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to do a job gives you a high “return on energy.” Once you have taught
someone how to do a part of your work, you can always delegate and free
yourself up for other work that pays you a higher hourly rate.
Focus on Clarity
The major problem and time waster in communication, and working with
others, is fuzzy understanding. The antidote to fuzzy understanding, one of
the greatest time management tools of all, is clarity. Clarity is only achieved
through repetition, discussion, feedback and agreement. Take the time to
learn how to be a good communicator. This will pay off in tremendous time
savings and will increase your effectiveness in every area of your life and
work.
“Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you
must yourself believe.” (Winston Churchill)
Action Exercises:
1.
Practice delegating everything to anyone who can do the job at a
lower hourly rate than you desire to earn.
2.
Be crystal clear in explaining to others exactly what is to be done, and
to what standard of performance, and by what date.
3.
Sit down with each staff member and explain to them exactly why
they are on the payroll, and what their highest value tasks are.
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4.
Keep everyone “in the know.” Be sure that your staff is aware of
everything that is going on that affects their jobs in any way.
5.
Whenever you assign a task, ask the person to feed back to you what
you have said; this clears up a lot of misunderstandings.
6.
Practice participative management with your staff; hold weekly staff
meetings and invite everyone to participate and ask questions.
7.
Remember that your people are your most valuable asset; continually
seek ways to communicate with them more clearly.
Chapter Eleven
Time Management for Sales People
“The successful person makes a habit of doing what the unsuccessful person
doesn’t like to do. The successful person doesn’t like to do them either, but
he does because he recognizes that this is the price of success.” (Herbert
Gray)
In 1928, the magazine Sales and Marketing Management surveyed
American businesses to determine how efficiently sales people were using
their time. They discovered that the average sales person in America was
only working 20% of the time, approximately one and one half hours per
day.
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This finding caused alarm bells to go off throughout the sales industry. The
idea that sales people were only working 90 minutes per day became the
emphasis for improved training, better time management skills, better
supervision, and better control of the activities of sales people. It led to a
greater focus on the accountability of sales people to the company for the
way they were spending their time.
In 1988, sales and marketing management magazine reported on the results
of this training over the past 60 years, aimed at upgrading the time efficiency
of sales people. They reported that, in 1988, the average sales person in
America was still working 20% of the time, 90 minutes per day. Nothing had
changed.
A study at Columbia University came to the same conclusions. After
interviewing thousands of sales people, they found that the first sales call of
the day was made, on average, at approximately 11 am. The last sales call of
the day was made on average, at about 3:30 pm. The rest of the time of sales
people was spent preparing, shuffling papers, traveling, eating lunch,
drinking coffee and complaining about how tough the business was.
McGraw Hill did a follow up study in the 90’s and reached the conclusion
that sales people were spending 37% of their time selling. This report turned
out to be based on what is called “self reports.” This is when the individual
salesperson reports, according to his personal recollection, without notes or
records, a particular number. Alas, we can safely conclude that the average
sales person only works 90 minutes a day.
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Double Your Sales
In my sales programs, I teach what I call my “minutes theory.” It is based
on a simple equation. If you are in sales today, 100% of your sales and your
income today are generated by the number of minutes that you spend face to
face with prospects and customers. If you want to increase the number of
sales or the amount of money you make, you must increase the number of
minutes that you spend in actual selling activity, face to face with people
who can and will buy from you.
My theory says that if you double the number of minutes that you spend face
to face with customers, you will double your income, even if you do not
improve in any other area of sales. If you manage your time, as the top
salespeople do, so that you are spending more time with customers, your
sales will increase immediately.
If you are in sales and reading this chapter, in the next few pages, you are
going to learn how to double your time effectiveness and double your sales.
Thousands of sales people are already using the ideas in this chapter to
double, triple, and even quadruple their income in as little as six months.
Many of my graduates have doubled and tripled their sales in less than a
month as the direct result of applying these methods and techniques.
The Job of the Salesperson
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Let us begin with the job description of the sales person. The job description
of the sales person is to create and keep customers. The measure of
effectiveness of a sales person is how many new customers he creates, or
resales he generates, in any given time period.
Everything else that a sales person does is secondary to creating and keeping
customers. Therefore, the only time a salesperson is working is when he or
she is face-to-face, head to head, and knee to knee with a prospector or
customer.
Sales people are the only working people in America who wake up each
morning unemployed. And they remain unemployed until they get in front of
a person who is capable of making a buying decision. The first rule for sales
success can be summarized in six words, “Spend more time with better
prospects.”
Sales Success is in direct proportion to your ability to initiate new contacts.
Because selling is a numbers game, based on the law of averages, the more
new contacts you initiate, the more successful you are going to be, holding
constant for all other factors.
The Three Step Sales Formula
There is a simple formula for outstanding sales performance. It consists of
three activities: prospect, present, and follow up. Successful sales people
are those who prospect, present, and follow up more often than unsuccessful
sales people.
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A person of average talents and abilities who prospects, presents, and
follows up all day long will run circles around a genius who does not. If a
salesperson is not making the sales he would like to make, or is not earning
the income he would like to earn, it can always be traced back to a failure in
one of the three key result areas: prospecting, presenting, or following up.
