It seems like everything I read about sales productivity is focused on doing more. I see all sorts of insights, sage advice, and technology that helps improve our productivity and efficiency. These offer the potential of freeing up time. But it’s interesting how we fill the time we theoretically gain. It seems we fill the time doing more of that same stuff, rather than doing other things that may be neglected, or for which we have not enough time.
We have tools that improve our productivity in generating emails, making calls, outreach to prospects. But what do we do with that time? We do more of those things. We do even more emails, calls, and outreach.
There was a time, sometime when fire was invented, when these productivity tools freed us up to do other things. As much as I hated CRM, using it freed up time for me to spend with customers and prospects. Other tools freed me up to learn more about my customers and how I could help them. Others let me spend less time doing financial justifications and proposals, so I could actually talk to customers about what they could achieve. Others freed up time, so I could take on collateral responsibilities to further my professional development.
But somehow, we use the time freed up by all these tools to do more of what we use these tools to do. We’ve lost the idea of freeing up time so we can allocate it to focus on another part of our jobs.
And that confuses me. As we do more and more of the same things, as we seek to maximize our productivity and efficiency, those very things are producing less and less. How are we becoming more productive?
A few years ago, it took 200-400 touches to get a response. now it’s 1000-1400, there’s no guess what it will be in two years? And we use all the technology, AI, we can to create more outreaches, and we use all our time to do this.
What if we started looking at things differently?
What if, we leverage the productivity and efficiency gains we get from all of that stuff, and diverted the time we save to doing something else? Maybe we can spend more time with those people we actually reach, diving deeper into their issues. Or we can take that time to develop new skills to engage our customers in more value based discussions.
Or possibly, we could use that time to think about and experiment with doing things differently. Particularly since the more we do, seems to produce less and less.
We tend to look at productivity and efficiency in terms of constantly doing more and more of the things we have always done. Perhaps, we should look at it as freeing up time to do other things, critical to success, or to explore doing things differently.
“Or possibly, we could use that time to think about and experiment with doing things differently. Particularly since the more we do, seems to produce less and less.”
When I conduct market reviews,
and get Sales and Marketing in the same room,
I use the expression “Likely to Buy”, a LOT.
How likely to Buy?
WHO likely to Buy?
Where Likely to Buy?
When likely to Buy?
What likely to Buy?
WHY likely to Buy?
“What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. I send them over land and sea, …”
Rudyard Kipling.
When we look at the 1399 FAILED touches, against that Scrutiny we SEE
Its the WRONG touch point.
When we look at the ONE success, we can model success.
As always, well said!