There is no more common question that I receive
from salespeople than
"what are some of the best time-management tips
or advice that you have?"
My response is actually always the same.
It's not what you need to be doing,
it's what you need to stop doing in sales
that will often determine whether you are effective
with your time
or simply wasting a lot of time.
There are so many activities that salespeople do
that ultimately waste a tremendous amount of time.
By removing these activities from your day to day life,
you will see at least a 2x return
on the time you spend selling.
In this video I'm going to show you
the seven time wasters of most salespeople.
Check it out.
Number one: email.
You know what?
You probably saw this coming,
but there is no greater time suck for salespeople
than constantly checking email.
It's not only a waste of time,
it also breaks your focus throughout the day.
You're in sales, not operations.
You don't need to solve every single problem
in the first five seconds that it's presented to you.
The people who take pride
in always immediately returning emails
in fact have nothing to be proud of.
They're just wasting their time.
Check your email no more than three times a day
at scheduled intervals.
Make sure that the rest of your day
is spent doing things that are actually making you money.
Number two: operations.
The most valuable person in an organization
is the person who can generate revenue.
Operations people are a dime a dozen.
Now that may piss some people off
that I just said it,
but it's true.
Great salespeople though,
are diamonds in the rough.
It's critical that we as top performing salespeople
understand that the time we spend on operational issues
is a waste of time.
We are so much better off outsourcing
any operational activities except
for the absolute most critical.
Stop wasting your time in operations.
Number three: to-do lists.
We've all been taught to have a to-do list.
But the problem is that they tend to fill up
with lots of tasks
without any clear prioritization
of what's most important
and there's no deadline for each task.
It's time to throw out that to-do list
and use an objectives list.
The key idea here is that every objective that you have
should be both time bound
and clearly prioritized
in terms of what's most important,
and realistically there should be no more
than a couple of objectives
in any given week that you're focused on.
The rule of thumb is that
if you ultimately push back an objective's completion date
more than three times,
it's obviously not important enough to do.
Delete it and move on.
Number four: research.
I know there are gonna be a lot of people
who are really annoyed that I just said
that research can be a huge time waster.
But it's true!
I will acknowledge it,
every good salesperson needs to do research.
There is no question about it.
Whenever we're talking to an important prospect or client,
we need to know what we're talking about.
Just as importantly,
we need to know who we're speaking to.
We need to know about that.
That doesn't mean that you have to spend hours each day
researching your prospects.
In fact a good chunk of research
can actually be outsourced to an administrator
or some type of virtual assistant
who can 90% of the research for you.
Then they can just simply present you the final info.
Of course you can fill in any holes.
Don't waste your time
spending hours and hours each day researching,
it is a time waster.
Number five: strategizing.
This is similar to the research.
I will admit that we want of course
to have a good strategy.
That is critical.
But it is also not something that we need to be doing
on a daily basis.
A good salesperson is clear on what the strategy
is going to be with key prospects.
Once that strategy is laid out,
there's no need to rehash what it's going to be.
Most salespeople fall into that rut
of waiting for that perfect strategy or approach
for each prospect.
But they should really just be spending that time
implementing that simple strategy.
Keep it simple and take action.
Number six: tire-kickers.
This may not be one that you may have expected,
but in fact is one of the biggest time wasters of all.
Because you are spending time with a prospect
who is never going to buy from you.
This isn't just a time management strategy,
it's also a sales strategy.
The typical sales person according to my data
spends at least 15 to 20 hours each month
with prospects who will never buy.
We are losing about a quarter of every week
with those tire-kickers.
Be willing to disqualify prospects
early on in the sales process,
so you don't waste your time
with people who are never going to buy.
Number seven: buyers.
Buy buyers I mean these are the people
that actually have the title of buyer.
So many sales people can waste a lot of time
selling to low level prospects
who really lack the authority to make buying decisions.
Usually those people have titles like buyer.
It's time to step outside of our comfort zone
and sell higher up the organization.
I want titles like VP, CEO, CTO, director.
People like buyers rarely have the authority to say yes.
They do though have the authority to say no.
They're going to beat you down on price
and ultimately make difficult clients.
There are the seven time wasters of most salespeople.
I want to hear from you.
Which of these ideas did you find most useful?
Be sure to share below in the comments section
to get involved in the conversation.
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then I have this awesome free E-book
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Until next week.