Time management - Better Closer

5 Important Steps to Keeping Your Sales Process Moving Forward

January 9, 2010 By Bill Rice

I think it’s harder than ever to keep your sales process moving forward. There are so many innovative technologies that hold promise for sales. So many social media tools that help us connect and build relationships. Unfortunately all this scatters our attention and focus and working the sales pipeline.

Here are some time-tested ideas for returning your focus to forward sales movement.

1. Time blocking - This is an oldie, but goody. Blocking off certain times during the day for specific routines is a great way to block out distractions. The technique is as simple as blocking off brief increments (I recommend 30 minutes) of your day. During those blocks of dedicated time refuse to do anything, but the assigned task or routine.

This works exceptionally well for things you probably procrastinate on a regular basis–doing sales reporting, updating your CRM, cold calling, commenting on relevant blogs.

2. Jump start every day - This is one of my favorites and I think my biggest productivity lifter. There is so much time lost or wasted in starting up and winding down the day. I recommend improving the productivity of both those time blocks with a simple technique.

As you wind down (maybe even have a dedicated time block) review your day. Sales might review objections that stuck them, marketing may review analytics, writers might inventory assignments, developer might track problems that baffled them. Now turn those items into a fast start for tomorrow…

Create your “before email” morning routine. This might be a Web prospecting goal, competitor website research, a little searching in developer forums, have documents with titles (maybe outlines too) open on your computer. Jump starting the day is as simple as knowing what–exactly–you are going to do first.

3. Stop prioritizing - I think this is the number one killer of sales momentum. Prioritization is often a crutch. Something that we do when we lose confidence in our sales approach or are frustrated with our numbers. These challenges send us looking for the sure wins. Unfortunately, that is a myth. Avoid it.

4. Do the work - Prioritization and not doing the work often work hand in hand. There is no short-cut. You can’t cherry pick your way to success and you can’t grow rich while you sleep. You have to do the work. In sales or even as a freelancer that means making connections. You need to do the work–build the connections, nurture relationships, and build trust. There are no short-cuts, only distractions.

5. Understand your energy - This is a big one for me. Everyone seems to run on their own energy cycles. Mine is early morning, around 10 am, and then again around 2 pm. This when my mind seems to kick into high gear. Pay attention to when your energy kicks in and time block high impact tasks into those opportunities. Trying to plow through a low energy cycle is on a challenging task is a waste of time. Instead block in your Web browsing, Twittering, relationship calls–easy, no-brainer tasks.

Bonus tips (my favorites):

6. Work in short sprints - This tip is an important part of a lot of the other techniques. I find it a big productivity enhancer. Learn to work in short, well-defined, goal-oriented sprints. This makes it easier to stay focused and maximize energy cycles.

7. Set bite-size goals - In addition to your big goals, it’s important to have smaller objectives that get you to the big ones. This will help you stay focused and boost your confidence on a regular basis. Feeling productive is a huge motivator and aids focus.

8. Learn to relax - This is one I have just recently learned the value of–learning to shutdown. The always on and connected world makes this really hard. Wifi and iPhones keep us always tuned into our task list and emerging demands. This can keep you continually stressed and overwhelmed. You need time to recharge. It is impossible to run at 100% for 12-16 hours a day.

Shutdown at specific times–evenings, weekends. Spend the time enriching your life. Hang out with family and friends. Read, watch movies, experience travel. These activities not only relax us and get us ready for the next hard charging sales cycle, but they make us better at sales. These experiences make us better rounded and more interesting conversationalist–core skill for a good sales person.

What do you do to stay focused? How do your structure your sales day? What do you do to relax?

Filed Under: Featured, Social Selling Tagged With: focus, Productivity, social selling, Time management

Free Lead Management Software

October 26, 2009 By Bill Rice

: Image via Wikipedia

Looking for free lead management software? It is possible. The basic principles of lead management can be cobbled together with free tools. Depending on your sales goals and quotas, these just might do the trick.

Let’s build a free lead management system.

