subject: Useless Information And How To Avoid It [print this page] This might look a bit unrelated to the day-to-day challenges of an effective sales person. What has this to do with your relations with your customers?
Consider the issue of "sales time". Sales time is the time that you actually spend interacting with your customers either on the phone or in person. It is the heart of your job and the ultimate reason your company employs you. Investing your sales time effectively is the way that you achieve better results and earn your money.
Because of the demands for administration, reporting, preparing, travel, etc., the typical field sales person only spends about 25 percent of his/her work week in sales time. In our challenging economy, the demands on our time by the press of "other stuff" can be overwhelming.
We need to constantly battle the allure of "other stuff" so that we are investing sufficiently in selling time. All things being equal, the more time you actually spend with your customers, the more successful you will be.
So that leads us to this question: What constitutes the biggest percentage of other stuff? What has the potential to overwhelm us, to rob us of our sales time by tempting us to invest our energies in something not nearly as effective?
The answer? Information. We are flooded with information. Consider the amount of selling literature, technical bulletins, computer reports, web pages, emails, voice mails, and memos from the boss that we have to deal with every day. All these are types of information. If we gave in to the temptation of dealing with all the information that comes our way, we could easily spend 8 to 15 hours a week doing nothing but that.
And that would not be a good idea. It would detract from our ability to create sales time, and immediately and negatively impact our performance.
That leads us to this best practice. The best performers don't waste a lot of time dealing with useless information. They stay focused on the heart of the job "sales time" understanding that without quality time with their customers nothing else matters.
So, they create disciplines and strategies that enable them to deal with all the forms of information quickly and expediently. The run-of-the-mill sales people waste inordinate amounts of time processing information.
