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Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-08: Time: The Great Equalizer of Sales
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8 Time The Great Equalizer of Sales To succeed in sales, simply talk to lots of people every day. And here’s what’s exciting—there are lots of people! —Jim Rohn At the beginning of every Fanatical Prospecting workshop, seminar, and boot camp, we ask participants to tell us their greatest sales challenge. We’ve asked the question more than 10,000 times. Eighty percent of the sales professionals and sales leaders who attend our sessions say that they struggle most with time management. “I just never seem to have enough time for prospecting with everything else I have to get done” is a constant refrain. Yes, salespeople and sales leaders are busy. Yes, sales organiza- tions are asking more of their salespeople than ever before. Yes, there are proposals to create, contracts to get approved, orders to enter into the system, calls to record in the CRM, meetings to 49
attend, and asses to kiss. For salespeople, though, most time management problems are self-inflicted. The difference between top performers and all of the other salespeople who are picking crumbs up off of the floor is top sales pros are masters at maximizing prime selling time for . . . selling. Top performers organize their day into distinct time blocks dedicated to specific activities, concentrating their focus and elim- inating distractions within those blocks. They develop outside sales territory plans that minimize drive time and inside sales plans that organize their database and resources to get the most out of each sales day. They delegate nonessential and nonselling tasks to their support teams. They are flexible, adaptive, and creative in their quest to maximize time for selling and minimize distractions that steal their commission checks. 24 The one constant for every salesperson is time. Time for prospect- ing, time for discovery, time for meetings, time for demonstrations, time for presentations, time for closing, and, unfortunately, time for administrative tasks, CRM data entry, and paperwork. Every salesperson has exactly 24 hours each day, and only a handful of these hours are available for selling. It’s how you efficiently and effectively use these “Golden Hours” that is the ultimate differ- ence between failure, average, and superstardom. When you master time, territory, and resource management, you’ll lower your stress level and make more money. This chapter is not an ad nauseam treatise on time-management tools. Time-management tools abound. From Google apps to the Outlook calendar to your CRM to the thousands of cutting-edge apps for mobile devices, there is no shortage of tools available to help you manage time, tasks, and resources. My recommendation is to find the ones that work best for you and then use them in the way 50 Fanatical Prospecting
that works best for you. You’ll find an updated list of time and territory management tools at FanaticalProspecting.com. My primary objective is to generate awareness for how critical time management is to your success and income and, help you shift your mindset about how you schedule and manage time for pros- pecting and other sales activities. I want you to take an honest look at theconsequences ofthechoicesyou aremaking aboutwhereandhow to spend your time and how those choices may be holding you back. Adopt a CEO Mindset The CEO mindset is the most critical component of time, territory, and resource management. Unless and until you are willing to accept complete responsibility for owning your time, nothing else matters. When you adopt a CEO mindset, you choose to see yourself as the CEO of You, Inc. For dramatic effect, I ask the salespeople in our Fanatical Prospecting Boot Camps to take out their business card, scratch out whatever title is on it, and write in CEO. It’s a little corny, but it drives home the point that in sales you control your own destiny. This is the very reason that I love sales so much. CEOs are ultimately responsible for the results of their organi- zation. They can’t push blame off on anyone else. They are expected to deliver and the buck stops with them. However, CEOs have constraints because resources are scarce. The CEO is tasked with generating the highest return on investment possible with the scarce resources available to them. Likewise, in sales, you are constrained by scare resources. Your job is to generate the highest ROI possible for your company and the largest possible commission outcome for yourself with those scarce resources. And your scarcest resource is time. Fanatical prospectors adopt a CEO mindset. They believe that they and they alone are accountable for their own success or failure. Time 51
They take complete responsibility and accountability for managing their time, territory, prospect database (CRM), and resources. As the CEO of their own selling company, they do not allow anything to intrude on the Golden Hours and they are diligent and disciplined with how and where they spend their time. They are also aware that they don’t live in a perfect world. No matter how much you plan and how disciplined you are with your time, prospects, customers, the boss, and sometimes life will throw you curve balls. The true test of CEOs in the business world is their ability to find creative solutions to inevitable road- blocks. Likewise, fanatical prospectors do not allow unexpected obstacles to slow them down. They do not blame others. They do not make excuses. Instead, when faced with roadblocks, distractions, and surprises, they adapt and find creative solutions that allow them to work around problems while they continue to fill the pipe. Protect the Golden Hours The single biggest challenge for salespeople is keeping nonrevenue- generating activities from interfering with the Golden Hours. It’s a challenge for many reasons: ■ There will always be clients, managers, and peers who will make requests of you that are nonsales activities but require your attention. ■ When your prospecting activity levels are high, you will naturally generate more follow-up tasks like demos, presenta- tions, proposals, CRM data entry, contacts, approval requests, implementations, follow-up calls, inbound calls, and so on. ■ Doing nonsales activity feels important—like you are getting things done. ■ Nonsales activity is the perfect excuse to avoid the hard work of prospecting. This is the core reason salespeople dig holes for themselves. Busy work becomes an excuse for not prospecting. 52 Fanatical Prospecting
Let me make this crystal clear. Salespeople get paid to sell. Period. End of story. Whine and complain about all the stuff you’ve got to do if you like, but it will not change the fact that your job is to be interacting with qualified prospects during the Golden Hours and moving them into and through the pipeline. Therefore, if you are a salesperson and you are not doing things that are directly related to selling during the Golden Hours, then you are not doing your job. I’ve heard the same BS excuses a million times: ■ “Wait a minute, Jeb, what about all of those things my manager or customers need me to do? When am I supposed to get it all done?” ■ “If the company didn’t put so much on me, I might have time to actually sell something [eyes rolling—sarcastic tone].” ■ “What about my work-life balance? I don’t get paid to do this stuff after work. I’ve got a family, dog, golf game, friends, stuff I’ve got to do!” Here are your choices: Delude yourself. You can continue along the same track, deluding yourself that doing busy work during the Golden Hours is actual sales work, but you cannot be delusional and successful at the same time. Just say no. One of the most effective ways to unload nonsales activity is to just say no. You don’t have to take on or do everything that others bring to you. Whenever someone brings a task to you that has the potential to derail your Golden Hours and it is not mission critical—say no. This won’t be easy. However, if you consistently create reasonable boundaries, it won’t take long for others to get the message. Prioritize. Get your priorities straight. I have never known of a salesperson who was consistently hitting her numbers and got fired for not getting nonsales administrative tasks done. Harassed, maybe, but fired—never. On the other hand tens of thousands of salespeople get canned for not making their number. Not Time 53
everything is a priority,and in some cases, this meansthat there are tasks that may not get done. That’s okay. Keep the pipe full and get the deals closed and no one will ever remember. Do important nonsales activities before or after the Golden Hours. There will always be nonselling activities that you must do to be successful in your job. Proposals, pre-call preparation, contracts, orders, reports, and CRM data entry are all important, but they are not sales activity. Do these things before and after prime selling time—in the Platinum Hours. Yes, I already know the excuses: “But Jeb, I’ve got a family, a life . . . things to do.” Here’s the deal. In sales time is money and the money is in the Golden Hours. If you want to make more money, you will have to make some sacrifices. If you want to maximize your income, you will need to get up early, go to bed late, and do some work on weekends to ensure that you don’t waste your Golden Hours on nonsales activities. Delegate. One of the most effective things you can do with nonsales-related tasks is to delegate them. Leverage your support staff to the fullest. In every organization, there are people assigned to solve specific problems and get stuff done. If you don’t know who these people are, ask questions and keep asking until you find out. Sometimes these people are assigned to help you on a formal basis and sometimes there is an informal system. If you don’t have sales support available, consider hiring some- one to help you. You can hire someone locally or easily find virtual assistants who will work for you, on demand, by the hour. If you are an independent sales rep like a real estate broker, financial advisor, or insurance agent, getting an assistant is a smart move. Top sales pros fiercely protect the Golden Hours. They say no a lot. When a fellow rep stops by to chat them up about the weekend or bellyache about a recent policy change, they do not engage. When managers and corporate staff attempt to dump busy work on them, they push back. The best reps put “Do not disturb” signs on their doors when they are on prospecting blocks to keep distractors at bay. Your daily mission is simple: Squeeze as much out of the Golden Hours as possible by managing that time wisely. If you 54 Fanatical Prospecting
