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?

No related posts.

Last week, while at Dreamforce, I had a conversation over coffee with a relatively new sales manager.  He was excited about the job and the opportunity to move forward in his sales career. 

We talked about how he spent his time.  It seemed to be a flurry of activity.  He wanted to go on sales calls with his people, feeling he could contribute to moving deals forward.  As part of the management team, he was called to participate in any number of meetings–budget reviews, planning meetings,  forecasts reviews, reviewing reports, creating reports — the list went on.  Somehow, the sheer momentum of the position had caught him, he was excited, he seemed to be doing what needed to be done.

I asked him, “What are you accomplishing?”

He thought for a moment and replied, “Well I’m really busy.”  He paused further, then sighed, “I’m not really sure what I am accomplishing.”

Many of us, managers and non-managers get caught up in the activities of our jobs.  I struggle with it myself.  Somehow momentum seems to take over, we seem to be doing more, but accomplishing less.  At the end of the week, we wonder where the time went.

Busyness overtakes accomplishment and getting things done.  Activity overtakes thought-fullness.  Time passes, we wonder what we’ve gotten done.

1. Do you spend time every week re-assessing your priorities for the week?  Do they move you and your people forward?
2. Do you have your daily “to-do” list?  Do you update it, do you check things off?
3. Are you spending more time with your people, coaching and developing them, than sitting in planning and review meetings?
4. Are you spending time with customers–helping your sales people, listening to your customers, learning from them?
5. Are you dedicating time to learn something new?  Are you keeping up with news in your industry?  Are you reading?
6. Are you taking time to exercise and meditate?
7. Are you taking time to laugh– have some fun?
8. Are you spending time with your family?

Time is the one thing we can’t recover.  When we lose it, we can never find it again.  Are you making each minute count?

Related posts:

1. Quiet Time–Break Away From Email, Phones, Blackberry’s
2. “Can I Have 15 Minutes Of Your Time?”
3. The Ultimate Question — Finding Your Sweet Spot

The other day, I was returning to the office from a meeting.  The drive was a little more than an hour, so I started making calls.  After a few calls, I suddenly looked around–I’d missed my exit and had driven about 5 miles further than I should have.  All of a sudden I thought, “How did I get here?”

In this world of hyper activity, impacting every aspect of our business and personal lives; I think we often find ourselves in the situation of “How did I get here?”  We get caught up in meeting after meeting, constantly being interrupted by emails, texts, tweets.  We go through the motions we always have gone through–often on autopilot.

Then something happens, we suddenly snap to attention, thinking, “How did I get here?”  It could be the loss of a long term customer.  It could be the pipeline drying up.  It could be losing that deal that was “wired for us.”  It could be longer and longer sales cycles, lower win rates.  It could be leaving the office at 10:00 PM, knowing there’s one more call later in the evening.  Or it’s the 200 unread emails sitting in the inbox this morning.

For organizations, it could unhappy employees, people leaving – going to different jobs, loss of key customers, missed product launch deadlines, products that flop on the market, that new-unexpected competitor,  increases in customer complaints, more billing disputes, the inability to attract and recruit the right people.

We try to put things in place to help us pay attention–our to-do lists, countless dashboards, and reports.  We buy the latest new technology that is supposed to help us “pay attention.”  It works for a while, then things get back to routine.  We buy the latest book, attend a seminar.  We’re energized, on a “sugar high,”  and then we, go back to do our jobs.

Paying attention is hard–there are so many things fighting for our attention, that it’s difficult to focus and really be attentive.  Then one day, something happens and we wonder, “How did I (we) get here?”

Paying attention means constantly being conscious—being in the moment:

• Are we listening to the employee sitting in our office.  We’re not distracted by emails or phone calls, but are we fully attentive and engaged in the conversation?
• Are we listening to our customers and really hearing them, engaging them?  Are we so worried about our script, the next question, the fact that we need this order that we’re not paying attention?
• Have we stopped multitasking?  Have we recognized that busyness is a productivity drain?
• Do we know the handful of metrics that are important to us?  Not the long list of reports, but those 3 or 4 metrics that tell us that we are on track?  Do we pay attention to them?  When things start going off target do we take the time to analyze and understand?
• Do we understand our priorities and are we committed to them, or do we let the latest whim, crisis, fashion du jour divert us.
• When we add a new priority or project–do we remove at least one?  Do we resist piling on?
• Are we focused on no more than 3 priorities?
• When an initiative isn’t working, do we take the time to understand why and take corrective action?  Or do we abandon it and go off onto something new-just because it is new?
• Do we schedule down time for ourselves-and keep it?  Do we schedule time to think, plan, and reflect?  Do we schedule time to learn something new?  Do we schedule time to get exercise?  Do we schedule some time to just look around and see what’s happening around us?

