The Sales Experiment

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I Must Be Ruthless about My Time

One of productivity’s biggest killers is our tendency to allow other people’s priorities to determine our schedules.

We become ineffective if we do not filter every opportunity or task through the lens of our personal and work priorities.

We must be ruthless about our time. It is the most precious non-human resource we have at our disposal. The way we use our time predicts our relationships, our work outcomes, and our health.

When we allow others’ opinions about what we should be doing at a particular moment, we give up our overall effectiveness.

Will we please a particular person at a particular moment? Maybe.

Will we be rewarding their bad behavior so they will continue to butt in on our days with a sense of entitlement to our immediate jumping when they request we jump? Most definitely.

It’s a Balancing Act

If you’re reading this, then you are probably in sales or marketing and you are responsible to clients, managers, and other stakeholders.

Consequently, you must balance others’ very real needs of your time and effort with your commitment to producing long-lasting results.

The question is how to do this. How do you make sure to enter info into your customer relationship management software while still taking time to prospect into new opportunities while quarterbacking a servicing need for an existing client? Two of which always seem urgent (guess which one always gets put on the back burner).

Keeping all of these priorities (because they are all things that need to get done) is a skill that can be developed through developing some key habits.

Practices to Help You Develop Time Management Ruthlessness

We are all different, so I will not be prescriptive here. As a matter of fact, I continually play with different practices and habits to help me win in this area. I struggle with people pleasing in the worst way and find I must be vigilant about my tendencies to “Yes” myself to death.

What follows are mindset shifts and tactical practices to help.

Mindset Shifts

  1. Be Intentional: Most of us live in our inboxes. And we feel busy. Inbox triage all day long is the opposite of intentionality.  Develop an intentional mindset. When you do something, ask yourself if it serves your key responsibility areas, your primary goals, and your ultimate personal priorities.
  2. Be Willing to Say No:  You must be willing to say “No” or “Net yet” or “I’m not the best one to do that for you.”  We can’t usually disregard a request completely, but we can put it in its proper place on our calendar or delegate it to the best priority.
  3. Be Selfish: Learn to take the first few hours of the day to plow through your main priorities and tasks. Don’t feel bad about waiting until 10am or 11am before bouncing around like a pinball according to others’ priorities. Treat your first couple hours as if you had a client meeting. And your client is yourself.

Tactical Practices

  1. Time-blocking: Duh. But do you do it? This fits hand in glove with being intentional. Determine the best days and times of the week for certain important but not urgent tasks. Block time for making prospecting calls. Block time for creative work. Block time for strategic planning. Treat these times as appointments and meetings. There’s nothing that someone needs from you at 9am, that they can’t wait for until 10am or 11am.
  2. Process Creation: Identify where your work can be broken down into processes. Codify those processes. Inform others. Creating processes does two things: (1) It helps you create a habit around a task so you don’t need to think about it every time, and (2) it gives you an easier way to say “No” or delegate or put a false-urgent into the calendar because you have a “proven process” to handle such requests.
  3. Email Avoidance: Many people balk at this one. Just try it. Turn off your automatic send/receive for at least 30 minutes two times a day (and expand as you can). You can still send emails or review any relevant emails for a project you are working on.  Most email clients allow you to send manually without receiving messages.

How Do You Protect Your Time?

Let me know in the comments. The six items above are quite general and basic, so I’d love to hear how you specifically ward off time thieves.

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Why I Write, Sell, and Do Most Everything Else These Days

I honestly don’t really want to use this blog for blog challenges, but I am. This is from Day 2 of 10 Days to a Better Blog. I like John Saddington. An increasingly salty style over what appears to be a very compassionate, authentic heart. He is a smart kid who has created a bunch of stuff – a bunch of stuff. He’s more than worth a follow. I have no reason to brown-nose here unless he needs insurance for his various ventures. Then I’m his huckleberry. 

Today’s Challenge: Connect with why you write… 

I have no clue whether I write well or not. I have enough grammar sense at least to say ‘write well’ vs. ‘write good.’ But that doesn’t make me a good writer.

I love to read. I love words. I like to toss around ideas. I like to think.

Writing provides a way to get thoughts out and play with them.

Since words mean  lot to me, writing has become a method for me to offer up a bit of myself to others.

Again, no statement on the quality here, but I write because it is a way I can give something to others.  Writing has become one of my chief methods of telling individuals that I love them, respect them, and appreciate them.

Writing also provides a way for me to learn. If I simply think about something, I forget it. But if I mull over the idea and write it down, then it becomes much more real and more likely to become something I act on.

Writing provides a history. Journal after journal and a growing number of blog entries create a pretty clear picture of my life since high school. Probably too much navel-gazing, but that’s fine.

Hopefully, my writing will be something I can leave behind for my kids that might at least make them laugh even if I don’t teach them anything.

What Does Any of This Have To Do With Sales?