Apply the 80/20 rule to all of your selling activities. In selling, this means
that you spend 80 % of your time prospecting until you have so much
business that you don’t have time to prospect anymore. You spend the other
20% of your time on everything else, including planning, organizing,
paperwork, studying your sales material, socializing and any other activity
that is not prospecting.
Prospecting is defined as the work of taking specific actions to seek out and
contact people who need, who can use, and who can afford to purchase your
product or service. The only thing that you have to sell as a salesperson is
your time, and your time is only worth anything when you are face to face
with someone who can buy what you are selling.
Begin With Clear Income and Sales Goals
Achieving peak performance and excellent time management in sales begins
with your setting clear income and sales goals for yourself. The act of sitting
down and deciding in writing how much you want to earn and how you are
going to go about earning it makes it far more likely that you will achieve
those goals then if you didn’t set them at all. The goal setting exercise I am
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about to share with you has led to the doubling and tripling of the incomes of
many sales people. It is powerful because it is simple and easy. You can
learn it and apply it immediately.
At a sales seminar recently, a woman came up to me and told me what had
happened to her since she attended my seminar fifteen months before.
She said that she was just starting in real estate when she came to my sales
seminar. She had not sold her first house or taken her first listing.
Nonetheless, as a result of this exercise, she set a goal for herself to earn
$50,000 dollars income in her first year. At the time, she had no idea how
few people selling residential real estate earned $50,000 per year. But the
goal setting worked for her. She passed the $50,000 mark in her tenth month
of selling.
She brought several of her friends from her company just to hear me explain
the way to set sales and income goals that I am about to give to you.
Start With Your Best Year
You begin by taking your very best year’s income to date, and grossing it up
by 50%. In other words, if your very best income year to date was $40,000,
you set your income goal for the next twelve months at $60,000, or 50%
more. If your very best income year to date was $100,000, you set your
income goal at $150,000. For the sake of this example, I will use $60,000 as
the income target for the year.
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Once you have determined how much you want to earn over the next twelve
months ($60,000), the next step is to determine how much of your product or
service you are going to have to sell in order to earn that amount.
For example, if you are receiving a commission of 6% on your sales, you
will have to sell $1,000,000.00 of your product or service over the next
twelve months in order to earn $60,000.00. That number of $1,000,000.00
now becomes your annual sales goal.
Next, you determine your monthly income goal. In our example, $60,000.00
divided by twelve months equals $5,000.00 per month. You then determine
how much you will have to sell each month to achieve that income goal. One
million dollars in sales divided by twelve months equals $83,333.00. This
becomes your monthly sales target.
Once you have determined how much you want to earn, and how much you
will have to sell each month to achieve it, you then determine your weekly
income and sales goals. Let us assume that you will take two weeks off on
vacation. You then divide the remaining number of weeks, 50, into your
income goal for the year. Fifty into sixty thousand equals $1,250.00 per
week in this example.
You then calculate the amount that you will have to sell each week by
dividing your annual sales goal by fifty. In this case one million dollars in
sales divided by fifty weeks would mean that you would have to sell twenty
thousand dollars of your product or services each week in order to earn
$60,000.00 by the end of the twelve-month period.
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You now divide the number of days per week that you work into your
weekly income goal. If you work five days per week, you can use that
figure. In our example, $1,250.00 per week, divided by five, would equal
$250.00 per day.
To calculate your daily sales goal, you divide the amount that you intend to
sell per week by the number of days that you work. In this case, using
$20,000.00 per week as the sales goal, and dividing it by five, you would
arrive at $4000 worth of your product or service that you will have to sell
each day.
Finally, divide your daily rate, in this case $250.00, by the number of hours
you intend to work each day.
For example, if you work eight hours per day and you divide that into our
example of $250.00, you would come up with an hourly rate of $31.25.
Focus on Your Hourly Rate
Once you have determined your desired hourly rate, you are ready to start
work. From the time you start working in the morning until the time you
finish in the evening, you refuse to do anything that does not pay you $31.25
per hour. And the only type of work that pays you $31.25 per hour, or more,
is prospecting, presenting and following up.
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This is an important point that many sales people don’t seem to understand.
You cannot drop off your laundry, pick up your groceries, get your car
washed or chat with your co-workers during the weekday and expect to earn
$60,000.00 per year. Those time consuming, time wasting activities do not
pay $31.25 per hour.
This is a universal law. You only get out what you put in. Because of this
law of sowing and reaping, if you do $31.25 work per hour, eight hours per
day, 250 days per year, there is nothing that will stop you from earning
$60,000.00 or more over the next twelve months.
If you do $60.00 per hour work, you will earn more than $120,000.00 over
the next twelve months. You determine your own income by the way you
use every hour of each day. And the very best use of time is to invest it in
prospecting, presenting and following up.
Determine What You Will Have to Do
Once you have broken your income and sales goals down into monthly,
weekly, daily and hourly amounts, you then define these goals in terms of
the activities necessary to achieve them. The critical element in this
calculation is the factor of control.
You cannot control your income or your sales on a day-to-day basis. They
depend on too many other factors. But you can control your activities. You
can determine and control what you do from morning to night, and as a
result, you can indirectly control your income. If you engage in the activities
