The Sales Experiment

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3 General Improvements All Sales Professionals Should Make

All salespeople should make improvements in three general areas:

  1. Efficiency: All salespeople need to be more quick and dirty with administrative tasks and other tasks or projects that should be delegated. We do not need to be micromanagers of paperwork. We need to move that stuff quickly and efficiently.
  2. Effectiveness: All salespeople need to improve in effectiveness. This means we need to identify weak areas and areas of shoddy discipline and improve. We must prospect and build our pipelines and be more effective in every skill that goes into doing that. We need to be more effective at presenting, negotiating, and solving problems. We must become better and more surgical in the key income producing activities.
  3. Enjoyment: All salespeople need to learn to have fun and enjoy what they do. If we’re intentional, sales can become tied into our callings as individuals. That sounds crazy, but it’s true. If you find where your unique personality, skills, and passions can intersect with your sales work, then you might just find more pleasure out of what you do. The key is learning how to bring great value to others while being who you are.  and providing solutions to your clients.

These are general areas for sales improvement. But all three are vital for a sustainable, growing sales career.

If you aren’t enjoying at least part of what you do, you’ll be miserable.

If you aren’t being effective at what you do, you’ll constantly struggle financially and emotionally.

If you aren’t efficient, you’ll struggle physically and mentally. You’ll run out of steam.

The question, then, is how. How can you be efficient, be effective, and enjoy what you do?

You tell me. How can you improve in these three areas?

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How to Gain Clarity Every Single Day

Most of us are overly busy, so there’s very little chance that if you’re actually reading this post that you have an empty schedule.

It might be that you’re reading this post because you’re distracting yourself from what you really need to be doing right now.

And you’re distracting yourself because you don’t want to do what you really need to be doing for whatever reason:

  • You don’t think you’re good at it.
  • You just plain don’t like to do it.
  • You are afraid of doing it.
  • You love being lazy and procrastinating.
  • You’re not clear on what you actually should be doing at this very moment.

I battle with this last bullet point often: I’m not clear what I should be doing at any given moment.

We have so many irons in the fire that we procrastinate from making the choice about the next most important task or project we must engage.

This lack of clarity is why we spend so much time in our email inboxes. Since we struggle making choices on our next most important task, we choose to allow others, in the form of their emails to us, determine what we do next.

In essence, we allow other people to determine our priorities and to clarify what to do next. It’s easier than sitting down with our stuff and sifting through the demands on our minds and time and making decisions.

So, then, the problem: lack of clarity. 

The solution (I promised this in the headline, didn’t I?). 

As mentioned above, I struggle with this, too. But here are some thoughts on what practices are starting to help with gaining a bit of clarity each and every day.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing Who Should Do Each Task

Regardless if you decide to do the task or if you react to someone’s email, ask yourself this simple question with every single task:

Am I the best person to do this task?

If you start answering ‘No’ to that questions, you’ll find patterns. Decide who should be doing that thing and start forwarding those tasks on.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing Why You Do Each Task

Is this a thing that even needs to be done? Be diligent about weeding out old habits. Do you really have to read every email newsletter? Does every email require a response? Why are you doing it?

If you can’t think of good reasons, then you have a bit more clarity.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing How You Feel About Everything You Do

This one is more ontological (a fancy word that has to do with your ‘being’ or who you really are and how you’re made up).

Do  you like doing this next task? Is it engaging your mind and heart? Is it in your skill set?

You might still have to do the thing, but as you ask yourself the question about how you feel about the task, you’ll start gaining clarity on the work you (a) love to do and (b) are truly good at doing.

Clarity Doesn’t Come in a Flash

You and I must be intentional about gaining clarity every day. We have to ask these types of questions regularly in order to make sure that we don’t just shotgun our work lives in a billion different directions.

Gaining clarity over time will help us better leverage the small amount of time we have for work for optimum effectiveness.

As you discover what you love to do and what you’re good at and which things should actually be taking up your time, you discover where you can make your greatest contribution.

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This post was inspired by Day 5 of 10 Days to a Better Blog, a short online workshop from John Saddington. The exercise was about detecting blogging patterns (which categories, tags, topics that you gravitate toward) and using those patterns as clues where you might want to dive deeper. 

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Finding a Place to Write

As much as I love to write and try to connect it to sales and marketing, I’m not a fool.

The top 5 salespeople in my firm wouldn’t be caught dead trying to figure out how to create a post in WordPress or any other blog software.

It’s not mandatory to be a good writer in order to be an effective salesperson.

That said, writing can be a powerful way to clarify thinking and develop a content library to benefit clients and potential clients.

Writing has been the stuff of marketers, but these days, it can be the stuff of salespersons who want to develop not only their bottom lines but their thought leadership.

A long lead in to this: How do you find time and space to write?

We live in a modest house with a 6 year old who loves to wake at 5:45. Consequently, my space is my dining room table, and my time is between 5:00 and 5:45am. That’s not ideal.

But I’ve decided it’s important and if it’s important, I can’t worry about finding the perfect zen location and time for putting my thoughts down on paper (or word processor).

The key is this: Keeping a commitment to the act of writing and building it into the schedule. When the schedule gets disrupted because a little guy bounces downstairs too early, be gracious, attend to the relational priorities, and try again the next day.

While it might be helpful to have certain music playing and to have a particular private room with the minimalist laptop desktop, many of us have a shared computer and no extra room to craft into an office.

In that case and if writing is important, the key thing is to pencil it in the schedule and put the laptop in the right place so when the time comes to write, all you have to do is sit down and start tap, tip, tapping away.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be a priority.

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