Back to the other day.  After asking myself, “How did I get here.”  the terror came–I was driving on the freeway, I’d become unconscious, what kind of accident could I have created?  Something serious could have happened.  That’s the problem with not paying attention.

Related posts:

1. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention And The Coming Dark Age
2. Sales Manager Or Individual Contributor?
3. Sales IS A Numbers Game!

In many organizations, sales managers also have a personal sales territory.  The practice is not limited to small organizations, I’ve worked with a number of companies in th $500 M range who have some of their sales managers also carry a personal sales territory.  In the smallest of organizations, it’s difficult to avoid, but in general, I think it’s a lose-lose practice.

The job of the sales manager is coaching and developing their people to achieve the highest levels of performance possible.  In smaller organizations, it’s also driving the sales strategy, making sure the right tools, processes, and people are in place.  It’s removing barriers to sales performance.  Any way you look at it, it’s more than a full time job.

Imagine now, the sales manager has a personal territory, even one that’s a reduced size.  The manager is now responsible for driving business in the territory.  The manager has to invest time in prospecting, developing opportunities, managing relationships within the territory.  In any scenario I’ve seen — even the so-called reduced sized territory, it can become all consuming.  I’ve never seen a way to make it “part time.”  When you are engaged in prospecting, you can’t turn it on or off, you have to be executing it fully.  Likewise, in managing opportunities–it’s impossible to go to a customer and say, “I can only work with you so many hours a week, so you’ll have to be patient with my slower responses.”  Sure I’m exaggerating a little, but selling under any condition is a full time job–at least if you want to do it well.

Now you ask the sales manager to do both.  The premise, usually is an affordability issue.  Smaller organizations can’t afford additional headcount, so they assign the sales manager a personal territory.  There are very few cases where I believe this results in higher productivity and effectiveness.  If affordability is the issue, then the company is aggressively looking to generate revenue. I see it with small companies all the time.  They a full time sales manager, can’t afford it, so they drive revenue growth so they can afford to shift the manager into a full time role.  Well, the behavior this inevitably drives is that the manager focuses on doing deals–after all, presumably she is a great sales person, so she spends time focusing on deals.  They monitor the few other sales people, trying talking to them early in the morning, late in the evening, but never have the time to really work with them, coach and develop them.  As a result, the other sales people are left more on their own than they should be, and are unlikely to be performing at the highest levels possible.  One wonders, if the manager was working with the sales team full time, would their increase in productivity and effectiveness drive faster revenue growth then by just trying to squeeze them in?

Other organizations feel that managers need to “keep their hand in selling.”  They need to understand what’s going on, so they can develop their people.  They believe that having a small personal territory can help them understand the world of the sales person.  I think this is just a bad rationale.  If the sales manager can’t understand what their people face by talking with them, coaching them, working with them on a day to day basis, then he isn’t doing the right job as manager’s.  A manager doesn’t need their own territory to understand the challenges of prospecting, of engaging the customer, of facilitating their buying process.  Plus if the are seeing it through their own execution–what value does that provide–again, presumably they are good at doing this.  The point is for them to see it through their people, to understand the challenges their people face, to help them grow and develop.  Managing their own territory diverts the manager from doing this.

Professional selling is a tough job–regardless the size of your territory it demands complete focus.  Likewise, sales management is a tough job–and it too, demands dedication.  By asking the sales manager to do both, there are very few circumstances where I think it’s a win.  We need to invest in selling, we need to invest in developing our people.  Committing to full time sales management is a faster path to growth than giving them an impossible assignment.

What do you think?

Is there a case where it does work to have a sales manager also have a personal territory?

Related posts:

1. Sales Manager: Stop Wasting Your Time On Coaching Meetings!
2. Getting It Done Versus Doing It Right
3. As A Sales Manager, What Would Your Top 3 Activities Be?

We’re all busy.  We run from meeting to meeting, we’re busy doing research, reports, working on social media…. The list can go on.  No one suffers from a lack of activity—the key to sales productivity, though, is are we focusing on the right activities?  Ideally, as sales people, we want to spend as much of our time in customer/sales related activities as possible.  Recently, I heard a piece of data, roughly 40% of sales people’s time is spent working with customers in sales related activities.  Frankly I believe that probably high, I think the time is significantly less than that.

Think of it, on an annualized basis, once we eliminate weekends and holidays, at 40%, we have roughly 80 days to make our annual quota!

Are we focusing on activities that help us produce results–or are we wasting our time?  Are we as impactful as we possibly can be?

