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.
It is that time of year to reflect on the closing of one year and the beginning of another new year. Peter Drucker said, "Don't confuse motion with progress."
ReplyDeleteAs to the question of "selling" I believe that "selling time" is when one is face-to-face or phone to phone with a qualified buyer who has an identifiable problem that you can solve and they have the ability to pay for the solution. Anything else is either marketing or administration.