Comments on: Lean Sales And Marketing — Time Available For Selling

By: How to Spend More Time Selling

How to Spend More Time Selling — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:01:08 +0000

[...] a recent post on the Partners in Excellence Blog, David Brock highlighted several of the reasons sales people are spending less time selling than [...]

By: Luis

Luis — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:40:28 +0000

This is such a big uncomfortable true for many sales people. Thanks for be clear and direct ! Best regards !

By: David Brock

David Brock — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:09:02 +0000

Penny, thanks for the great insight!

By: Penny Merian

Penny Merian — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:04:31 +0000

Great article. I agree that enabling the sales team to maximize the time spent talking to customers is key to making your numbers every quarter. It requires your sales resources to be properly aligned with growth opportunities within your customer base while minimizing manual activities like looking through stacks of reports. Good sales reps know a tremendous amount about their top accounts and are able to grow those accounts based on that direct knowledge. The challenge is to understand where opportunities for cross sell and retention exist in every account in each reps book of business.

I have found that the most accurate and timely method to identify hidden opportunities within your customer base is by leveraging science to understand the purchasing tendencies of every customer, compare them to your most profitable customers, and highlight what a customer should be buying that they aren’t currently, and where they were buying but spend has dropped off.

These expansion and retention opportunities should be automatically sent to the rep, focusing them on the right expansion and retention activities for customers, with the right products, who are likely to spend to expand your business.

By: David Brock

David Brock — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:13:25 +0000

Jay, thanks for the comment. I absolutely agree that in whatever time we have with the customer, we have to maximize our impact–both for our own productivity, but more importantly, to not waste the customer’s tiem.

However, I believe maximizing time to sell is a critical sales productivity issue. The customers may have little time to work with us—we have to maximize the impact of each engagment, but by maximizing the time available to sell, the sales person then can call on more of those customers, driving productivity to higher levels.

The problem with the football analogy is that it may be appropriate if we have only a fixed number of customers to call on. However, that’s seldom true, we can always expand the number of customers we call driving higher levels of productivity.

Thanks for taking the time to comment–while we disagree, I think your comment helped me clarify areas that were potentially confusing.

By: David Brock

David Brock — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:07:13 +0000

Great obeservation Caelan! Thanks for taking the time to comment!

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 03:03:01 +0000

Good post David, but I will differ.

I think it all depends on what you are selling and how. To draw an analogy, it is like saying that a football player plays fewer minutes today than in the past. The reason for this is the complexity in the game.

You have little time with a customer and you have to make it work, otherwise you will be making lot of calls with little to show for it. I think you would agree we are in a different selling environment today.

By: Caelan Huntress

Caelan Huntress — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:11:14 +0000

Systems are so important. I can’t believe some people’s actual selling times go below 20%!

Well, considering the absence of effeciency planning at the individual level in the corporate world, I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising.

If management devoted one day per quarter to efficiency training for the salespeople, they would get back a minimum of 16 days in productivity per year. And, of course, more time for selling!