I was not supposed to go into sales. My English major self (with a graduate degree in ministry) never had selling on the radar. Luckily, we’re not always correct at 22 with all of our assumptions. It’s crazy how we feel like life has passed us by if we didn’t have the solid job, marriage, and family by 25 or 28 years old. I was an idiot back then (and might only now be crawling out of idiot-hood).

So sales… I’ve learned that selling isn’t about getting people to buy something. It’s about creating value.

I sell because it teaches me, over time, the importance of creating value. And this idea from selling has been ridiculously important for any of my attempts at writing. Writing isn’t only about any ability I might have to turn a phrase.

Writing (for me) is about taking what little value I can provide and putting it out into the world. It’s something that I think I have to offer, and I’d be a horrible steward if I didn’t practice and make a habit of taking the little that’s in my cup and pouring it out on the off chance it’s exactly what someone needs.

So I write because I want to give what little bit of experience and even wisdom I might have to others. If it helps you… wonderful! If it doesn’t… just chalk me up to one of the other billions of people who take up space on the interwebs.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to write, sell, and do other stuff in feeble attempts to make others’ lives just a bit better (and perhaps mine will improve in the process).

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Starting New Habits by Creating Deadlines

I sat down with a colleague today and worked on setting up a personal sales and marketing plan for the next few months.

He had engaged me to assist him in creating a plan that he could implement to kick his sales efforts up a notch.

I’m not technically a sales trainer, but consuming content and attempting to implement said content has helped me to recognize patterns in me and in others.

I see that while many of us want change, we fail to create deadlines to reinforce and establish new habits.

Therefore, when I sat down with my colleague, I attempted to focus on developing a clear system.

The Importance of Committing to New Habits

My suggestion was to be systematic and habit-focused:

  1. Decide on an ideal client profile.
  2. Create a list of at least 100 potential prospects that fit said profile.
  3. Commit to weekly prospecting appointments with self that are every bit as important to commit to as client appointments. Be violently committed to that time.
  4. Use that time in a systematic way: make calls, intentionally research client organizations, write content.
  5. Make note of ALL questions that current clients and prospects ask and have that running list handy.
  6. Use those questions to create consistent emails, blog posts, mailers.
  7. Reach out to that list of 100 as close to a monthly basis as possible as the relationships open up.

And I suggested that he commit to having the list of 100 list in a week and to have the first email scheduled to go out on a specific day, even if only one person is on his list on that day.

We settled on a specific date to send out that initial email, but I felt some hesitation. No list yet. Who is he going to email?

I said that it doesn’t matter. Put a couple current clients on your list and send something out.

Give yourself a deadline. Go ahead and write the email for that matter. Why not?

Change Is Simply The Accumulation of New Habits

This whole program will require developing new habits. The habit to schedule a weekly appointment or two solely dedicated to prospecting. The habit to make note of common questions for content fodder. The habit of sending regular emails out. The habit of taking time to map out potential clients’ organizations and finding connections.

All of these habits require intentionality. They require doing more than just popping on LinkedIn to send a connection request when the idea hits. They require more than just allowing client call-ins to determine who goes into the funnel.

To be better than average requires quality habits.

[Tweet “Quality habits don’t happen by accident. Crappy, useless habits happen by accident.”]

Quality habits happen by creating deadlines, taking a bit of time to plan, and scheduling them in the calendar. There really is no other way to build a new habit.

It’s consistent, daily action.

I hope that my colleague (and I, for that matter) will find some traction. I hope that there’ll be enough reward from forging ahead that the new habits will be reinforced.

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Recent Reading and Listening

Social Media Marketing Happy Hour 163: Fight Your Border Bullies 

Dawn Marrs Ortiz and Traci Reuter are two of my new podcast best friends. I love short podcasts with big nuggets of info and experience-gained knowledge. This particular podcast discussed the idea of ‘border bullies’ – those folks who stand around the edge of your safe life and encourage you strongly NOT to push the envelope and slay your dragons and forge new territory and pursue passions (and all the other metaphors that indicate moving outside of your comfort zone).

3 Questions That Matter Most This Year – Jeb Blount, Sales Gravy Podcast

Jeb’s is another wonderfully short, power-packed podcast. This episode encourages you to answer these questions this year:

  1. What do you want?
  2. How do you plan to get it?
  3. How bad do you want it?

It’s stuff you know, but more than likely you need to listen to it again. I, for one, have learned that it matters not how much I know. It matters what I do with what I know. As soon as ‘I’ve heard that before’ comes out of my mouth, the very next statement better be, ‘And I did something about it.’

Pinterest Smart Feed Is It Bad for Business? – Oh So Pinteresting Podcast with Cynthia Sanchez

I love Pinterest. I’m not all that consistent with it, but thanks to Ms. Sanchez, I’m getting better and better at it. I highly recommend her podcast and other content. She’s the go-to girl on the topic (in my humble opinion).

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