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One of the worst habits to get into is becoming a Task Salesperson. A Task Salesperson loses sight of their sales goals and sales skills. They primarily focus on the mechanics of sales. This can happen to us without even knowing it.

I used to observe two polar-opposite sales representatives. One of them was incredibly well organized, a hurricane of activity and was under budget every month. It looked like he had everything under control but in reality needed a lot of sales help. The other one sat in a garbage dump cubicle reading her favorite sales blog, always seemed relaxed and blew out her sales budget every month. What was going on here? One of them was most likely focusing on the mechanics and tasks of sales while the other was focusing on the true goal of sales…developing relationships with customers.

“Be careful not to be a slave of what doesn’t matter in sales.”

Giving sales tasks too much priority will keep us busy but normally doesn’t make us a sales leader.

Task Salespersons have these habits:

-Respond to every proposal and lead that is sent their direction
-Spend three days on a proposal that could be done in four hours
-Contact 100 prospects each day regardless of the quality of the leads
-Spend a minimum of two hours preparing for each customer appointment
-Spend 90% of their time on administrative functions
-Their sales manager loves the quality and penmanship of their required sales reports
-Never seeks sales tips from his or her peers and refuses all sales help

Goal Oriented Salespersons have these habits:

-Ensure they have a relationship with a company before investing time in them
-Are always prospecting but primarily to referrals and other qualified leads
-Do only mandatory administrative duties that aren’t directly related to sales
-Are always getting screamed at by their sales manager for past due sales reports
-Relationships are first, administrative perfection is number two
-Are consistently hitting and exceeding their sales objectives
-Welcome any and all sales advice and are open to any sales tip given to them

Remember, no sales representative is ever paid more or promoted simply for their administrative abilities. Be careful not to be a slave of what doesn’t matter in sales. What matters is customer relationships.

Related links: Your Personality is What the Customers Wants to See, Free Sales Tips: Don’t lose sight of this when selling, The Attributes of an Unsuccessful Salesperson

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Allow me to introduce you to a tried and true warehouse operations technique that can also work beautifully in sales.

Have you ever heard the term Cycle Inventory or Perpetual Inventory? It’s a concept used by companies that have a large warehouse of goods that require a high degree of inventory accuracy.

Let’s say a company has 25,000 items that they stock in inventory. Instead of doing the inventory all at once they break it up into pieces and do a little each day.

If they wanted to inventory their entire warehouse every six months they would only need to inventory 192 items per day using this technique. They make it a manageable task.

Prospecting is no different. If we Cycle Prospect or Perpetual Prospect we can take a time consuming and challenging chore and break it into much smaller pieces. At the end of a month, quarter or year we can achieve some remarkable numbers without ever having to binge prospect.

Here are the steps to make this happen:

1. Calculate how many new customers we want to add in a month.
2. Calculate what our personal closing average is (i.e., for every 100 prospects we contact how many turn into customers?).
3. Divide the number of new customers desired by our closing average.
4. Take this number and divide by 22 (the average number of work days in a month).
5. This number represents how many prospects we need to contact each work day in order to achieve our new customer goals for the month.

Example:

Jill wants to add five new customers each month and her closing average is 10%. She takes the number of desired new customers (five) and divides by her closing average (.10) and the result is 50. Next she’ll divide 50 by 22 to see how many prospects she’ll need to contact each work day, and the result is 2.3. By contacting just 2.3 prospects each day Jill can realistically expect to add five new customers a month.

With discipline and time this technique can break down a sales chore into reasonable chunks and yield nice long term returns.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

As the number of subscribers increases for Sales Vitamins™ I am in the fortunate position of receiving many reader questions submitted from the Contact Me page. For today’s post I’d like to answer a question that was submitted to me by Richard F. of Denver, Colorado, with his permission.

“I like reading your blog and many in our office are regular readers. Why do you make such a big deal about prospecting? I’ve been with my company for about a year and am meeting my sales objectives most of the time without doing any prospecting. Why should I care about prospecting?”

Richard,

There are primarily four reasons that we prospect and I think all of them could be applicable to your situation.

1. We prospect because we lose customers. It’s inevitable. No matter how good we are, we will, over time, lose all of our customers for one reason or another. Since you have only been at your employer for a year you most likely haven’t seen significant customer fallout yet. Now is the time to start planting seeds to replace those customers that will ultimately start to wither and die.

