sales exchange

Your Timing Is Great

There is a lot of talk in sales about timing, some write about how to improve it, some talk about how you can be a victim of it, others will tell you how to manage it.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that we too believe that time is one of the key elements of success in sales. What we don’t believe in is the notion of “time management”.  In many ways it is a hollow and worn out concept that at best distracts sales professional, and at worst frustrates them. After all isn’t time already managed for us, nicely organized across borders and languages is units of 60, assembled in cartons of 24, stacked in piles of 7, those then placed in crates of 52, loaded into 12 trailers. Sound pretty organized and well managed to me, a German logistics company couldn’t improve on it, so don’t waste time on time management.

With time, the focus needs to be on usage;  if you want to manage something, manage your activities, manage the urge to multi task, and instead focus on managing to get something done, multi tasking will only help you not get a number of things done at the same time. Now that’s not to say that you can’t use systems, processes and tools (applications) to help you get things done even as you are doing something else, or to keep you on track when you need to do that “one thing” at the right time.

Case in point is the time allocated and spent on managing your leads funnels.  Next to active prospects, leads in your leads funnel are probably the most important thing for many sales people. I’d much rather spend energy managing my leads than trying to manage time, and to do that I use Renbor’s Contact Strategy: Touch > Contact > Engage . A simple process for Touching, Tracking, Contacting leads and converting them to prospects on a consistent basis.  Doing this consistently and properly will not only help you reduce the need to constantly cold call by having a funnel full of people brewing to become prospects, but as they move down the lead funnel, you will have an easier time converting them.

As an example, I have been pursuing a company for some time, I first called the VP of Sales back in April of 2007, and after a good conversation it was clear to both of us that it was not the right time to engage.  We have stayed in touch regularly, met at industry events, and he has always been open and forthright about their situation.  Needless to say he has been reading our monthly newsletter.  Their industry has been hit severely by the economy and the rising Canadian dollar, and we have had a few discussions specifically about that impact.  When we spoke in September he indicated that there was an initiative looking at training across the company and suggested I get in touch with the person spearheading the initiative.

When I called that person the conversation went something like this:

TS: Hi John, Max Sales suggested we speak, as he is aware of the work, we do with B2B sales forces in helping them attain their goals.

John: Well Tibor, I must say your timing is great,….

TS: Actually John, timing had little to do with it…

Indeed it didn’t, it had much more to do with the process, the execution, and allocating time to getting it done.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto