The typical sales role requires a significant amount of work beyond meeting with our prospects and customers. Email alone can gobble up 80% of our time if we let it. Reports, forecasts, proposals, expense reports, and other mundane tasks can take away from what we do best – selling. But don’t let work get in the way of your job. Never forget, your job is to close business.
I have worked with reps who have pristine pipeline reports but not much meat to them. These reps are too busy doing their job to sell. Yes, your CRM is very important so you should keep it updated in real time. But don’t let that be a crutch for what you should really be doing.
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Sales is series of conversations that typically start with some sort of outreach from you, the sales rep. I recently inherited a book of business from a departed sales rep. I’m working the territory while I find her replacement. A few weeks ago I was staring at spreadsheet with a list of accounts that I had not spoken to yet. These companies were doing some amount of business with us, but not significant. It was my job to research the company, find the key contact, call them and make an introduction. There were dozens of things that I could be doing instead. But I carved out some time over a couple of days and made a bunch of calls. It was incredibly rewarding and invigorating.
There is no doubt in my mind that most sales reps could spend their day answering the phone, managing email, updating the CRM, and other tasks that keep them from doing their job. Some reps are so detail oriented that they are holding themselves back from doing what they were hired to do – sell!
If you find that your numbers are suffering, take a hard look at your pipeline. How full is it? What kind of work are you doing to fill it? Do you find yourself doing busy work instead of cold-calling? Are you sitting in front of email all day and not reaching out to those leads or new prospects? If so, shut down your email and any other application that distracts you, take a deep breath and start selling again!
Sales does have its fair share of busy work. Carve some time out for what is really important – selling – and see your job satisfaction and numbers improve.
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