2. We prospect to replace bad customers. We only have a limited number of hours in a day. Why would we want to budget our time around customers that are high maintenance, buy little and pay slowly? When we find better customers through prospecting we become more efficient selling machines by using high quality new customers to replace existing bad ones.

3. We prospect because order-takers make less income than consultative sales professionals. If all we do is process orders, we aren’t particularly valuable to our employers. Order taking is a bad habit we don’t want to get too comfortable with either.

4. We prospect to bring in new business in order to increase our sales and therefore increase our personal earnings (commissions). It appears that there might be some periods when you don’t hit your sales quota. Finding new business could help you hit your target more often and increase your income.

Thank you for your question, Richard. I’ve never seen a superstar salesperson that was successful over an extended period because of their order-taking capabilities. They did it because they had well developed sales skills and they were always looking for better customers to either add to their book of accounts or to replace undesirable customers.

Scott

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

There were many times as an inexperienced salesperson that I got a little overwhelmed with the fast paced decisions that I needed to make in order to effectively manage my accounts. Should I call on customer A? Should I propose a certain product to customer B? Do I need to go to the home office and expedite an order?

I struggled with this until I received some stellar sales advice from Bob, who was the Vice President of Sales at the company I was working for at the time. He was very happy with my sales results but knew that I was struggling with how to prioritize my sales activities.

He told me, “Son, you’d make life a lot easier on yourself if you focused on the needs of the people that will make you the most money in the long run.”

What a great piece of advice that I use to this day. It’s great advice because in one sentence it hits all the important aspects of sales planning:

1. Focus on customers, not tasks.
2. Prioritize your activities according to the expected monetary return.
3. Take a long term view of things; don’t let short term crises get in the way of long term strategies.
4. Make sure you take care of those people that support you in the home office.

As sales professionals we are expected to simultaneously manage an account base, look for new opportunities and keep up with the administrative side of things. It can be overwhelming. When you need direction as to which way to turn, remember Bob’s words of wisdom. He was a smart guy.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Summary: Sticking with bad sales habits will ultimately cause you to have poor sales results.

In sales training and coaching you often hear “shoulds.” “You should make more calls. I think you should start earlier in the morning. We feel that you should call on more customers per day.” People basically “should” all over you. I’m somewhat of an expert on the items that follow because I have been guilty of all of them. This is a list of things that will cause your sales results to suffer. These are the opposite of “shoulds;” these are things you want to avoid while simultaneously replacing them with more positive behaviors.

Calling only on customers. Error in thinking: You erroneously believe that your customers will stay with you forever and there is no need to grow your sales by prospecting. All customers will eventually leave the fold for one reason or another and all companies want their salespeople to grow revenue.

Ignoring customer relationships and focusing exclusively on being a good order processor/taker. Error in thinking: The reason you are getting orders from a customer is largely a result of the relationship you and your company have with that customer. Ignore this long enough and the customer will divorce you. If you’re just a warm blooded version of e-commerce why does the customer need you?

Dominating customer interactions and doing all the talking. Error in thinking: The biggest single complaint about salespeople is that they don’t listen. Asking open ended questions and then listening will not only help bust this stereotype but will get you needed information and build the customer relationship.

Keeping all of your customer information “in your head.” Error in thinking: Even Einstein had to take notes. Quit deluding yourself; you’re not able to keep track of all the information you need about your customers and prospects from memory. This is just a lazy copout. Ever have a waiter or waitress not write down your order and then get it wrong? Didn’t make you too happy did it?

Working only part of the day. Error in thinking: You incorrectly think that your superior sales skills will carry the day for you; there is no need to work a full day every day. Besides, you’re in sales; you’re expected not to work a full day. Here’s where this will nail you every time and it’s a slippery slope. You start out working ten hour days, then nine hour days, seven hour days, five hour days and before long you’re barely getting out of your pajamas. Your sales results will show it.

Believe me, there are more ways than this to grenade your sales career. I should know; I’ve done all of them. These five are some of the most prevalent. We have a tendency to think that we can get away with these things without consequence, but these bad habits will ultimately nab you.

If you’re not already a subscriber, click here (salesvitamins.com) to subscribe and automatically receive Sales Vitamins™ as new posts become available. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer