Time Management Advice For Sales People

Back in the 1920s there was a survey conducted by the Sales and Marketing Management, it surveyed american businesses to find out exactly how efficient sales people were handing their time.

After the survey was completed, they uncovered that the average sales person was only putting in a total of 20 percent of their time. If you consider a normal eight hour day, they were only working around 1.5hrs per day. This survey caused a ripple effect throughout the sales industry due to the enormity of the problem. It caused companies to keep better track of what their sales people were doing, an improvement in time management skills and an overall increase of supervision from managers.

Double Your Sales

By simply calculating the amount of time you actually spend speaking with new customers now, you can figure out exactly how much time more you need to spend in order to double your sales. Although it will require you to be 100% honest with yourself, this technique will help you see what it is you’re doing on a daily basis. The amount of money you are making will also double, assuming you get the exact time correctly. Which is why honesty is a very important part of this fact finding process. As long as you know how many hours or minutes more you need to spend doing sales producing activities, the amount of sales will increase.

In essence, you must double the amount of time you spend in front of qualified prospects in order to double the amount of sales you’re making. Even if you fail to improve in the other aspects of the sales process, getting in front of more people who can buy will increase the number of sales. Simple.

The Job of the Salesperson

What exactly is the description of what a sales person should be doing? Alot of the time we get lost in the many jobs we have to fill when we are in sales, but essentially our job as sales people is to generate and maintain customers. The way we measure the success of a sales person is by the number of new customers generated and the retention rate of the previously acquired customers. Which means that the only time we are doing our jobs, as sales people, is when we put our faces in front of potential customers. Delivering whatever message we have to deliver in order to achieve the most amount of sales.

Begin with Clear Income and Sales Goals

One of the most important factors for achieving the highest rank of success as a sales person is having a clear goal for income and sales. The amount of focus you can give to that goal will help you manage your time much better, simply because you know exactly where you are headed and you know how to get there. My personal practice begins on Monday mornings, when I sit down at my desk with a hot cup of coffee and I choose to write down my goals for this week. I determine those goals by looking at my last week’s achievements and appointments. Meaning, if I only sold $15,000 in medical supplies last week, but my goal was double that, I need to make $45k this week. Simply because of a choice, I can do whatever it needs to be done to achieve that goal.

Determine What You Will Have to Do

One the fist step of figuring out what your goals are is completed, you need to figure out how you’re going to achieve them. One of the most important pieces of information I own is to break down your goals into activities to do. Meaning you need to transform that $45k goal into how many clients/hours/days/calls you need to make.

The key to this process is to control your activities, although you can’t control your results, the amount of activity you produce is key. Engaging in the activities necessary to get to your goals will only increase your chances at succeeding.

Get Better at What You Do

Once the first step is 100% clear to you, figured out exactly what you need to do on a daily basis, and determined how you’re going to get there, you need to work on your individual sales skills. Being in sales requires you to constantly improve your overall business skills, speech, looks, and etc.