Sometime, it’s tough to tell.  We may be busy meeting with people at the customer, are we meeting with the right people?  Are we meeting with our friends and allies, or are we meeting with the people deeply involved in the decision?  Sometimes we fall into bad habits, or rely on too few people in the organization when we should be expanding our relationships.

When we meet with people, are we talking about the right issues–the issues important to them?  We spend a lot of time meeting with people, but if all we are doing is regurgitating a list of features and functions, we are wasting our time, more importantly, we’re wasting their time-we’re wasting our time.

Are we accomplishing as much as we can in each call?  Research we did several years ago showed sales people making 50% more calls than needed.  The reasons, poor call planning/preparation then poor execution.  Sales people spend a lot of their customer facing time going back, to cover things they forgot to do in the original meeting.  A small improvement in planning and executing calls has a dramatic impact in our productivity!

Little things rob us or our time to sell—-bad preparation for sales calls, bad organization, too much time in internal meetings, not leveraging tools that help our productivity, not planning the day/week and sticking to the plan, too much time on emails, constant attention to blackberries.  Sometimes an “avoidance” mentality impacts us, we find anything we can to distract us so that we can put off those calls to customers and prospects.

• Are you using your time as effectively as possible?
• Do you make every moment with a customer count?  Do you maximize your impact with every call?
• Do you rigorously plan and schedule your time?
• Do you look at thing that rob your time, that distract you?

Related posts:

1. Do Great Sales People Make Good Sales Managers?
2. The Secret To Success Part 2—Make Customers Money!

Everyday, I speak with sales executives about the issues of sales productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency.  For any sales executive it’s a critical issue, something they are constantly seeking to improve.

All the executives I speak with are bright, successful people.  They constantly are looking at their sales processes, the skills of their people, the tools their people use, and other things to get the highest levels of performance out of their sales people.  They are fine tuning, trying to find an edge, a few percent productivity improvement here or there.  They are looking to reduce sales cycle times, improve win rates.  They are looking at more effective and efficient ways of filling the top of their funnels.

As a self proclaimed sales guru, I spend a lot of time talking about it–even pontificating at times.  I’m not the only one, there are hundreds of blog posts every week, with everyone offering good ideas on improving the sales process.  Many of the Sales 2.o tools and vendors offer tremendous productivity and effectiveness advantages in executing the sales process.  There’s lots of training that teaches us how to prospect, qualify, discover, propose and close more effectively.

Yet at the end of all this thinking and good work, on a daily basis, I speak with executives that, while they can’t put their fingers on it, they just don’t feel they are getting as much out of the sales people.  The question I pose, in fact this is probably the starting place for any sales effectiveness assessment, is:  “How much of their time are they spending on ‘doing deals’ and deal related activities?  How much time are the spending on activities not directly related to selling?”  After all, that’s what we do—deals.  We find them, we qualify them, we understand what the customers want, we propose a solution, and we negotiate the close.  We do that as effectively and efficiently as possible.  We have all the latest tools, the best training, great management coaching, and we execute well.  When we don’t, we have all the consultants, trainers, and tools in the world to help improve our execution and productivity. 

But some how that misses something.  What we are focusing on is only a part of what sales people spend their time on.  To get a sense of where they are spending time and other areas to improve sales productivity, we need to almost do an old fashioned time and motion study  (sorry, that industrial engineering class in college made a lasting impression).

We’ve done that with a number of large organizations and every time, the results are startling.  Simplifying it, we basically look at how sales people spend their time.  Typically, we find sales people spend between 11% and 23% of their time “doing deals” or deal related activities.  Included in this is the time spent researching, prospecting, executing all the steps of the sales process in meetings with customers, the time spent preparing for those meetings, etc.   Usually, when we are looking at sales efficiency and effectiveness we are looking at these types of issue.  Stated differently, we are only looking at how sales people are spending 11-23% of their time.   Big initiative productivity improvements of 10/20/30% in how they execute the sales process are only impacting this 11-23% of their time.

What if we started looking at the other 77-89% of their time.  Those are the “hidden” time wasters, but eliminating or reducing those can have a tremendous impact on sales productivity, without changing anything about the way the execute their process.

Some of this time, we have no control over–things like holidays and vacations.  There’s a lot, though that we do have control of:

1.  Internal corporate requests of sales.  Lots of people in the organization contact sales people for help and customer input.  Product managers and marketing people are always looking for sales and through sales customer insight.  This is fantastic, the product managers and marketers are doing their jobs.  However, even though each request is small, taken together, these requests have a tremendous impact on people’s time.  In one Fortune 100 organization, we found requests for information from these people was taking up to 20% of the sales people’s time.  It was so easy to send an email blast to the sales force to get their views.  Product managers didn’t know their peers in the next cubicles were also sending request—and they were all sending followups.

