How Many Sales Opportunities Do You Miss?
November 23, 2007
This week I wasted several hours researching and meeting with prospects that had absolutely no need for my services and as we discussed a few weeks ago the actual cost of making a sale can be as high as $1600 when the time costs are taken into account.
This has provided a timely reminder for me about the importance of maximising your selling time. Studies from the US show the average salesperson only spends 1.5 hours a day in front of prospects. Imagine if we were able to increase this average to 3 hours – we would double our sales!
So on to Mistake No. 5 – Wasting Selling Time
Most salespeople look real busy but they are not achieving the results they should be.
Generally they lack organisation so instead of spending more time in front of prospective clients they are busy spinning their wheels in low payoff activities such as administration, report writing, quoting/proposal writing, attending endless meetings, the list goes on.
Organising our time is a problem for many of us in sales if we haven’t identified the high payoff activities that maximise our time in selling.
The five key areas we train sales teams in are –
Planning
Prospecting
Phoning
Presentations
Pampering
So the first area that wastes our time is a lack of planning.
Areas to focus on here include breaking down our yearly targets into monthly, weekly and daily activity plans then planning them into your week.
If we don’t put the planning time in we end up presenting to suspects who will never turn into prospects. Presenting to people who are not qualified, that you have not researched, is just that – presenting. In fact you could be considered a “professional conversationalist” as all you are doing is having a conversation and your company is paying you for that. It is not selling! This is probably the greatest misuse of salespeople’s time – presenting to someone who doesn’t have a need, who doesn’t have the authority to make the decision or cannot afford your services. Professional salespeople have learnt the futility of presenting to suspects who are not qualified.
Another problem area for salespeople is calling on everybody on their list and treating all customers and prospects as equal (as indeed they are and should be). However the key consideration here is the amount of time the salesperson has and the amount of clients/prospects he needs to contact. The salesperson needs to focus most of his attention on the 20% of clients and prospects that have the highest potential to give the company 80% of their profits.
The old 80/20 rule still applies and in fact an international accounting firm recently conducted a study that showed that 83% of their profits came from 20% of their client base.
A key step here is to create an ideal client/prospect profile so that we know who we are looking for and where we should be spending our time. It’s like the old hunting story –
“if you don’t know what you are hunting everything looks like a target”.
We will continue with this subject in my next article.
Quotes of the Week:
If we say it they doubt it
If they say it its true
Tom Hopkins
“Never tell a buyer anything you can ask them”
Brett Burgess
Have a successful week!
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