are not prospecting, qualifying, information gathering, presenting, or closing during Golden Hours, you are hurting your career and your income and you are not doing your job. The Fine Art of Delegation Delegating is how you scale yourself. It is how you get more done with the same 24 hours. However, delegating also requires you to have to let go of control and trust other people. The desire to control everything that is happening with their customers and accounts is how many salespeople get themselves into trouble and cause themselves immeasurable stress. They made prom- ises to their customers and they want to control the outcomes. I get that. The problem is they cannot scale themselves and eventually stop prospecting because they are bogged down with nonsales activity that others could do. You can only scale when you tap into the talents of others to accomplish more. Effective delegation begins with effective communication. Sales- people create havoc and communication breakdowns when they fail to give clear instructions to their support team. Then, when mistakes are made, these same salespeople throw their hands in the air and proclaim, “If you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Your support staff cannot read your mind. When you take time, in advance, to develop a plan, articulate clear instructions, make sure everyone knows where they are going and have a map to get there, you’ll find that you add hours back to your sales week. It may seem tedious in the moment but the discipline to slow down and do things right up front will actually allow you to speed up. Follow up, follow up, follow up. Once you have delegated a task to your support team, you must provide consistent and ongoing communication and follow up. One of my favorite sayings is “In God we trust; everyone else, we follow up on.” If you fail to systematically follow up on tasks you have delegated, you’ll find Time 55
yourself scrambling at the last moment because critical tasks were left undone or incomplete. Invest in building relationships with your support staff. I’ve always been appalled at salespeople who treat their support teams with indifference and disrespect. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “3 Behaviors that Drive Successful Salespeople,” Ryan Fuller cites a compelling VoloMetrix study that indicated a direct correla- tion between success in sales and the salesperson’s investment in building a strong internal support system and network.1 Never forget that the people on your support staff are human—just like you. Show them you care, listen, give them the same respect that you expect in return, and, above all, say thank you. Blocking Your Time Will Transform Your Career The sales VP was desperate for a solution. His sales team was behind on their number and things were not getting better. I spent a day on- site observing his sales team, going through the pipeline, and analyzing the activity numbers. It was shocking. The standard for each rep was 50 teleprospecting dials each day, with the goal to set three discovery appointments. I analyzed the call data for the previous 90 days. On average, each rep was making less than half of the required dials and setting only two appointments a week. Think about this for a moment. This is an inside sales team. Their entire day is dedicated to setting appointments with prospects over the phone and they were barely averaging two prospecting calls an hour. The lack of prospecting activity was putting the entire company at risk. When I pulled the sales team together and confronted them with the numbers, there were excuses—lots of excuses. “You don’t understand, Jeb! We’ve got so many other things to do—meetings, following up on deals in the pipe, admin work. The CRM is clunky, the coffee is decaffeinated, it takes so long to send voice mail, people 56 Fanatical Prospecting
don’t answer their phones in the morning, afternoon, Wednesdays, or during full moons . . .” and on and on. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I’d heard it all before. So, I pointed out the fact that the pipeline was empty and asked how they could be spending so much time on follow up calls and admin when, essentially, there was nothing to follow up on. They stared back at me. The room got cold. Before they could launch into more excuses, I gave them 10 minutes to go to their offices and pull together a list of 50 prospects and meet me back in the training room when they were done. Ten minutes later, with lists in hand, I gave them 30 minutes to call 25 prospects with a goal of setting two discovery appointments. The stunned look on their faces told the whole story. They fidgeted in their seats and stared at their phones. Two people said they felt better calling in their office. I wasn’t budging. No more excuses. So with a little more prodding, they got down to work. Thirty minutes later, on average, each rep had made 22 dials and set at least one appointment. More dials and appointments than they’d been making in an entire eight-hour day. After some additional training and coaching, they were averaging 29 dials in 30 minutes and setting two appointments. I had their attention. The salespeople were shaking their heads, saying that they had no idea it was possible to get that much done in such a short period of time. The VP of sales and his CEO were blown away. They couldn’t believe what we accomplished in such a short period of time. All I had done though was leverage the Horstman’s Corollary to Parkinson’s Law. Horstman’s Corollary Parkinson’s Law states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. Horstman’s Corollary is the converse. It describes Time 57
