CHAPTER 6

Time-Management Tactics

Early in my consulting career, I was working with a company known for employing creative geniuses who designed for the consumer goods industry. After each time I was with them, I left in amazement at the ideas they created for their clients and the fun they had doing it. The salespeople were all long-term veterans of the industry, and their role as account managers was to maintain enough projects coming to keep the creative team busy.

The CEO brought me in to help them do two things—stabilize their business and open up new business segments around which they could build a new division. The biggest problem I saw was when and how they prospected. They had the faulty philosophy that they only needed to prospect when business was slow. In the mind of the vice president of sales, prospecting was drudgery and it didn’t fit the fun, creative environment they had, so he didn’t want to require anyone in the company to do it. He also felt making people prospect was not the right way to treat a veteran sales team. Therefore, whenever the company found itself in a slump, his solution would be to get everyone on the phone calling prospects in what he would call a “prospecting telethon.”

In theory, the strategy of a “prospecting telethon” isn’t horrible, but what made it bad in this case was there was zero—and I mean zero—follow-through on the leads generated from the blitz. Almost by magic, a day or two following a blitz, some massive piece of business would fall out of the sky. Then, the vice president of sales would feel good about things, and the leads generated from the prospecting blitz would fade into the sunset. The salespeople simply would go about doing what they wanted to do, taking care of existing clients, and completely ignoring what needed to be done to develop new business. The result was as you might guess. Six to nine months later, the vice president of sales would declare the sky was falling and he would schedule a “prospecting telethon.”

In my conversations with each account manager, their response to my question about why they didn’t follow up on leads from the phone blitzes was always the same. Each one said it was impossible to find the time, as they were already overloaded taking care of existing business. Were they too busy? No, they weren’t any busier than any other account manager for any other company. In reality, they were too busy because they told themselves they were too busy—so often, in fact, they began to believe it. Their reason for saying they were too busy was because they didn’t want to endure what they felt was work that was beneath what should be expected of a veteran salesperson.

Prospecting Is Not the Last Thing on Your To-Do List

Prospecting is not something you do when you don’t have anything else to do. It’s not something you do when you suddenly find yourself without enough customers. Prospecting must be something you do on a regular basis. View prospecting the same way you do taking a shower. You take a shower daily, and you should be prospecting daily. Failing to prospect on a regular basis is putting yourself in a situation where your sales will constantly be in a peak/valley syndrome.

Even if you are extremely successful, or don’t feel there is a need to prospect because your customers like you so much, the truth is you must prospect consistently! You must allocate time on your calendar—and this doesn’t mean just adding it to your list of things you want to get done. No, you must physically block the time on your calendar. Minimally, block time each week. Ideally, block time every day. Dedicated time built into your day will increase your probability of doing it. For too many salespeople, prospecting is the last thing they want to do because of how difficult it can be. Merely having it on your list of things to do is simply not good enough.

Time for Prospecting Means You Actually Prospect

The next step in allocating time to prospect is actually doing it. Thinking about prospecting and preparing to prospect is not prospecting. Too many salespeople will have an hour of time blocked on their calendars, only to spend the entire hour getting ready to prospect, but never actually doing it. When you allocate time, include time for preparation. For most salespeople, this means setting aside twice as much time as they think they will need. When I’m asked how much time salespeople should spend prospecting, I say divide your calendar into fourths. If you work a forty-hour week, you have four quarters each week containing ten hours each. Allocate the quarters as follows:

Prospecting. Developing leads and qualifying prospects

Existing Accounts. Connecting with your existing customers

Sales Calls/Proposals. Making calls on prospects in the middle of the sales funnel, the high-potential prospects, and customers with whom you’re trying to close more deals

Customer Follow-Up/Admin. Taking care of customer issues, attending sales meetings, and completing administrative work

Don’t tell me you don’t need to dedicate 25% of your time to prospecting. Prospecting is what keeps your sales engine going. Prospect today and you will have leads to work tomorrow, and leads tomorrow mean you have people to sell to next week. When you have people to sell to next week, you have the ability to close deals and make money. It’s not a matter of how much time should you prospect; it’s a question of how much success you want!

Does Your Clock Match Your Prospect’s Clock?

Ask yourself the following questions when you set aside a time period to make prospecting calls: First, is it a time when the decision makers are most likely available? Second, is it a time when you’re mentally prepared? Sometimes these two periods conflict with one another, and if they do, then I guarantee it will create a problem. The solution is simple. When your pipeline is empty and you’re not making enough money, you’ll begin to change your view. You will become more discerning about mentally preparing yourself and making calls when prospects are most likely available. The exact day or days of the week and times of the day you set aside for making prospecting calls will vary based on whom and where you’re calling. In chapter 11, I will discuss how to best determine days and times that will work best for your situation.

Your challenge is to maximize the window by being mentally prepared to call. You must be prepared. If you merely go into your daily “prospect-calling window” cold, I guarantee your success rate will be zero.

Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish

I cannot emphasize enough that prospecting is not about the initial calls; it’s about the consistency of the calls. A huge mistake people make when prospecting is thinking they’re being efficient by making a bunch of calls or emailing a group of prospects once. The definition of prospecting is creating a level of awareness with those who might do business with you. You can’t accomplish that goal with a single phone call or email.

Before starting to prospect, you must first ask yourself if you have the time and ability to make the necessary number of follow-up contacts with the people you intend to prospect. Just answering this question truthfully can and will save you a tremendous amount of time. To put it bluntly, you are not being productive in your prospecting efforts if you don’t have an effective process for following up. I am a huge advocate of having dedicated blocks of time on your calendar to which you adhere. I knew one sales manager who would routinely schedule sales meetings on the best prospecting day of the week. When I challenged him, he said he was trying to make it easy because that was the one day each week he knew all his salespeople would be in the office. He was making it easy all right—for his sales team to have an excuse to not prospect and then an excuse as to why they couldn’t make their numbers.