Why Don’t We Take The Time To Do Things Right?

It’s oddly ironic, we never seem to take the time to do things right.

• We don’t do the pre-call research before the call or meeting.  We know we have the greatest impact when we have some minimal amount of research complete, but somehow, we don’t take the time.
• We don’t take the time to personalize our emails.  We know we will have far higher open rates and far better receptivity with even the most simple levels of targeting and personalization, yet we don’t take the time to do it.
• We don’t leverage the sales process.  We know the sales process represents the most effective and efficient steps to engage customers and navigate their buying process.
• We don’t develop call or deal plans/strategies.  Like the research, we know these things increase our impact, increase the value we create, and maximize our abilities to win.
• We don’t focus on the customers’ goals, challenges, problems, instead pitch our products hoping the customer can make the connections to how it helps them, rather than providing this leadership ourselves.
• As managers, we don’t develop a rich hiring profile supported by a competency model.  We know this is critical to getting people with the attitudes, behaviors, skills, competencies, experiences to be successful, but we don’t take the time to do this.  Instead, we risk hiring the wrong people.
• We don’t have strong onboarding programs to reduce time to productivity.  We know without this, the liklihood of a sales person being productive in the shortest possible time is very low.  The liklihood they will fail is increased.
• We don’t take the time to coach our people.  We know coaching is critical to maximizing performance, but we don’t take the time to coach, then wonder why our teams aren’t making their goals.

I could go on and on, but you get the point or you are getting really pissed off.

As sales people or managers, unless we are totally unconscious, we know the things we should be doing to produce the best results.  But too often we fail to do them, most often complaining that we don’t have the time to do these things we know to produce results.

Instead of taking the time to do the things we know are right, we take shortcuts.  Inevitably the shortcuts don’t produce the same results as doing things right.   Then, we take more time to correct things.  But since we aren’t doing the right things, we tend to continue to fix problems that probably wouldn’t have occurred if we did what we knew was right in the first place.

The irony, is we always find the time to correct our mistakes and missteps, but we can never find the time to do things right in the first place.

How much time would we free up?  How much more effective would we be?  What would happen if we started doing the things we know to be right?