I’m, more frequently, involved in discussions around “time available for selling.” Increasingly, more “stuff” seems to be occupying sellers time, diverting them from engaging with customers in their buying processes.
Part of it is increasing complexity of our solutions and businesses. We may spend a lot of time, internally, configuring and making sure we can support what we are selling. As more people are involved in selling complex solutions, we spend more time coordinating and planning with them.
There are endless demands on our time for meetings, some that are high value and some that are worthless, but they suck up time. We have administrative and other responsibilities that take time–like compliance issues around tool utilization. While we may be WFH, we spend endless hours, day and night, on Zoom/Teams calls that are not with our customers.
Too many of our metrics focus on activities—metrics focusing on how busy we are, not what outcomes we create. So we focus on doing more and more of those activities. Striving for 1000 more emails, 100 more dials, 30 more LinkedIn outreaches because we are driven to achieve our activity goals. There are endless technology solutions, focused on freeing up our time, making us more efficient, yet they seem to be taking more of our time just using them.
Every seller and manager I meet have overwhelming demands on their time. Everyone I meet is incredibly busy, but the issue is, are they spending their time as productively and effectively as possible? Are they creating the outcomes important to us, our customers, and our business?
There’s an intriguing shift in seller mindsets, the busier we get. We start feeling a sense of accomplishment in the act of being busy. We look at our to-do lists, admiring how much stuff we’ve checked off. We compare calendars and working hours–then start talking about work life balance. But we pay little attention to the fact that as we are getting busier, we are actually producing fewer results. But busyness somehow becomes the surrogate for results.
Often, these diversions are well intended, but cumulatively, they represent huge time drains to each of us.
We have to, periodically, reassess what we do, how we work. How do our sellers spend their days? How do we restructure our work processes, simplifying things or offloading sellers of certain tasks? How do we simplify our tech stacks? Do we need all these meetings?
But once we do this, there’s a new challenge. How do they spend that time we just freed up?
Some years ago, we worked with a large organization in freeing up time to sell. We “found” 25% more time for sellers to sell. Ironically, the reaction from them was, “OMG, now we have to spend time with our customers!”
Unconsciously, all the time drains had become a refuge for sellers avoiding spending time with customers. They were busy, but not busy with customers. And, in a weird way, there was great relief in that.
As we dove into what was happening, we discovered the real fear, “We don’t know what to talk to our customers about! What we used to talk to them about, they no longer care as much about. What do we talk to them about now?”
They had been taught to focus on their products and the company. But the customers have more efficient ways of learning about the products–and preferred those. They didn’t know what to talk to customers about, how to engage them in conversations that were impactful to the customer. What the customers cared about were their businesses, challenges, problems, opportunities.
As we taught the sales people to be more business focused in their conversations an interesting thing happened. The customers wanted to have more conversations with them, they were willing to spend more time because the sellers were engaging them in the issues most important to them.
We need to free up as much time as possible for our sellers to sell. But in freeing up that time, we have to equip them to be able to use that time with customers in ways that create value with them.
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