It's not much fun

“My salespeople are wasteful, tired, and stressed”

Ouch!

Let’s understand why and think about solutions

🟠 Orange Hat Thinking 🟠

❌ Wasteful

When people are being wasteful they're chucking away our most precious resource - time

Loads of people will do stuff that's trivial

Why?

Because it's easy and it’s fun

It's when people are not doing thoughtful activity

They're not spending time thinking

Salespeople will lose the best opportunities and get wasteful because they're not making an impact with customers

❌ Tiring

What happens then?

They chase success by putting more resource

Throwing good effort after bad

Doing the same thing which doesn't work can form vicious circle

This is really tiring

❌ Stressful

It can end up pretty stressful

This is not a good place to be

We don’t want to have salespeople who are getting stressed by all this unfocused activity

Running around in circles, spinning plates

People like to feel busy

We've seen this in salespeople boasting about driving hundreds of miles, seeing loads of people, diary like a patchwork quilt

But it's not making a difference, because it's not focused on the things have an impact


▶️ We can counter these problems

It's all about being more effective.

Prepare, plan and use process


🔶 Preparation

Making the most of the opportunities

Taking time to stop and think

Thinking time is crucial

I've seen some organisations where people need to be moving and doing stuff all the time

Really they should be stopping and thinking

Investing time to understand the customer, what it is they're trying to achieve and then how we can use that info to work with them

Taking time to think about who are the right people to work with and how to engage them

🔶 Planning

Getting the work balance right

People get stressed when they're trying to do too much in too little time

Everything is NOT a priority

Decide which things are going to make a difference. (That's part of the preparation)

Then work out what it is you're going to do

Plan it

Work that into the diary

Self-management is a key area many salespeople can improve on

Just using their time well by making intelligent decisions about how they're going to invest will make a massive difference

🔶 Process

Focusing on things to drive the right activity

Tried and tested methods

Structuring a way of working that's right for you, the organisation, the customer

It's weird

Some salespeople seem to see this as a weakness. They want to be ‘intuitive’. They do it their way. They'll wing it

They end up wasting way more time

Having systems, procedures, templates, things we know that work, that we can do time and time again, is a smarter way of operating

When we know we're doing something that makes a difference, the more relaxed we can be that we're doing the right thing

🧡 Sales should be fun based on making an impact... not tiring and stressful 🧡