A very basic truth in life is that no one will ever take a positive action unless that person places significant value on the results or outcomes of that action.
Sound confusing?
More importantly though, what does that mean to you as a professional salesperson?
Quite simply this.
Until you value time, and the critical role it plays in your personal and professional success, you will never even try to manage it.
In short - until you emotionally, not just intellectually, identify the potential that time has for you and how this can impact the various aspects of your life and your career, you will never care to grab hold of it and make the decision to control it instead of letting it control you.
What is this potential?
What's the real value of time to a sales professional like you?
This, of course, will vary based upon a multitude of factors.
These include your pay plan, frequency of your compensation, expense reimbursement system and the length of your specific sales cycle, the size of your territory, your type of product or service, the size and complexity of your customer base, the depth of the administrative work required to make support and service the sale, the extent of your personal involvement in the delivery of your product or service after the sale.
The style of management utilized by your supervisory and management team. The availability of state-of-the-art equipment to you, like cell phones, laptop computers, palm pilots, dictation equipment and the like.
Not to mention the price, size and complexity of the very product or service that you sell.
Before you can begin to analyze these variables on a personal basis, it's important to take an overall view as to the value of time in its most absolute terms.
If you earn twenty thousand dollars a year, every hour is worth ten dollars and twenty-five cents, every minute - seventeen cents. And if you fritter away just one hour a day, you lose twenty-five hundred dollars every single year. At an annual income of thirty thousand dollars, every hour is valued at fifteen dollars and thirty-seven cents.
Each minute, twenty-five cents, and an hour of wasted time strips you of three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars every single year.
If you earn a hundred thousand dollars a year, your hourly rate is fifty-one dollars and twenty-three cents.
Your minute clock is worth eighty-five cents, and wasting just one hour per day costs you twelve thousand five hundred dollars every single year. That's right, one hour a day of wasted time daily costs you twelve thousand five hundred dollars.
Unfortunately, that's not the whole story.
We haven't even looked at opportunity costs, energy costs, or demotivation costs. If you're not consistently maximizing your time to a highly profitable end, you haven't been capitalizing on the potential of varied opportunities that come your way by maximizing that time and exposure.
The costs can be staggering if you think of missed opportunities that occur when you're doing the wrong things at the wrong times for the wrong reasons and maybe even with the wrong people, instead of vice versa.
Energy costs come from the loss of physical and emotional energy that are the result of wasted time.
Constant wheel spinning, excessive duplication of effort, fixing mistakes, spending excessive and wasted time on the telephone, in travel, or in meetings are all tremendous wastes of energy, both physical and emotional.
And once spent, it becomes increasingly more difficult if not impossible to resurge and tap that consistently diminishing source of human energy.
Demotivation cost is the price paid for excessive chunks of time being spent on totally fruitless endeavors.
Talking to unqualified prospects, handling paperwork entirely too many times, shifting priorities, unclear objectives, the list goes on and on. The consequence, a rapidly rising and ever-escalating demotivation cost. And, like energy costs, demotivation cost can never, if ever be regained.
To a sales professional, these four costs of excessive time waste, dollars, missed opportunities, energy loss, and the cost of demotivation can be absolutely staggering. With this as a backdrop, it's critical to start examining the real potential that time holds for you as a sales person.
First, let's examine how your pay plan is linked to your management of time. Clearly, if you're on a commission pay plan, there's a direct correlation between your time use and your pay level. In short, your income is in direct proportion to how you use your time.
Waste your time and your paycheck is affected. Waste a lot of time and you may have no paycheck at all. Simple, isn't it? Waste too much time, you have no job.
For salary-based sales professionals the formula is a little different.
You may receive a salary while still wasting lots of time - but not for too long. You see, sales people at any level and with any pay plan are ultimately judged by two things and two things only:
Sales volume and profitability.
The frequency of compensation is also a critical, yet easily overlooked factor for salespeople. This is particularly true if you're guilty
of wasting lots of time and are on a pure commission or bonus plus salary or salary plus commission plan.
The longer the time between critical activity (sales), and results (pay), the easier it is to lose sight of the direct relationship between time utilization and income. The result is a loss of income, potential opportunities, and perhaps ultimately, even a job.
Let's take a look at something so mundane and trivial as an expense reimbursement cycle and how this relates to time.
I was recently working with a client who had to let their top salesperson go because she was habitually late with expense reports and virtually every other type of paperwork related to her high sales volume. In the process she made life miserable for everyone else in the organization. High sales with no follow-up, including paperwork.
The consequence - a top selling pro out of a job. The cause - the overall poor image that she gave. It was easy to see that her supervisors drew the conclusion that if she was missing paperwork deadlines, she must be missing other bigger deadlines too.
Mishandling of paperwork and detail is a common time problem for salespeople. The reasons are multiple.
However, the impact that this can have is immeasurable. Depending on your company's policy and length of time for repayment, this could become critical to your personal cash flow, not to mention your image and your credibility. And in this case, a job.
The length of your sales cycle is another major component in this thing called time management.
The longer the sales cycle for your product or service, the more complex contacts you have to keep organized, the more paperwork and correspondence, the more frequent the travel, the more detailed the management of the account becomes. It can become a real quagmire if you either don't want to, or don't know how to manage it properly.
This is much different from the shorter sales cycle. This type of sale has its own characteristic pitfalls including:
More compressed and fast-paced travel, frequent presentations, more carefully orchestrated and quicker delivery systems, and the like. Just as in war, the longer your supply line becomes, the more vulnerable you become.
In short, when you have an extremely long sales cycle, the more potentially volatile your lack of time management skills can be.
The paradox is that with a long sales cycle, it appears as if everything is easy to manage. Well, the opposite is really true. The result - we get lulled into believing that length of time equals relaxation. Wrong! - The culprit, short-term versus long-term thinking.
Territory size is another key element. However, size can fool us too.
Size doesn't just mean how geographically large it is for the traveling sales professional. We're also discussing complexity, time zones, a rural territory versus urban, and all the rest.
You know there are salespeople whose entire sales territories can be a single office building in a major city, and perhaps that describes you, while others have an entire, multi-state region. Their needs and their time management skills are much different.
There are many telemarketing professionals whose territory can cover the entire United States and even foreign countries.
Time zones can be misleading, and calling across the International Date Line can be even worse. Traveling across it even more disconcerting. Dealing with international trade regulations almost impossible. And dealing with cultural differences a real barrier.
Are these time management problems?
You bet they are.
The real issue at this point is not how you as a salesperson manage your time, but why you manage your time. Clearly, for results. In order to deliver these results, a lot has to go into the formula.
Does your territory mandate that you master travel skills, scheduling skills, planning skills?
How about prospecting or organizational skills?
Maybe you don't have a territory at all, maybe prospects come to you, maybe you work primarily on the telephone, and maybe you don't even travel at all. The list could go on.
But there's more.
The type of product or service that you sell is also a critical factor to this whole issue.
For example:
Some products allow the salesperson to make the sale and immediately move on to another prospect.
Others dictate that the salesperson not only sell, but install, service, and provide ongoing support services, while others require not only sales and support but extensive travel and ongoing penetration, prospecting, and in-depth selling. In short - retention marketing.
The result - a myriad of time management skills that are specific to that person's unique selling situation.
By: Bill Brooks
(c)The Brooks Group 2004
www.brooksgroup.com
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