how work contracts to fit into the time allowed. I simply changed the paradigm the reps were working under—instead of giving them an entire day to make their prospecting calls, I gave them 30 minutes. I repeat this exercise with salespeople within organizations across the globe, and the results are always the same. Salespeople and leaders are absolutely stunned at how much they get done when they block their time, focus on a single activity, and set an outcome goal for that activity. Time blocking is transformational for salespeople. It changes everything. When you get disciplined at blocking your time and concentrating your power, you see a massive and profound impact on your productivity. You become incredibly efficient when you block your day into short chunks of time for specific activities. You get more accomplished in a shorter time with far better results. For example, the average Sales Gravy inside sales rep makes around 120 outbound prospecting calls a day selling employment advertising to companies that are hiring salespeople. To most people, thatseemslikeahugenumberofcalls,anditis.Butwhatreallycausesa double take is when they learn that we do this in just three hours. Which leaves plenty of time for updating the CRM, building presentations, making follow-up calls, creating proposals, closing deals, and cross-selling existing customers. We schedule our prospecting blocks into three “Power Hours” that are spread across the day—morning, midday, and afternoon. During Power Hours we do nothing but make teleprospecting calls. We stay off of e-mail and remove all other distractions. We don’t do research, allow ourselves to get sucked into CRM management, drift off into social media sites, or accept any excuses. We don’t take breaks to get coffee or go to the restroom. We minimize the downtime between calls by having our targeted call lists prepared and researched in advance (Platinum Hour work). We take notes during the block and wait until after the block concludes to log our calls and update the CRM—time that is 58 Fanatical Prospecting
blocked specifically for CRM activity. We also schedule blocks for e-mail and social prospecting. Don’t get me wrong. It is intense, draining, rejection-dense work. We make calls as fast as we possibly can. However, Power Hours work brilliantly for two reasons:
- Our work contracts to fit the time allotted, so we get more done in less time.
- Anybody can stay focused for an hour. The good news is most salespeople can set all of the appoint- ments they need to keep their pipeline packed with new opportu- nities in an hour or two each day when that activity is concentrated into set prospecting blocks. If you invest just an hour a day to make 25 to 50 teleprospecting calls and another hour for e-mail and social prospecting, I can absolutely and unequivocally guarantee that in less than 60 days, your pipeline will be packed. Stick to Your Guns Let’s suppose that you had an appointment with a hot prospect to do an online demo and presentation. You’d been calling this customer foralmosttwomonthstogettheappointment.Itisonyourcustomer’s calendar and she is expecting you to be on the conference line at 9:00 AM. At 8:50 AM one of your fellow reps comes by your desk and says he’s going out to get coffee and wants to know if you want to go. Would you? Would you just walk out the door and blow off that meeting? Of course not! That would be completely irresponsible and stupid. You would tell your peer that you have an important appointment and that you can’t go. Prospecting blocks should be scheduled or “blocked” on your calendar like any other commitment. They are appointments with yourself. The key to making prospecting blocks work is to treat them as sacred—in the same manner you view a set meeting with a Time 59
customer, prospect, your boss, or an important event with your family. When it comes to time blocking, you’ve got to stick to your guns. Let nothing or no one—not even yourself—interfere with or steal that time. Many of the sales professionals who go through our courses hang signs on their doors to warn others to leave them alone while they are on their phone blocks. (Get your own “Do Not Disturb” door hanger at FanaticalProspecting.com.) It is discipline, pure and simple. You, above all others, must hold yourself accountable to schedule your prospecting blocks and keep them sacred. No one else but you can do that. Concentrate Your Power What makes prospecting blocks so productive is the concentration of all of your power on a single focus. Of course this flies right in the face of a culture that has elevated the multitasker to mythical status. Perhaps you’re the kind of person who believes you can multi- task.Youcan fieldtextmessagesfromyourmom,scan yourFacebook feed, take calls from existing customers, answer e-mails, and dig through your CRM to research each prospect, all while you are making prospecting calls. You pride yourself on being a multitasker and even brag about your ability to do so many things at the same time. Here’s the truth: You suck at it! Basic neuroscience refutes the delusional human belief that we are good at multitasking. Our brains don’t actually multitask. Instead, when we are working on more than one thing at a time, our brain cycles back and forth between those things. It does this so fast that we have the illusion of multitasking. Which is why we suck at it. Your brain was not made to multitask. Sure, it was designed to operate in complex environments and process multiple streams of 60 Fanatical Prospecting
