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Successful Selling: Time Management
By Terrill Klett | Office World News
I was touched by an advertisement in the reward section of a newspaper that said “lost yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward offered, for they are gone forever.” The time thieves are robbing us every day and it’s time to fight back! Most statistics will say we waste two to three hours a day, which equals about 19 weeks per year! Wow! Imagine what you can do with 19 extra paychecks every year! This alone is incentive to better budget your time.
In our industry, it is the timesaving feature that we are trying to sell to our prospective customers. Why is it that we have such difficulty in managing our own time in our workday? With an analysis of your day, and some practical planning you’ll be well on your way to finding and budgeting your time to be successful and productive.
Narrow It Down
First, evaluate your schedule to find what is “unproductive” and “wasted” time. Unproductive time is spent driving, filing—any of those tasks that can be important, but should be saved until the appropriate time. Prime sales call hours should be spent pursuing prospects and attending sales calls. Wasted time is just that…wasted!
For example: You arrive at the office at 8:12 a.m. and grab a coffee, all the while chatting with a co-worker for just a few minutes before getting started for the day. In its totality, you have already wasted about 30 minutes! Don’t accept those unnecessary personal phone calls, and politely dismiss the co-worker that loves to “drop by” for a few minutes each day to chitchat. To track your time, and the amount that is wasted, record the actual time you start and finish your workday. Create a sheet entitled “interruptions for the day’ and record each minute spent on personal telephone calls and “drop-ins”. At the end of the week, total those minutes and identify the main culprit. You may find some much-needed changes to be made in this area.
Productive Activities
Next, make a list of the activities that make you the most money. These activities are, for the most part, time spent in front of the customer in appointments and demonstrations. Take the wasted time that you have already identified and use it in an activity that will get you in front of a prospect.
The old school of thought, the one that supposes that success could only be accomplished with long and hard work is not necessarily so today. It’s what you do with those hours—managing your time, prioritizing, and working hard at it that formulates success. Stephen R. Covey identified this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He places time into two categories: effective time and efficient time. Efficient means doing things correctly. Effective is where you want to be. Effective is spending your time in the areas that will generate the best results—the high payoff activities. Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar have also stressed the importance of these two words!
Effective vs. Efficient
On Friday afternoon you can be efficient making telephone calls for four hours until 5:00 p.m., but it’s not very effective because most “decision-makers” aren’t available at this time. It would be most effective to make the calls in the morning. Not only will the likelihood of reaching the decision-maker be greater, but they will also be in a better mood knowing that the workweek is drawing to a close! The call is also more non-threatening when you state “would the beginning or end of the week be better for you” (when phoning on a Friday), as this seems as though it’s a longer way off than it really is.
Knowing Your Schedule
Determine what your schedule will be for each day and actually write down what you would like to accomplish in the order of importance. This planning will only take you about ten minutes, but can save you hours. Block off time to make phone calls, planning, training or whatever, but always stay focused. This may mean declining phone calls for a certain time period. The idea here is to make sure you concentrate on the task at hand. Becoming involved in too many tasks at one time makes one distracted and much less productive—which means less concentration and more time spent trying to get back “into the groove”.