Lead Capture: Email, Contacts, and Spreadsheets

Most sales leads are coming from business cards, website contact forms, or phone calls. These are easily captured in email, contact databases, or spreadsheets. The key is centralizing that process. Consistently use one method or the other. Lost or misplaced leads are one of the top reasons for poor conversion rates or low sales numbers.

Most lead management software automates the lead capture process. Typically the automation will capture lead data directly or allow for simple imports–quickly and efficiently adding leads to a central database.

Lead Distribution: Email or Spreadsheet

Getting leads out to others on your sales team can be as simple as emailing or forwarding a spreadsheet. The challenge becomes syncing these various leads with associated actions or annotating updates and notes.

Popular lead management software often simplifies this process by allowing leads to be transferred or routed within the database. There is little change for loss and all of the past history and notes travel with the lead–important bonus.

Lead Tracking: Folders or Labels

Any good sales person will attribute their long-term success to their database. That means never losing track of a lead. This can be difficult for most. We (sale people) are an easily distracted bunch. Each new shiny object that pops in attracts our full attention, while more productive leads spoil.

Tracking these maturing sales can be as simple as using some of the most basic filing techniques. Remember folders and labels?

I am not necessarily advocating your investment in filing cabinets, manila folders, sticky labels, and a good Sharpie. I am telling you to get organized so you can find and tune into these valuable leads on a regular basis. Whether you are using email or some file system on your computer, get a filing system.

This can be as simple as breaking your sales process into statuses and stages. Move your leads from one folder to the next. Label each lead with a priority or probability of success. This gives you easy retrieval and a simple count of items in these folders and of these labels will easily give you feedback on progress.

Sales Pipeline: Calendar and Alerts

Pipeline management is a critical skill for squeezing more out of your leads and accurately forecasting sales revenue. Your sales quota depends on you mastering this process. Doing it with a free system can be challenging, but it is possible.

Get a good electronic calendar–one that can alert you on your computer and your phone. Good pipeline management means forward motion. That means you need to schedule forward and attend promptly to what is ready to be attended to.

I like Google Calendar, but your organization may use Outlook or other enterprise calendaring system. Whatever it is get your sales process integrated into it. This will give you a realistic sales pipeline. One that accounts for those miscellaneous sales meetings and reporting requirements. It also ensure real sales get equal or more priority than simple (but necessary) administration and reporting.

Task Management: TODO List

With your leads tracked and sales pipeline under control it is time to get down to work. This is the job of your TODO list. Lucky for you there is no shortage of free task lists. The trick is finding one that you will use.

My suggestion is a good legal pad and pen. Something about scribbling out tasks and striking them off the list motivates productivity. However, there are a lot of great electronic solutions as well–Remember The Milk (RTM) and TaskPaper are a few of my favorites.

In my experience the closer you keep this solution to your email the better. This is especially true for free lead management as most of your tasks are invariably generated from and maybe moved forward by email.

Lead Nurturing: Email and Calendar

Finally, you need to manage those leads that aren’t quite ready to convert, but may given time and contact. Again, your email and calendar are the right tools to keep up the appropriate touch points and frequency of contact.

Set-up triggers and integrate them into your regular calls and email correspondence. These prospects will be impressed you remembered them and you will be glad you did. Lead nurturing is probably one of the most effective ways to build a healthy and consistent sales pipeline.

There you go, free lead management. A bit more work and less functionality than proper lead management software, but for a single sales person it can get you by. The calculation you need to do is what will a small investment in integrated sales lead management do for your business?

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Filed Under: Lead Management Tagged With: crm, Google Calendar, Lead Management, Remember the Milk, Social Selling, Time management

GTD for Sales: Batch Processing Leads

October 21, 2009 By Bill Rice

: Image by travisepoling via Flickr

I was an early follower of David Allen‘s Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity philosophy. It immediately synced with my observations of what makes sales people productive. Allen’s techniques in personal productivity are most effective with busy people. Sales is a numbers game. Processing high volumes of opportunities–efficiently–makes GTD a bulls eye strategy for sales.

