Common Time Wasters of Sales Professionals

So very few small businesses collect and use statistical data about the effectiveness of activities relating to the sales process, and as a result many business owners and sales managers are insisting that their staff undertake activities that are wasting time, and robbing both the company and the sales staff of income.

Case Study – Real Estate Agency A well-known agency insisted that its sales staff spend an hour a day door knocking their neighbourhood, introducing themselves to home owners who might be potential sellers. At the same time it did not insist that telephone contact was undertaken, and nor was there any strategic approach to telemarketing.

Statistical collection and analysis showed that the door knocking was not an effective use of the sales team’s time, and that more coverage, with better outcomes, could be obtained by having a strategic in-house telemarketing program that developed strong loyalty and public profile.

Other Time Wasters Here is a brief list of other activities that are too inefficient for the sales person to spend time on and/or actually prevent sales staff from engaging in sales activities:

Hanging around shopping centres handing out pamphlets Letterbox dropping (unless it's part of a well-planned, integrated strategy)

Sponsorships (unless they are a well-planned strategy, not just a self-contained action)

Casual drop ins (unless they’re existing clients, and have been scheduled, not just to fall back on because prospecting is seen as the tougher option)

Giving gifts/corporate souvenirs to people before they even become clients (it’s like a tacky bribe!)

Doing deals on the basis of a verbal agreement – no paperwork, doh!

Not having a proven schedule of activities, not diarising, documenting, tracking or analysing these activities Being unaccountable Allowing proven selling activities to be shoved aside (eg, not turning up to a networking event because a client called and wants to reschedule. Unless that client is leaving the country, this one is plain dumb because you are killing the goose that laid the golden egg!)

Turning office time into a social exercise ***

How to Assess Activities So You Choose the Most Effective There’s only one way, and that’s to know your stats. Have a written plan of your sales activities, schedule them on a very strict basis, track their results, and analyse results regularly. If an activity cannot justify its existence or compete against better-performing activities, drop it like a hot cake!

If you set this up on a well-formulated spreadsheet it will spit out the meaningful statistics automatically, on a daily basis. Very few companies do this, and that’s why so very few companies actually survive. No-one would argue against the fact that it would be stupid to try to run a company without keeping financial records – and yet the majority of SME’s run their sales team without keeping adequate activity records! They track every dollar and cent, but they don’t track how time is used. Somehow it’s OK for that part of the business to be some kind of black box.



Very rarely do companies keep the sort of statistical data necessary to develop each sales person’s Unique Selling Equation with precision. The USE that you develop in this way will serve as the basis for concerted action on the part of the sales person, and will need to be refined over the coming months.

Analyse the data as you collect it, for each person as well as for the whole team. You want to know conversion rates, and the efficacy rates in ratio to each activity. For instance there may be an overall conversion rate of 30% of appointments. However one sales person may easily have a 30% efficacy rate converting referrals to appointments, while another may have 10%, and yet their overall appointment conversion rate is the same. This data is absolute gold to you and your company because it allows you to precisely pinpoint where and how superior performance is happening (and teach this to others) as well as precisely pinpoint where substandard performance is happening and address it.

If a sales-oriented company is not keeping and utilising these kinds of records, it is flying blind and surviving on pure luck. It’s only a matter of time before they’re overtaken by a disaster they didn’t see coming.

More help for sales professionals is available on www.betterbusiness.speedbusinessnetworking.com.



Common Time Wasters of Sales Professionals - To learn more about this author, visit Christine Sutherland's Website.

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