data at once. You can cook dinner and watch TV at the same time, drive and talk. But your brain was not made to talk, walk, rub your belly, and chew gum. You simply cannot do multiple tasks all at one time and do them well. When you have too many things going on at once (especially complex tasks), your brain begins to bog down and you start slowing down. It is no different from what happens when you have too many complex programs running at the same time on your com- puter. At some point the processor can’t handle it and it begins running slower and slower. Be honest. You know you’ve banged into another person or almost been mowed down by a bus while you were staring at your phone screen texting. You know you’ve escaped death more than once while applying lipstick, talking on the phone, or checking e-mail while you were driving your car. Most salespeople I work with believe that multitasking is what they are supposed to be doing. They make a call, log it into their CRM, research the next prospect through a web or social query, answer an e-mail from the boss, take calls from customers, monitor social media streams, send LinkedIn InMail, send a prospecting e-mail, send text messages, instant message their peers . . . When I point out that with all of this going on, it took them an hour to make four prospecting calls, they stare back in disbelief. “No,” they’ll explain, “I made way more than that.” Delusion brought on by multitasking. You secretly know you suck at multitasking, so why not just admit it? That makes it so much easier to see the truth about your prospecting blocks: You are making maybe one prospecting touch every three to five minutes because you’ve got so many things going on at once. Prospecting efficiency decreases in direct proportion to the number of things you are attempting to do at one time. Recently I was working with a group of commercial insurance sales reps who were averaging seven telephone prospecting dials during a one-hour phone block. That’s eight and a half minutes per Time 61
dial. It wasn’t like they were sitting around doing nothing. They were busy, busy, busy multitasking. Yet they were barely making enough calls to keep the lights on and feed their families. The next day they averaged 47 dials an hour. What changed? It was a simple concentration of power. ■ Rather than focusing on multiple tasks at one time, they focused on one: Dial the phone. ■ Instead of logging the result of each call into their CRM at the time of the call, they created a list in advance and made their notes on the list. They blocked 30 minutes after the call block to log everything in. ■ Mobile devices were turned off and placed into drawers. ■ E-mail was turned off. ■ Signs were placed on doors alerting others that they were in a phone block. ■ Research was done and call objectives set prior to the phone block. The result was both efficiency and effectiveness. Performance improved exponentially—more prospects were qualified, more appointments were booked, and more new opportunities were dropped into the pipe. With all their prospecting calls for the day knocked out in just an hour, they were able to concentrate their poweronotheractivityblockslike leadgeneration,socialselling, outbound e-mail prospecting, discovery meetings, proposals, and closing. Beware of the Ding Laura abandoned the prospecting call she was about to make, looked down, and reached for her phone. The sound it had just made compelled her to check it. Two text messages, a Facebook post, and a YouTube video later, she finally shifted her attention back to her 62 Fanatical Prospecting
prospecting list but couldn’t remember where she’d left off. Seven minutes had gone by since she’d looked down at her phone. She was oblivious. During the two hours I observed her, she’d lost her focus more than 11 times. When e-mails came in, her computer would ding and she’d stop and look at each one—sometimes for a moment, and twice she stopped completely to fret and respond. When her two-hour prospecting block ended, she’d achieved just a fraction of her activity target. Then (I can’t make this stuff up) she turned to me and said, “See, these call targets they give us are ridiculously unreasonable. There is no way anybody can possibly make that many calls.” The two biggest prospecting derailers for sales professionals are e-mail and mobile devices (text, social media, e-mail, web surfing, apps). When something new hits your inbox or social stream—ding, buzz, lights, action! Like clockwork, your concentration shifts to e-mail or a smartphone. Twenty minutes later, you find yourself watching a video of a chimpanzee riding a giraffe around a circus tent and can’t remember how you got there. Making things worse is the addictive nature of our mobile devices. The average person looks at their phone screen every seven minutes. Look down—ding—and just like that, you get sucked in. Even as I write this paragraph my iPhone is calling to me. I put it in another room so I’d stay focused on my writing block, but I miss it! You cannot be efficient when you are constantly being dis- tracted. Besides the distraction itself, it takes time to remember where you left off before you were distracted. This is why time blocking and concentrating your power inside those prospecting blocks will make you so much more productive. Placing your attention on one thing at a time is the key. This means that during prospecting blocks or building proposal blocks or follow-upcall blocksorwhateverblock you are in,you need to turn everything else off. Schedule alternate time blocks for dealing with e-mail, watching cat videos, or hanging out on Facebook. Time 63
