Everyone can benefit from adopting more productive habits into their day, most especially salespeople. Meeting quotas involves staying on task and focused. They cannot afford the liability of distraction. To learn some key ways to develop productive habits, listen to this episode of Sales Reinvented with special guest Chris Croft!
Chris Croft hails from the United Kingdom and offers in-person training in project and time management. If you’re not native to the UK, he offers courses on Lynda.com and has a popular YouTube channel. He’s been a management coach for over 16 years, is an author, and an all-around expert in the field of time management—a core competency of productivity!
Salespeople are constantly barraged with choices. What activities that they engage in can vary greatly day-to-day. It’s important to focus on the important things and do those well. But many sales professionals are flexible opportunists that are easily distracted—it’s the nature of the job. So having a grasp of time management is essential to being productive.
Chris illustrates his point with a color-based time management model:
The goal to being productive is finding a balance—a blend—of the three colors. All are things that do fall on your to-do list, but each with differing importance.
Chris advocates for completely emptying your mind so you can focus on the present moment. No one wants to be thinking about a project they need to work on while in a meeting with a client. So what do you do? Get a diary, journal, planner, etc. and write everything down. Write down every appt., every promise made, every follow-up call, and any tasks you need to remember.
In that same planner, Chris recommends creating an appointment with yourself every day. A half-hour time-slot for you to plan. His second tip is to never allow your calendar to get full. Save yourself an hour each day for small tasks (such as emails) that crop up throughout the day. Lastly, note whenever you need to complete a follow-up action such as calling a prospect back.
Chris talks about creating a master list and a daily to-do list and why it’s important they must be different. Keep listening!
Chris believes a characteristic of a great salesperson is discipline, and disciplined people know how to overcome procrastination. He details 7 things you can begin to implement to procrastinate less:
Chris outlines some other productivity tools he recommends, habits to develop, and his top 3 do’s and top 3 don’ts. Don’t miss his insight into productivity.
Chris was on holiday in the Lakes District (in England) with his wife. They were walking their dog, and he got a work phone call. He answered it and happily scheduled some training courses. He wrote it in his planner, pocketed it, and continued with his vacation.
Many might criticize him for taking a work call while on vacation.
But to Chris, it was a complete win. He took a few minutes and scheduled something that he loves doing. Blurring the edges between home and work is okay! If you have to completely separate yourself from the work you do, maybe you’re in the wrong job.
Because if you love what you do, it doesn’t feel like work.
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Following the right productivity tips can make or break your sales performance. When your entire job revolves around generating revenue, it’s important to be as productive as you can be. So what steps do you need to take? If you’re looking for some great tips to propel you in the right direction, this episode of Sales Reinvented is the one for you!
Noelle Leemburg joins Paul in this episode to deliver some of her top tips from years of experience. She is a coach, co-author of a book, and an experienced saleswoman. Her enthusiasm, energy, and authentic desire to help others reach their goals shines in this episode. Don’t miss it!
Noelle believes productivity begins with doing impactful tasks effectively and efficiently. The key word is impactful—whatever task you’re doing needs to clearly be working towards generating revenue. So what keeps a salesperson from those tasks?
The #1 answer tends to be there are too many things on their plate.
If you’re getting tasks sent your way or requests are made of you that fall outside of your role, they need to be set aside. Don’t let “shiny penny syndrome” distract you from what generates revenue.
So how does a sales professional become more productive? Noelle advocates being protective of your time. She refers to this as “Tiger Time”. You must fiercely protect your schedule. So start tracking where you’re spending your time. Then narrow down what activities you’re doing that are wasting your time.
Intentionality is a large part of what makes someone successful. If you know what your quarterly goals are, you can then plan monthly, weekly, and daily tasks to reach those goals. You can take those goals and plan them into your calendar so your precious time is not being wasted.
To hear the attributes Noelle believes a sales professional must cultivate—keep listening!
A goal-oriented and focused salesperson will focus on their most impactful tasks and knock them out first. Noelle helps further define impactful activities by noting it’s the things that make money. This can include—but is not limited to—prospecting, conversations with clients, face-to-face proposals, and phone calls.
Noelle states that one way you can get a leg-up on your day is by coming in 10 minutes early. Investing an extra 10 minutes is an extra 40 hours a year spent in impactful activities. Think of what could be achieved in that extra time! Not everyone is a morning person, so connect with prospects when you’re at your best (even if it’s in the afternoon).
Take Noelle’s top tips and make them your own. You’ll begin to take steps towards becoming a more productive sales professional:
Noelle wants sales professionals to focus on What’s Important Now (WIN). If you begin to do that and follow her productivity tips, you will start to win. Don’t miss listening to this whole episode for some great stories and productivity strategies.
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Are you ready to improve your sales performance? There are so many factors in play that affect reaching your quota, but something you can easily start to remedy is your productivity. What can you do to drive your progress? How do you improve your productivity? Meridith Elliott Powell answers these questions and more in this episode of Sales Reinvented.
Meridith is a business growth expert, motivational speaker, and successful author. She understands the constantly changing economy and knows how to help you grow your business. One way to accelerate growth is by making sure your salesforce is as productive as possible. Be sure to listen to this episode to hear her advice!
Everyone has their own philosophy on the sales process and what works for them. More often than not, those strategies are based on what worked in the past. Meridith states that you must stop living in the past. What worked then won’t always be the best strategy for the here and now.
The marketplace, customer, and competition are constantly changing.
So you must grow and adapt with those changes. Behaviors drive results. So you must decide which ones move you forward. If romanticizing past success is holding you back from reaching your goals, it's time to move on.
Meridith believes improving day-to-day productivity begins with reflecting over your week. Every Friday, she takes time to look at the last four days. She recommends looking at your emails, phone calls you made, proposals you wrote, and even networking events you attended.
What moved the ball forward? What didn’t?
You are your efficiency expert. You must be the one to look at your week and make adjustments moving forward. Meridith knows she is more productive when she takes 15-20 minutes to keep herself accountable to move towards her goals. That means eliminating activities that don’t.
Sometimes it’s hard for sales professionals to recognize or admit that the sales process truly begins before salespeople ever connect with a potential customer. Customers Google, they do research, and likely know about your business or product because of your marketing team doing their jobs right.
Let marketing do the heavy lifting and provide the data you need. That allows a sales professional to do what they do best—build relationships. Salespeople are the ones who bring emotional intelligence to the process. Remember that the marketing process doesn’t steal your leads, but softens them for the sale.
Meridith loves every part of the sales process. She is very outgoing and loves the thrill of the hunt. Because she was very good at what she did, she fought every tool or resource ever introduced to her. She was meeting her goals, so why did she need them?
When forced to implement a system of questions to gather information, she found out how wrong she was. She thought she knew everything about a long-time client. But after she had asked the required questions, she realized she missed important and necessary information.
From that moment on, Meridith became a staunch advocate for embracing a CRM and any tools or resources that would propel her towards her goals. The moral of the story? Keep your ego in check. She continued forward and consistently closed $1 million a month in sales.
To hear in full detail her productivity process make sure you listen to this episode in its entirety!
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