What sucks productivity and results away from your sales prospecting the most?
Time vampires.
Identify them. Eliminate them.
You get more results without working harder.
Time vampires.
They suck the sales prospecting appointments and qualified leads from you every chance they get.
You make the calls and send out your stuff, yet your activity produces a fraction of the results possible? Why? The time vampires have got you.
Unlike the creatures that “vant to suck your blood,” you are your own time vampire.
Yes you. You make the decisions and choose behaviors that move you closer (or further?) from your sales goal.
One of the cardinal rules of sales prospecting is that “everything you do, you do at the expense of something else.”
When you choose to continue chasing a low probability target because you “don’t want to give up,” that’s time that cannot be invested in identifying and converting high probability targets.
When you choose to work a group of typically low purchase volume accounts, that is time you can’t allocate to higher purchase volume accounts.
When you spend the time and dial, dial, dial and get a top decision-maker on the phone, yet are not prepared with scripts that communicate value, responses to resistance and crisp follow-up questions that turn a “dead end call”… into another meeting or another high worth prospect identified… your time vampires have got
you. You are doing all the work, yet not getting the results you should, simply because a few basic preparation steps were not done.
What a shame.
Slaying your time vampires almost always generates quantum leaps in sales productivity. Same time. More qualified prospects. More closes.
When working with sales teams or individuals I very commonly see these time vampires at work.
1. Low probability/small volume prospects are being called; high probability/higher volume prospects are waiting for calls. Time wasted.
2. Far too much time is spent “hanging on” to garbage, when there are tons of quality qualified prospects out there to get. Time wasted.
3. At the moment of truth, having done all the work and dialed, dialed, dialed… the best words, responses and questions are not spoken. So what could have been a scheduled meeting or identified worthwhile future opportunity is a “dead end go nowhere” call. Time wasted.
4. When interacting with gatekeepers, strategic interactions and key “Lieutenant Columbo Type Questions” are not asked. So you are not able to spend less time chasing non-decision makers and low prob/no prob/low volume buyers. Time wasted.
5. When calling, there are far too many tasks being done that don’t contribute to results that can be eliminated. Keystrokes made unnecessarily. “Research” that gets you nothing. Distractions allowed to creep in. Time wasted.
6. Simple coding systems are not used. This means that you are not able to make more higher probability/higher worth calls simply because you can’t call them up with a few keystrokes. Time wasted.
Driving a stake through the heart of the sales prospecting time vampires is about you being ruthlessly determined to spend your prospecting time in a high result zone.
I’d be willing to bet that most sales reps could increase their sales at least 25% if they would kill just half of their time vampires. I’m not kidding.
You don’t have to work harder.
You don’t have to prospect more.
You don’t have to improve your sales skills.
You just have to be determined to eliminate the blood sucking demons from your life.
Stop doing things that get you nowhere.
Do things that enable you to identify low prob/low volume targets.
Stop calling them.
Now more of your time can be spent in the “high results” zone.