What Lurks in Your Inbox Can and Will Derail Your Sales Day Anthony Iannarino, author of The Sales Blog, advises salespeople not to check e-mail first thing in the morning. Maybe “advises” is a little weak. He’s passionate about it and calls it prospecting rule number one.2 Most salespeople have a really hard time getting started with prospecting each morning. There are dozens of convenient distrac- tions. Iannarino says that one of the best ways to “avoid these distractions is to never check your e-mail first thing in the morning.” E-mail is the great time-sucker of the twenty-first century. It is an always-on stream of consciousness. It follows you everywhere (on your phone, tablet, laptop, and now trains, planes, and auto- mobiles) and demands your attention. E-mail is the derailer of all derailers. The time-sucker of all time-suckers. If you are itching for a few unproductive hours that you will never get back, just open up e-mail and dive in. In our always-on society, e-mail has become an addiction. We feel compelled to check it, file it, manage it, rate it, flag it, spam it, and respond to it immediately. We delude ourselves into believing that if we don’t jump right on it we’ll be judged as nonresponsive or worse. Consider this: When you are with a customer, do you interrupt them with a “Hey, could you hold a second? Mary over in billing just sent me an e-mail. It’s nonsense but I need to answer her.” Do you leave your phone or laptop sitting on their desk dinging and beeping while you are in the middle of a sales conversation? Sound ridiculous? Of course it does. Yet we’ll interrupt a prospecting block (an appointment with ourselves) to answer trivial e-mails that can easily wait for an hour—or never—to be answered. If you were to get up early with me, grab a cup of coffee, and sit in sales offices observing salespeople in the wild (sort of like one of those Discovery channel nature films with the Australian narrator), you’d 64 Fanatical Prospecting
see salespeople walk through the door in the morning, sit down at their desk, take a sip of coffee, and dive headlong into e-mail. “Look closer, at the sales rep’sintense concentrationonher inbox,” says the narrator with the Australian accent. “Just a click here and a response there. Respond to the boss. Fire off a nasty e-mail to accounting. Oh boy, we’ve got a customer service issue. Well, you know how it is: ‘If you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.’ Check on an order status, read a newsletter, read a personnel announce- mentfromHR—oh,thatlookslikeaninterestinglink.Threehourslater our well-intentioned sales rep is mired down and getting nowhere.” When you open e-mail first thing in the morning, there is almost never good news. That big client you’ve been trying to close didn’t suddenly come to her senses at 2:00 AM and send over a note telling you that you have the deal. Nope. You’ve got four messages from your boss giving you nonsales busy work to do; an e-mail from HR telling you that you have not completed the compulsory compliance training on the company intranet; a handful of clients asking questions about when they will get their orders; one livid customer who wants you to stop your world and call them because they called customer service at 4:00 AM and no one was there; and 72 CYA, FYI, BTW, and OMG e-mails that require no action. But you feel compelled to respond immediately to all of them just so people will know that you are still breathing. Blocking out the first one to two hours of each day for a focused telephone prospecting block is the mark of fanatical prospectors. This is why Anthony is so passionate about moving e-mail to a later time in your day. He explains that “once you open yourself to the demands of the outside world, it is very difficult to bring your full attention and focus to the most important tasks you need to complete each day and the most important task you need to complete each day is prospecting.” “But Jeb, what if one of the e-mails is important? What should I do then? You know it is bad to ignore a client.” This is one of my Time 65
favorite whines from salespeople who are unwilling to face the truth about e-mail. Of course, some e-mails are going to be important. But important does not mean urgent. You will rarely get an urgent e-mail first thing in the morning, and if you do, Anthony says it best: “If something is really important, they will call or text you on your mobile phone—not just send an e-mail.” Take care of your prospecting block first, then manage e-mail. Leverage the Platinum Hours During the Golden Hours, time is money. Literally. To maximize sales productivity and your income, your total focus must be on prospecting and customer engagement activities. That, of course, means that there will be a number of tasks that will have to wait until before or after the Golden Hours. We call these periods the Platinum Hours. Top-earning sales pros set aside time early each morning or late each afternoon to attack important nonselling activities before the demands of the sales day kick in or after they’ve been addressed. They use the Platinum Hours for: ■ Building prospecting lists ■ Research ■ Precall planning ■ Developing proposals and presentations ■ Creating contracts and getting approval ■ Social selling activities ■ E-mail prospecting ■ Prospect research and call objective planning ■ Planning and organization ■ Administration and reports ■ Responding to e-mail ■ Calendar management ■ CRM management 66 Fanatical Prospecting
