The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [14]
What would happen if 80 percent of your effort was focused on high-results-producing activities? If you started spending 80 percent of your time on results-oriented work and only 20 percent on every thing else, you could conceivably get a fourfold increase in productivity! All it takes is pigheaded discipline and determination.
Tips for Salespeople and One-Person Armies
Every salesperson should have at least 2.5 hours a day of brand-new prospecting. And that’s for salespeople who have a full load of current clients. Salespeople who are not managing a large list of current clients need to do at least four hours per day of pure cold calling. I have a client who has software that tracks sales activity, but he never used the software. To our shock, when we actually used the software we found that not one person on the staff was doing more than an hour’s worth of cold calling in a single day. When surveyed, the reps thought they were making 40 to 60 cold calls per day. The reality: about 11 to 28 cold calls per day. For new salespeople, their entire day should be spent prospecting.
If you are a one-person army or a very small company and you, as the entrepreneur, are the main person responsible for growing the company, then you personally must spend at least 2.5 hours per day growing your company.
What to Do If Your Job Is Designed to Be Reactive
Say you are a salesperson who has to take inbound calls from clients on a regular basis. Say you are a customer ser vice representative whose entire job is to react to customer ser vice calls. What if you’re a receptionist who answers phones or an assistant who has to react to your boss’s needs all day. Even people in reactive positions should still plan realistically for some proactive tasks that can get done each day. You should have some proactive tasks that you do each day that move things forward or improve the company or your job. Plan time to improve skills, performance, work flow, and organization for you and your department or company. People in more reactive positions will simply have far less time dedicated to proactive tasks—but still have some proactive tasks in every day.
If you are a receptionist and your main job is to answer phones, can you also be productive making lists of prospects for the sales team? It makes me crazy when I go into a company and the receptionist is reading a book because the calls are slow. Can this person be doing some research on the Internet about your industry? Or doing mailings? These questions also apply if you’re in customer ser vice. In your weekly meetings (full design in Chapter Three), make it a point to address this issue and put reactive people to work in their down time or slow time.
People REspect What You INspect
If you want to get your people productive, you should examine how they’re prioritizing and planning their day every day. Before the advent of the Internet, I would go around the office and check how people were planning their day. I did that for months until every person in the company was doing their plan every day. It took me six months of pigheaded discipline and determination and constant inspection before my employees followed the six steps religiously. I am so intent on having great time management among my key executives, and they from their staff, that I even built an Internet program where employees log in and plan their day. The boss gets an automatic email alert each time an employee completes his or her day’s plan. (See “The Ultimate Time Management Tool” on www.chettime.com.)
With or without a program like this, instituting this kind of inspection on how employees are planning and prioritizing will increase their respect for time management and dramatically increase their productivity.
Exercise
Look at your plan.
How much of your day is proactive and how much is reactive?
Where did you put the most important task for the day? At the beginning? In the middle? At the end?
Rewrite your plan so that you complete the most important