Great question to noodle on from Sales Productivity Council
group. I struggled a bit with a comment about ‘non-selling’ tasks. I guess in
the purest sense, a ‘selling task’ is only one where we are engaged in a dialog
for a prospective sale. The thing is – many tasks go into ‘teeing up’ the opportunity
for that dialog to begin, whether networking, marketing, researching…etc.
I often talk to sales professionals about the ‘stop doing’
list as being as important as the ‘to do’ list. I also believe that ‘chunking’
our time into ‘money making’ slots and ‘sales readiness’ slots works well. Plan
2 hours for pure sales tasks, for example, and work that plan.
Too often it is the daily distractions (email, phone, quote
comes in…) that take us away from focused money-making sales tasks onto the
supportive (and still critical) sales readiness tasks. It is the frequency and
intensity of laser focus that produces results. There is a big difference between, readiness, intensity and busy.