The objective of the Platinum Hours is to set up your sales day so that all of your focus can be spent on high-value selling activities. Measure Your Worth When I was in my twenties, I worked for an entrepreneur. The man was worth millions and ran several successful companies. He was also a hands-on leader who for some reason took an interest in me. Because of this, I had the chance to spend time with him whenever he traveled in to visit my location. One day over lunch, he asked me what I did on the two days I’d taken off the week before. I was blown away that he would even know that. He had several thousand people working in his com- pany. But that was Phil. He knew everything. I explained that I’d done some home repairs. I proudly told him (and I was proud of my accomplishment) how I had learned new plumbing and electric skills and made the repairs on my own. He leaned forward and asked, “How many hours did it take you to do that work, including going back and forth to the hardware store to get and exchange parts?” I replied that it had taken up most of the two days. “But it didn’t beat me,” I exclaimed. “I got the job done!” “So about how many hours do you think it actually took you?” he asked. I thought about it and said, “I’d guess about 12 in all.” “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “How long do you think it would have taken a skilled plumber or electrician to do that same work?” “I don’t know—probably a couple of hours. It was pretty simple stuff. I’m just not good at things like that, so it took me longer. Nothing’s ever easy.” I said sarcastically. “Well, why didn’t you just hire a specialist to do the work?” he asked. Time 67
“Plumbers are so expensive,” I said. “Why pay them when I can do it myself?” “How expensive?” “The ones I called quoted $150 for the repair. That’s way too much for something that simple!” He pulled out a pen and paper and said, “All right, why don’t we do some math. You’re one of our top people. How much do you think you’ll earn this year with your base and commissions?” I thought about it for a moment, doing the math in my head. “Probably around $75,000.” “How many weeks a year do you actually work at selling?” “52,” I shot back. “Not so fast.” He shook his head. “You’ve got some vacation time, meetings, holidays, and you might even be out sick, so you are not going to be selling every week, are you?” “Well, no, not exactly.” “Okay, so how many weeks will you actually be working?” “When you look at it that way, maybe . . . 48?” “Yep,” he replied. “That sounds about right. And how many hours a day are you actually available for sales activities?” With trepidation I answered, “I guess six or seven?” “That’s true when you take out lunch and breaks.” “So let’s do the math: 6 hours a day times 5 days is 30 hours of selling time; $75,000 divided by 48 is $1,563 divided by 30 equals $52 an hour.” He let that sink in for a moment before going on. “So you are worth $52 an hour when you are working. The repairs you did on your days off took you 12 hours. You did them yourself because you felt paying $150 was too expensive. But based on your math, it cost you $624 to do them yourself—had you been at the office selling rather than at home pretending to be a plumber. Don’t you think your time would have been more wisely spent selling? Can you see why paying a specialist $150 was actually a bargain?” 68 Fanatical Prospecting
I had no response. I’d never looked at things that way. He went on to explain that most people don’t take the time to calculate their worth, and because they don’t understand what they are worth, they spend their time on activities that are far below their pay grade, and this holds them back. It was one of the most poignant lessons I ever learned and one I have never forgotten. Know your worth. When you know what you are worth, you become acutely aware of the damage that doing $10-an-hour work (like data entry) during $50-an-hour prime selling time has on your income. The Law of Triviality describes the human tendency to waste time on unimportant activities while mission-critical tasks are ignored. It’s why so many salespeople allow nonselling activities to become an excuse for their failure to focus on selling activities. It’s not uncommon for salespeople to waste 50 percent or more of their time on low-value activities. Understanding what you are worth helps you gain awareness of the cost of focusing on trivial things. Getting a bead on your worth is easy to do. Just take your annual income goal and divide it by the total number of Golden Hours in each year and you’ll find what you are worth per hour. AnnualIncomeGoal= Number of WorkingWeeks GoldenHours What You AreWorth an Hour Use this per-hour number as a gauge to determine whether a given task, activity, or assignment is moving you toward your goals or away from them. When you take time to gain a clear understanding of what each Golden Hour is worth, you will make far better decisions about how to spend your time. Effective time management is about the choices you make. The bottom line is you’ve got roughly eight Golden Hours each day to sell and make a living, and you have a choice. You can either dawdle those hours away doing things that don’t make you Time 69
money, whining that “they” give you too much paperwork, there’s too much reporting, admin, traffic, bad prospects, or whatever lame excuse you are using that day to justify that fact that you are wasting it. Or, you can plan effectively, block your time, and stick to your guns when others try to corrupt, interrupt, or usurp your time for their use. 70 Fanatical Prospecting