Adopt a CEO Mindset
Jeb Blount provides tips on time and territory management.
The one constant in every sales person’s life is time. Every Sales Professional has exactly 24 hours each day and there are only a handful of these hours that are available for selling.
Each year my team at SalesGravy.com is hired by companies and sales organizations to teach Sales Professionals how to better manage their time and territories. The reason that these companies are willing to invest in this training is simple. They realize that the one constant in every sales person’s life is time. Time for prospecting, time for sales calls, time for demonstrations, time for tours, time for closing, and unfortunately time for administrative tasks and paperwork. Of course, time is the great equalizer. Every Sales Professional has exactly 24 hours each day and there are only a handful of these hours that are available for selling. It is how you use these sales Golden Hours that is often the difference between success and failure.
The real key to success and the number one requirement for effectively managing your time and territory is to adopt a CEO Mind-set. This simply means that you begin to see yourself as the CEO of you. In fact, one of the things I ask the salespeople in my classes to do is to take out their business card, scratch out whatever title is on it, and write in CEO. Now I know this sounds a little corny but it drives home the point that in sales you control your own destiny. This is the very reason that I love sales so much. Sales is one of the few professions in business today where you can be in complete control of your earnings. In sales you have the flexibility to control your time, your income, and ultimately your success. Few people in the business world have this much opportunity.
Unfortunately too many salespeople don’t see things this way. They don’t take responsibility and accountability for their own success or failures. They blame the company, product, prices, lack of training, and the boss for their mediocre results. They whine that there is too much paperwork, quotas are too high, and that there is no support. While spending hours of wasted time behind the windshield or shuffling papers, they complain constantly that there “just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.” And ultimately they fail to live up to their true potential.
On the other hand, the top Sales Professionals have adopted the CEO mind-set. They believe that they alone are accountable for their own success or failure. Top Sales Professionals use their time wisely. During the Golden Hours they are either on the phone or face to face with customers or prospects. As the CEO of their own selling company they do not allow anything to intrude on the Golden Hours and they are diligent and disciplined with how and where they spend their time. Top Sales Professionals look at the world through the eyes of a CEO and allocate the scarce resource of time in the most effective way. In doing so they have less stress, more fun, abundant time with their families, and at the same time out earn the average salesperson 5, 10, and sometimes 20 to 1.
Quick and Dirty Tips for Adopting a CEO Mind-set
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Own Your Territory: Take complete responsibility and accountability for managing your territory. Map your territory and build a daily, weekly, and monthly plan. Allocate your time in the most efficient way to avoid windshield time so that you spend the Golden Hours with prospects and customers who deliver the greatest volume of new sales.
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Be Responsible For Your Time: Make sure that you have the tools to manage your time properly – a calendar, PDA, and GPS are critical. Plan each day and week in advance. Make decisions to move low value activities off of your calendar if those activities are not moving you closer to your sales objectives. At the end of each day review your actions to ensure that you have used your time wisely.
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Measure Your Worth: Take time to get a clear understanding of what each Golden Hour (your prime selling time) is worth. Just take your annual income goal and divide it by the total number of Golden Hours in each year and you’ll find what you are worth per hour. Use this number as a gauge to determine whether a task is moving you towards your goals or away from them. CEOs don’t spend $50 an hour time on $10 an hour tasks.
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Find Creative Solutions To Problems: We don’t live in a perfect world. No matter how much you plan and how disciplined you are with your time prospects, customers, the boss, and sometimes life will throw you curve balls. The true test of CEOs in the business world is their ability to find creative solutions to inevitable problems. Top Sales Professionals do not allow curve balls to slow them down. They do not blame others. They do not make excuses. Instead, when faced with roadblocks, they adopt the CEO mind-set and find creative solutions that allow them to work around problems and deliver results.
This is Jeb Blount. Thank you for joining me on the Sales Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips Podcast.
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