If you’re a sales professional and know you need to place importance on prioritizing tasks and becoming productive, this is the place to start! Are you ready to gain focus on what’s important and start closing more sales? Paul’s guest, Liz Heiman, lays out where to place your priorities, and how to become a productive salesperson.
Liz is the Chief Strategy Officer and Sales Leadership Coach at Alice Heiman, LLC. She is passionate about helping businesses maximize their full potential by increasing profitability. She enjoys strategizing plans for growth and success. Liz lends her expertise in this eye-opening episode of the Sales Reinvented Podcast!
According to Liz, productivity is the act of prioritizing tasks and being efficient at carrying them out. Sales professionals can get distracted and lose focus without clear priorities and plans in place. It can also be difficult to be productive when leadership pulls you in different directions. If you’re in sales management, you need to allow your sales team to do what they do best: close sales.
Management needs to focus on running interference and allowing salespeople to stay on-task.
In larger companies, this could be mitigated with the established of a sales enablement team. If you don’t have the means to create this team you must be thoughtful about expectations. Perhaps you can implement systems to limit unnecessary workload. Above all, don’t change the strategy for your sales team and leave them reeling and frustrated. Enable them to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
It is almost instinct for any professional to get to work and immediately check their email. It becomes the thing that controls us and steals our time. Liz points out that this is NOT the first task you should be engaging in. It is important to be responsive to customers. However, if you prioritize email, you never get to the things that are important and only deal with the things that are urgent.
Liz recommends diving into your CRM. Be sure you are entering data and keeping it up to date—even if you hate it. Look at your reports, get yourself organized, then dive into your funnel. Start by closing the sales at the end of the funnel, then work your way backward and follow up on leads. Don’t let them get cold. Leverage the power of the funnel to prioritize your day.
Liz points out that an important attribute of a sales professional is the ability to see the end of the road before they take their first step. An efficient person cannot just react, respond, and wing it. They need to ask themselves where their energy should be spent. What roadblocks may come up? Can they close on this sale? They must plan around the things that get them results. If they can’t envision the end result—closing the sale—how can they work backwards and plan each step?
Liz completely understands the power of planning. She feels lost and disorganized without it. Years ago, she was taught how to properly map out her time. She blocked time in her schedule for prospecting, calls to make, projects to complete, etc. This gave her the framework she needed to make deadlines and move sales forward.
If she didn’t utilize this strategy, she found herself floundering. She’d look at her week and question what, if anything, she got done. She recommends planning out your time so that you don’t lose track of the priorities or miss deadlines. A lack of planning creates more stress. And if you want time to play, you have to get your work done!
For a full picture of Liz’s strategies and tactics, listen to the whole episode of Sales Reinvented!
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