2.  Meeting discipline.  We waste a lot of time in meaningless meetings.  We waste even more time waiting for those meaningless meetings to start.  It all adds up.  Think of it, 2 meetings a day, starting 10 minutes late, for about 236 workdays a year is just under 79 hours a week—almost 2 weeks a year per person of wasted time—waiting for meetings.  Think of it, if you could reclaim that time and apply it to sales related activities, without doing anything else, you’ve added 4% more selling time.  Based on the numbers I outlined above, that can be roughly a 20-30% increase in selling time, which is directly translated into productivity.  And this can be implemented at no cost!

Looking at the number of internal meetings on many sales people’s calendars, and knowing that 10 minutes is probably an understatement, think of the time that could be recovered only by starting meetings on time!  Add to that the number of meaningless meetings that are total wastes of time (read some of my other posts on that topic).  One European client has adopted a very novel approach to managing this problem.  All meetings start precisely on time and end on time, more importantly, meetings are optional.  So if people feel a meeting is a waste of time, they don’t come.  Imagine the number of meetings that are eliminated.

3.  Reporting discipline.  You read me rant about reporting.  Sure there are a lot of good tools that reduce the amount of time needed for reports, but I continue to be amazed by the amount of time sales people spend on reporting that is never looked at—but I’ve written about it before, needless to say, there are lots of opportunities to divert this time into selling related activities.

There are amazing and very simple solutions to freeing up sales people’s time to sell—dramatically increasing productivity.  Look at the amount of time spent in non-selling activities.  Much of it is necessary and a part of any sales professional’s job.  But there is tremendous waste.  I’m not suggesting you start managing by a stop watch, but the first pass at any sales productivity initiative needs to be decreasing time spent on non selling activities.  Make sure you are giving them as much time as possible to sell.  The next step is making them as effective and efficient as possible in selling.  There are hundreds of articles, lots of advice and many tools that focus on this.

Related posts:

1. The Sales Game Has Changed, Are You Playing To Win?
2. Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 — Not Just A Sales Problem
3. Sales Manager: Stop Wasting Your Time On Coaching Meetings!

1. Set your own time limits to email.
2. Let calls to your mobile phone roll into voicemail—don’t interrupt what you are doing to answer it.
3. Let text messages queue up, look at them periodically, but not instantaneously.
4. Take some joy in looking around, watching what is going on around you, engage in the real world.

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2. Quiet Time–Break Away From Email, Phones, Blackberry’s
3. No "A’s For Effort"

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2. In Praise Of The Checklist

• Limit the length of time up front–keep it short.
• Have a hard stop that you enforce.
• Set an agenda at the start of the meeting. Here I disagree with Fred a little. I think the agenda should be set and distributed before a meeting. If I possibly have the option, I do not attend meetings where an agenda has not be pre-distributed.
• Don’t say yes to every request that is made.
• Do it right in the meeting, if you can: Here Fred is referring to quick emails or phone calls. We all know that “to-dos” don’t get done. Those that can be accomplished by emails or calls, I do immediately.
• Ask the person who called the meeting to follow up: Have them send the notes with what is being requested or has been committed. If they don’t, then it can’t be important.

• All meetings should be held in rooms without chairs.
• Never-never-never order coffee or other refreshments for a meeting. Consider not allowing refreshments—even water brought into a meeting. People’s thirst of caffeine addictions will keep meetings short.
• Any presentations should be distributed as position papers beforehand. People should be required to review these before hand so that you can use the meeting time to get things done. Lou Gerstner used a variation of this technique very effectively at IBM. If a participant has not reviewed the materials before the meeting, then they don’t get to speak.
• If decisions are to be made, make sure these are clearly identified in the agenda.
• Decide what the meeting is about and keep it focused on that one thing. Is it an informational meeting? Is it a decision-making meeting? It can’t be both.
• No multitasking involved–if you are at the meeting, be In The Meeting! No email, except at the end to do follow ups. No phones except at the end, No blackberry’s or anything else. If those are more important, don’t waste your time and those of others in the meeting.
• Calculate a cost to each meeting, make sure there is a positive ROI to meetings. For consultants, time is money–I am very sensitive about my time. Assess the investment in time (on a fully burdened cost basis) that each person is making in the meeting. Is the time justifiable?

The most important thing is block large portions of your time for yourself. You need time to think about what you are doing. You need time to to the work. You need time to plan.

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1. Real Business People Multitask