains.  We become unconscious to them, and over time they grow.  Assessing the time drains periodically can give tremendous improvements in Time Available for selling.

In small organizations, it’s a little more difficult.  The reason is, often sales people wear multiple hats.  In addition to selling, they  may be doing some marketing programs, customer service or support.  It’s simply because the organization is small and cannot afford to put the resources in place for each function.  The time drains are very obvious, but the fixes are more difficult.  Sometimes when they get to be big enough, you find you can justify hiring a person to do the function, freeing up the sales person to sell.  Sometimes, sales people use these other duties as an escape or an excuse.  If you know you have to do a lot or prospecting and you want to find excuses for not doing it, you can always use your other responsibilities as a mechanism for avoiding it.  It happens to all of us.  For example, I reserve time once a week to process bills and send them to our accountant for handling.  Usually I do this on Saturday mornings.  Today, I had a large block of time that I needed to do prospecting — I’ve told you how much I hate it. I almost decided to do my bill processing–I could have easily rationalized it–fortunately I didn’t.

In organizatons, large and small, we can always find excuses not to sell.  There are always “important meetings” to go to, reports to complete, research to be done.  Too often, sometimes unconsciously, we create the time drain.  This is the worst possible time drain–something top sales professionals minimize.

Leveraging Time Available For Selling:

If we accept the market surveys, the average sales person only has 405 of their time available for selling—that’s less than half our time!  Think about it, we have quotas that require our full time effort to achieve, but we have less than half our time to achieve them!

We need to make sure that whatever time we have available to sell, we use as effectively as possible.  This is where planning comes in–investing the time to develop a strong deal strategy–focusing on how you increase your odds of winning and reduce the sales cycle is critical.  Making each sales call count—figuring how you might compress what you would normally accomplish in 2-3 calls, compressing it to 1 call.  Planning, preparation, then effective execution are critical to making the most of the time you do have available to sell.

Final Thoughts:

It’s hard to monitor Time Available For Selling and the Time Drains.  Once a quarter, I take a week and closely watch my time.  At the end of the day, a look at how I’ve spent the day.  After collecting data for a week, I look at how I’m spending my time.  Are there time drains I can identify and eliminate?  I look at the time I have spent selling, have I used that time to maximum impact?

In sales we can recover virtually everything.  The only thing that we lose permanently is our time–it’s critical that we make each moment of the day as impactful as possible.

We’ve done lots of work in this.  If you need help in looking at how you are spending your time, give me a call!

The other day, someone called me.  He wanted to pick my brain (feeble pickings) for some ideas and ask for some help.  I was delighted with the call, both because he’s a prospect, and it was ego gratifying to be asked for the advice.  But the call ended up being a waste of time–mine and the prospect’s.

See, the problem was the multitasking being done by the prospect.  He was in a car–fortunately not driving, other people were in the car, having a different conversation, which my prospect would interrupt our conversation, to inject a comment into the other conversation.  There were also long pauses (and some background clicking), as I could hear him texting or emailing during our conversation.

I had to repeat myself several times, I could tell he wasn’t getting it, he clearly was distracted.  I suggested we speak later in the day, when he was in his office and could focus.  If this were an isolated incident with this individual, it may be excusable.  But it was his modus operandi–and it was the central issue to his effectiveness as a leader in the organization.  His people would tell me, “he isn’t listening, he’s always multitasking,”  “it takes 3-4 times of explaining the sale thing, until he understands.”  “he wastes my time.”  There was clearly a performance and morale problem in his organization–and his behavior was at the core of the problem.

Whenever I tried to confront it with him, he’d listen with one ear, looking at something on his computer screen, while simultaneously, texting,  and every once in a while injecting an “uh-huh,” or “what was that again?”

That afternoon, I called the executive up, it was to follow up on our conversation earlier in the day.  He said he was really glad I called, the issue was important, his boss was breathing down his neck.  As I started to speak, I started hearing the key board, hearing the distracted responses.  I stopped the conversation and hung up.

Moments later, my phone rang, it was the executive, “We must have been disconnected, what were you saying?”  I responded, “No we weren’t disconnected, I hung up.  Clearly, you aren’t ready to have this conversation.”

There was a moment of silence, “What do you mean, I need to get this done!” was the angry response.  I replied, “This apparently isn’t important enough for you to focus on it, so I’ll wait until you are ready to be present in our discussion.  Until then, we are wasting each other’s time.  Would you call me when you are ready to put everything aside and pay attention solely to our conversation?”  I then said good bye and hung up.

About 15 minutes later, my phone rang again.  It was the executive.  “I was so angry, I had to take a few minutes to calm down.  What do you mean?”  I explained to him what was going on, I walked him through some of the meetings I had participated in recently, how little had been accomplished, how upset his people were. We had a long conversation — the good news was he wasn’t multitasking, he was totally focused on the conversation.  For the moment, he’s making a strong effort not to multitask–you can see small improvements in attitudes with his people already.  They see him listening, they know he is paying attention.

We see it everyday, sometimes I fall victim myself.  This morning, I had breakfast with some colleagues.  It started with each of us conversing while tweeting, reading texts, looking at emails, distracted by people wandering the hotel lobby—we decided to put away our devices and pay attention to our conversation.

I did notice the tables around us.  Filled with business professionals, all intent in their conversations,  but most distracted by the iPhones and Blackberry’s.  I wondered what was happening.

There are all sorts of studies talking about how bad multitasking is.  Most studies reach the conclusion that people are less productive multitasking, than if they focused on one thing, completed it, moved on to the next.

I’m convinced, too many multitask only as a narcissistic show, “look at how busy I am,”  “look at me, I have to do a lot of things at once.”  It’s funny, I meet with a number of very senior and truly exceptional leaders.  Each of them is confident, each of them is totally present.  When we meet, it’s us speaking with each other, paying attention, engaging, and being present.

Multi-tasking is the ultimate demonstration of your lack of respect—for those who you are not paying attention to, and to yourself.

Do you respect yourself and your time enough to be present in what you are doing?

Do you respect those you are working with enough to be present and engaged in the conversation, not letting anything else distract you?