A players understand balance they understand that the most important contributor to their success besides relationship equity with their customers is time allocation. That warrants repeating -- time allocation and remember the currency to run a business is cash flow but the currency to run a sales territory is time management? A key principle for success is the ability to define and manage the activities that create success. What is the rule that many sales people allocate their time by?
Im gonna go after the really big guys. Ill call on my accounts based on breaking them up into As and Bs and Cs.
An Old Rule
As are the really big guys Cs are the little guys and you allocate suck up behavior based on size. So, you go out and call up on all the As half the Bs and a quarter of the Cs. When you make it through the territory four times, you believe you reached salesperson nirvana. You now believe you have maximum account coverage GET A LIFE! There are a lot of sales people that still follow that old school practice.
A key best practice principle to manage your territory and maximize success states that you should allocate time by opportunity for increase rather than existing volume. Think about that. It makes a huge difference. Most salespeople allocate their time based on the account size and what it takes to service them. Right? That worked in the 80s. Its was a lone wolf concept. Back then we all thought we personally owned every customer.
A Huge Price to Pay
Youre paying a huge price when professional field sales people spend a majority of their time being high paid apologists or just calling on maintenance accounts and buddies. This is the key question. How do you measure opportunity? Remember you must be able to measure it. Most salespeople spend less than 25% of their time with customers face to face in wholesale distribution. What do they do with all the rest of their time? Dont s ay playing golf. Its administrative stuff, non productive service stuff done by choice not necessity or just hanging out at the office. That can cost upwards of fifty grand a year.
Heres a Typical Office Sales Scenario-
Let me work out my quotes let me sit and voice mail my manufacturer to find out where my stuff is let me go buy the office to check on my special orders with purchasinglet me call on old Joe every Thursday and take him donuts because Ive been doing that for tens years. Sure he only buys $10,000 per year but we have a great checker game every week.
That kind of stuff wastes a lot of money.
Now think about this for a second. If you have five salespeople on the road in one of your branches and all of a sudden you get a 5% improvement from each one of them on customer facing time it gives you the financial equivalent of putting another whole field sales person on the road in terms of customer facing.
This article is not abou t the basics of time management. Go to a seminar. Buy McKenzies tapes on time management. There really good. Hes one of the Gurus of time management, and he talks about a daily prioritized to do list you prioritize tasks just like you do accounts. Everybody should have a To Do list. I have a To Do list. Yesterday I did something that wasnt on my To Do list --- so I wrote it on and then crossed it off.
Prioritize your list and learn to say NO! Most sales people have great difficulty saying NO. They have a disease called OKitus. They want everything to be --- OK
I want everything to be OK with my customer if things arent OK with my customer what do I need to do to make everything OK because my goal is to have everything in my life be OK!
Learn to say NO!
Here are the reasons I had to say No to your requests Mr. Customer you can get a response to your request much quicker by calling Bobby in customer service directly.
Time management is called the queen of the management sciences and the reason why they call it the queen of management sciences is that. Time management needs to be romanced salespeople need to go through a fundamental management course every 12 months. People get lost in the forest and all they see are trees. Every time I teach a time management class, I personally get more organized but in a relatively short period of time, I lose it we all lose it. We all get overcome by all these little urgent things. We lose our perspective. As a territory manager you need to know that this varies by territory, product mix and even customer mix, but there is this concept of primetime and super primetime. You take a look at when your actual selling activity occurs patterns repeat themselves. You have a month end rush its the last week of the month. Maybe there are a couple of months that are bigger than others. There are times of the day or days of the week that are much more active than others. There is a definite pattern to your territory. You need to go find it. Now as an example it could turn out that most of your selling is done early in the morning. Youre calling on contractors. So its May, which is typically your biggest month. Early in the morning in May when two of those times overlap it becomes known as super primetime. You actually talk to your inside sales people. What time of the day do the orders come in? Youll find there is a regular rhythm that you can plot you need to know what this is. Build your strategy around prime and super prime times.
CRS Management
That stands for Cant Remember Stuff! Teenagers and people over fifty have it. The rest of you are just carriers. We all get it eventually. Those of you with teenagers can relate to this. When my son was a senior in high school I asked him to cut the grass when he got home from school the following day.
No problem Dad.
When I got home from work the following day, I no ticed that the grass wasnt cut. As we all sat down at the dinner table I asked my son why he didnt cut the grass like I had asked him to. He looked at me for the longest time with that silly looking smirky grin that all seventeen year olds have mastered and he finally said;
GEE Dad----- I Forgot!
Being a baby boomer father, I kind of went off on him.
Forgot, Did I forget to put food on this table? Did I forget to put a roof over your head? Did I forget to pay the insurance on that car you drive thats sitting in the drive way?
What would happen tomorrow morning if I got up and just FORGOT to go to work?
Once again, he looked at me for the longest time with that smirky teenage grin and finally he said;
GEE Dad------- Maybe you could CUT THE GRASS!
Dr. Rick Johnson (rick@ceostrategist.com) is the founder of CEO Strategist LLC. an experienced based firm specializing in leadership for wholesale distribution. CEO Strategist LLC. works in an advisory capacity with company executives in board representation, executive coaching, team coaching and education and training to make the changes necessary to create or maintain competitive advantage. You can contact them by calling 352-750-0868, or visit http://www.ceostrategist.com for more information.
Rick received an MBA from Keller Graduate School in Chicago, Illinois and a Bachelor's degree in Operations Management from Capital University, Columbus Ohio. Rick recently completed his dissertation on Strategic Leadership and received his Ph.D. Hes also a published book author with four titles to his credit: The Toolkit for Improved Business Performance in Distribution, the NWFA & NAFCD Roadmap, Lone Wolf-Lead WolfThe Evolution of Sales and a fiction novel Shattered Innocence. Ricks next book due in November is titled; Lone Wolf LEad Wolf The Evolution of Leadership
Author:: Rick Johnson
Keywords:: sales management, territory management, time m anagement, Profit, Growth, territory performance
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