Today, I will share with you 3 ways salespeople waste time and sabotage their own success.
If you can make it through the week without doing any of these 3, you’ll start closing more sales because you’ve built a routine.
#1 Wandering throughout the day without a plan, reacting to what shows up
Before you leave every day, I would recommend you do what I do on a weekly basis, but at a minimum, do this daily.
Make sure the next day you know exactly what your day will be, and make sure prospecting is part of that every day.
It’s like brushing your teeth. You do it every single day.
So don’t take a day off, don’t put it off till tomorrow, don’t wait to prepare to prospect.
I don’t care if it’s imperfect. You’ll get better. Start prospecting.
#2 Wasting time online (reading articles, checking e-mail, checking social media, etc.) OR blabbing at the “water cooler” with co-workers
You don’t have time for that kind of stuff.
There’s no time to go on Facebook and start trolling.
You don’t have that kind of time. Especially when your customers are awake, if you want to do that stuff, then do it at night!
If you’re behind on quota, though, you ought to be working on your sales process. So don’t waste time on that.
#3 NOT grouping activities or appointments in logical chunks
So one of the things I would do every day when I was in a sales role is have my prospects I was going to call on for the day, and I would start at the top, and I would call, call, call, call, call, call all the way through till about lunch.
And I would talk to a prospect- let’s call him Ted- and I’d say, “OK, Ted, we’re going to book that appointment on Tuesday at this time.”
He’d say, “Great. All right.”
But I wouldn’t stop; at that time, I didn’t have Shock and Awe boxes or anything like that.
There was no social media where I could connect with them on LinkedIn or send an e-mail.
So I would write a note down of what I needed to do next.
I didn’t stop and send an e-mail or send a letter then dilly dally and get a drink of water and then come back and make my next phone call.
I’d keep going, then a couple of phone calls later, I’d get the next prospect to pick up.
Let’s call him Chuck, so I get him on the phone, and Chuck says, “No, you know, call me back in six months.”
However, I didn’t stop and then look up Chuck’s account in the CRM and schedule a six-month call, and go to his website.
I didn’t do any of that. I made a note, and I called the next person.
Then from lunchtime on to the rest of that day, that’s when I would sit and do all the activities to get that stuff done.
But I got my calls in every single day—prospect, prospect, prospect, prospect. Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t put the phone down.
That is the way we would teach our salespeople because I ran a telemarketing department.
This method is somewhat old school but never, ever hang up the call.
You never, ever let that phone touch the receiver.
Only touch it with your finger, and dial the next one.
You should never, ever put the phone down.
That’s chunking activities.
Because when you stop and you get this and that, you do all this and want to finish this up and document that and so on.
And then you get distracted, because the phone rings, and next thing you know two hours later, and your whole flow has been interrupted.
So if you’re going to do your sales activities, then first thing in the morning prospecting, prospecting, prospecting, get it done, get it done, get it done, get it done in uninterrupted orange cone time.
No personal phone calls, no checking e-mail.
Get it done. Don’t stop.
Take a break when you’re done, and then you go back, and you do all the things you’re supposed to do, and you chunk those activities together.
I had a question asked by a client “So you talked about doing non-stop phone calls first thing in the morning, and I’m just wondering if you have any insight into if there is a particular time window when it’s best to try and reach DMs?”
Here’s what I would tell you…Stop trying to play the market.
You know how investors always say that you lose salespeople if you try and time the market.
What I had found for me personally when I was making calls, I found Fridays to be my best prospecting days. I just got more people on the phone, and they were in better moods.
It used to piss me off because the company I worked for always had their sales meetings on Friday morning, and I would always think- why are they doing this?
I will tell the rest of you not to do frigging sales meetings on Friday morning, have a Monday morning because Monday morning can be tough to get all in because everybody’s just getting in from the weekend.
They get in their office on Monday, and that’s when all their clients call because Mondays are like, holy shit, what happened over the weekend, right? Everybody saves it up.
But that’s why we have our sales meeting first thing Monday morning. It’s 90 minutes.
That way, they get the rest of the week to call and prospect.
But I would tell you this; it’s more important that you just do it every day versus trying to time it because if you say, “Well, I’m going to do it all on Friday.”
If Friday comes and you’re out sick the whole day, now you didn’t get all your calls, and now the hundreds of calls you are supposed to make are delayed.
Now you’re behind by two hundred, and you feel like you’re never going to catch up. So I would just try different times if that is a concern.
