Time Is Your Enemy - Here Are Some Tips To Eliminate It As Your Competition

Time will beat you in every deal if you let it. It is a constant competitor. It is relentless. It never takes a break.

In every deal that you lose, you could possibly say that you just ran out of time to convince the prospect that you had the best solution. Whenever you do a post-mortem on your lost deals, it usually comes down to a simple realization, you didn’t spend enough time on with key decision makers. Sometimes you were blocked from spending time with the decision maker that turned the deal against you, but we all know that those blockers can be defeated given enough time.

We also know that time kills good deals. On old manager told me a statement that I often repeat, “The only things that get better with time, are cheese and wine.”

Using your time effectively is critical to your success as a salesperson. Hopefully, I can give you some tips to encourage you to do a better job, but I do have some bad news. You have probably heard all of these tips before. There is nothing new I can tell you. The only difference is that you decide to do something about it this time, or you don’t. You can always procrastinate about getting better with time management.

Here is the reality, if time is your biggest competitor, then procrastination is his coach and champion. Procrastination will help you become a very mediocre salesperson. Procrastination helps time eliminate you in your deals. You need to overcome procrastination.

To beat procrastination, you need a friend/coach/champion for yourself. That friend/coach/champion is urgency. Sometimes urgency can come from your manager, but when your activity becomes so low that you need your manager to give you urgency, then there is a good chance that your job is in trouble. That is not a good thing. Try to be urgent without your manager helping you.

Maybe your urgency comes from your spouse and family. That is "good" urgency. That means you are staying on top of your business for the benefit of others. You want to close all the deals that you can find so that you can provide for your family. You want to give them all of the great things in life that they desire and deserve.

I know salespeople that keep a picture on their desk or as the background of their computer merely to establish that urgency. To remind themselves that they are working hard so that they are providing a great life for their family. That is a good urgency.

How urgent are you?

Here is a bit of math to help you increase your urgency and eliminate procrastination as a competitor which in turn will help you beat time.

Assume that you have a 1 million dollar quota. Also, assume that the average product sale for your company is $50K. To continue this scenario, let's assume that you have learned from the most successful salespeople in your company that in order to consistently do 150% of quota (or $1,500,000 – remember that you should always think of your goals as a complete number!), you will need to close at least three deals for four times the average deal size. In other words, you need to close three large deals of 200K each.

While you have an annual quota, it is best to think that you always have to do 150% of quota in any given 12-month window. So in the next 12 months, you need to close:

3 – 200K deals for a total of $600,000.

18 – 50K deals for a total of $900,000.

You need to close 21 deals, and three of them need to be large deals to achieve your goal of 150% of quota.

The Power Matrix that I describe in my book Eliminate Your Competition suggests that you should cover 9 people in your small deals since they are less than 10% of your quota. It also tells you that you need to reach 25 people in your three large deals.

Some of those people that you need to cover in the Power Matrix you will meet with only once but others you will visit with many times. Some of your meetings will have multiple people in them. For rough assumptions, let’s assume that you need twice as many meetings are there are people that you need to cover. Therefore, you need 50 sales calls on your big deals and 18 sales calls on your smaller deals.

The above math means you need to make 150 (3×50) sales calls on your big deals and you need to make 324 sales calls on your small deals. That is a total of 474 sales calls or just shy of 10 per week. It also means that roughly ? of your sales calls are going to be on large deals.

If each sales call is 45-60 minutes, then the overall time for each meeting is about 90 minutes from the parking lot back to the parking lot. That is 42,660 minutes of sales calls every year for the deals that you win.

You will never win every deal. If you follow the suggestions of my book, Eliminate Your Competition, then you will eliminate your competition far more frequently than you will be eliminated. Let’s assume you win 75% of your deals. This means you will work just as hard on the deals you lose as those you win. That means that you need to increase the 42,660 minutes by 25% which is an additional 10,665 minutes. That is a total of 53,325 minutes of sales calls per year and approximately 12-13 sales calls per week.

There are approximately 120,000 work-minutes in a year. You can do this. In fact, you can easily do this. In this model that I just walked through, you are only spending 45% of your time making sales calls. The only issue is if you procrastinate. If you procrastinate then procrastination’s friend, time, will eliminate you from some of these victories and from achieving your goal.

I talk in my book, Eliminate Your Competition that you need to be making sales calls before the customer starts their decision-making process. Assuming that means you are calling on the customer 36 weeks before the order (the assumption that I make in the case study in my book Eliminate Your Competition) then today, you need to be calling on 19 opportunities (21 divided by 50 working weeks in a year times 36 weeks decision-making timeframe multiplied by 1.25 because you lose 25%). At least three of those opportunities need to be candidates for big deals.

More math, you have to make 12 sales calls this week. Above, we determined ? of those have to be on deals you think could be large deals. That is 4 per week.

Hopefully, this math (modified to match your quotas and average sales metrics) helps you create the urgency to achieve your goals.

You may purchase my book Eliminate Your Competition from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.

Here are some tips that will now help you develop your time management.

1 – Set goals

I discussed in an earlier article on how to set your goals, but now you can amend that with the math above. For instance, in this article, you need to make 12 sales calls this week. Also, you need to make four sales calls this week on opportunities that are going to be large deals.

2 – Find a good time management system and use it.

Everyone is different in how this works. There are lots of blogs out there to help you. Pick one and stick to it.

3 – Tackle your biggest tasks in the morning.

The different systems out there will give you different advice. However, as a salesperson, your day will almost definitely get crazier as the day goes on. Therefore, every morning you need to make sure you accomplish your number one task before you do anything else. In my opinion, your number one task every day is to make sure that in the next two weeks, you have 12 appointments scheduled with four of those appointments being for deals that are expected to be substantial.

4 – Follow the 80-20 rule. Another great time management tip is to use the 80-20 Rule, also known as the Pareto Principle.

In this case, 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your activity. The Pareto Principle reinforces that you need to focus on your big deals as you need to have your 25 people in the Power Matrix covered and comfortable with you, your product, and your company.

5 – Schedule email response times.

Don’t respond to incoming emails until you accomplish your top goals for the day. Yes, this is difficult, but you need to ignore the marketing emails and even the emails from your boss until you get your top goal accomplished – get your appointments scheduled for the next two weeks.

6 – Take frequent breaks when working.

If you have an office day, you need to stand up and walk around every 45 minutes. Get a coffee or water. Look outside for a few minutes. Please don’t go out and smoke though because smoking is an almost guaranteed trip to the hospital or the morgue when you get older.

7 – Meditate or exercise every day.

Some time-management gurus will tell you to do this first thing in the morning. This may not be possible for some sales professionals due to interactions with customers or maybe the home office in other time zones. Instead, either workout or meditate (or both) sometime during the day. If morning works for you, that is better, but daily is essential.

8 – Make to-do lists in the evening for the next day.

Before you check out of work for the day, update your task list. If you prefer a piece of paper, then rewrite a clean version for the next day. If you prefer a software-based task list, review it and make sure it is accurate. Make this the last thing you do every day. Make sure that making your goal for appointments per week is one of the top one or two things for the next day.

9 – Turn off social media app alerts.

Every day you will log into social media to make sure you are appropriately communicating to your prospects. You need to create a reputation that you are making them smarter. However, confine this interaction to once in the morning and then once in the afternoon. For your personal social life of looking at cat videos and pictures of your niece – do that in the evening on your own time.

This article originally appeared on my site dedicated to helping salespeople become more successful.

Header Photo by ?DLB?