When I started applying GTD to my sales teams I was struck by how counter cultural it was. Then I tried to get my sales software to enforce the principles. It was impossible. That is when I knew there was opportunity.

Sales fundamentally is a high-stakes, big numbers game. That sounds like Vegas and most sales people manage their efforts like Vegas–roll the dice and hope for the big hit. However, the people I saw hitting big were methodical processors.

Processing Your Sales Pipeline

In GTD there is the concept of “Getting ‘In’ to Empty.” Our sales pipeline is nothing more than an Inbox and we are going to apply the same principles.

As you process your sales pipeline you should get a sense of motion. Each sales lead should be moving to a different status. Nothing should stay put.

Working through your pipeline should result in leads flowing through these statuses:

Attempted: Every lead should get some attempt at contact
Contacted: When you make contact a lead transforms
Scheduled: Moves leads from routine processing to calendar
Application/Proposal: This puts the deal on the table
Processing: Can be a bit confusing, but this processing an order
Closed: The order is processed, delivered, and you have a client
Nurturing: This is where non-responsive prospects go

Allen’s GTD processing has some fundamental rules that we are also going to follow in GTD for Sales.

Top Item First

When I read Getting Things Done for the first time this was one of my first ah ha moments. As I looked around my sales floor I saw everyone “cherry picking” leads. For you non-sales types, that means looking at a list of leads and jumping all around for the “good ones.”

The habit of “cherry picking” is very natural, but easily the most devastating bad practice in sales. Intuition about what a good account looks like is nearly always wrong. What makes it even worse is that bad guesses lead to happy competitors that pick up that easy client you skipped.

All sales leads should be processed from the top down. If you do any prioritization it should be automated and completely obscured from your pipeline processing. Focus is critical. There should be no distractions in processing from the top to the bottom of the pipeline.

One Item at a Time

This is another powerful principle. People tend to mistake being surrounded by lots of stuff and multi-tasking with productivity. My experience is quite the contrary. Giving each item its due focus will move everything in your pipeline forward faster.

This principle is critical to sales, but rarely applied. Each sales lead that comes into your pipeline has an equal probability of closing with you–0 percent. That’s right, if you don’t make a disciplined attempt to contact cold or hot sales leads they will not convert. Therefore, there is no reason to do anything but attempt to contact one lead at a time, in turn, until all are processed.

Concentrating on each lead individually, one at a time, gives it the focus and attention that plays through on the phone or even in a follow-up email. Customers can tell a power dialed or automated email contact. They defensively reject it and you lose any efficiency you might have gained.

Processing one sales lead at a time makes sure nothing is lost, lacks follow-up, or gives that you’re just a number feel. It also gives you momentum. No more wondering what is next–simply get your next lead.

Never Put Anything Back Into “In”

It is ironic how many of these GTD principles most sales software and sales people violate. “Never put anything back into ‘in’” is another classic mistake. How many sales leads do you skip over everyday? Leads you are going to work later. Leads that are of lesser priority. How many ever get a second look?

You see the problem. If you leave leads in the inbox, in their initial state or status, they will never even get an attempt.

Some leads may truly be of a lower priority, but they should still be processed and attempted. Maybe you don’t want to call inquiries under a certain dollar amount. That’s fine, but at least send an email or delegate it to a telemarketer. It could still be a sale, just help the customer do a self-service order or go through a cheaper sales channel.

If you don’t sell that level or specific product at least tell the customer–better yet refer them to someone that does.

GTD has a lot of lessons for making your sales happen in greater volume and frequency. Batch processing your leads is just one facet of applying Getting Things Done to your sale pipeline. Stay tuned for more insights on applying GTD for Sales.

Stripped GTD: 3 Habits That Make You More Productive (lifehack.org)
GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit (lifehack.org)

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Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: business, David Allen, Getting Things Done, Inbox, Productivity, Social Selling, Time management

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