Every month I receive a variety of questions from salespeople and their managers. These come from a variety of sources - my live seminars, the monthly phone seminars, questions that are sent into my newsletter, and issues that arise in the course of my consulting work. Out of all of these, I select those that I think have the most universal application, and respond to them here.
How do we get more calls in when driving time is so long?
I'm going to answer this on two levels. First, when you have a big geographical territory with lots of windshield time, you have to do a better job of routing your calls to maximize the time with the customer. Plan your basic itinerary at least a month in advance, and try to schedule your calls in a logical pattern so that you are not driving back and forth. Schedule the longest drives before your first appointment, during lunch, or after your last appointment so that you are using the 8 - 5 selling time to its maximum advantage.
Make "ish" appointments. In other words, instead of making the appointment for 10 AM, make it for "10-ish." This gives you a window of about 15 minutes before the appointment to 15 minutes after when you can still be on time. It takes the pressure off of you and provides you a bit more flexibility.
Here's another way to consider the problem. Instead of focusing on more calls (quantity), focus on better quality calls (quality). If you can only make four calls a day, for example, consider which are the highest quality, highest potential four calls you can make. Understand that you can't get to everyone, so focus on the most important.
This issue of focusing more on quality than quantity is one of the best practices of the most successful sales people. If you'd like to dig into it a bit more, I'd recommend picking up my book, "10 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople", and/or buying my "Best of Dave Kahle" one-hour seminar number 14, entitled "Time Management: Making Hard-Headed Decisions about How to Invest Your Sales Time."
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If you have any comments or questions, email them to me. I do, of course, reserve the right to edit.
Here are a few articles by Dave
that you might be interested in reading:
- Biggest Time Wasters for Salespeople ... Good time management for salespeople has been an obsession of mine for more than 30 years. In the last decade, I've been involved in helping tens of thousands of sales people improve their results through more effective use of their time. Over the years, I've seen some regularly occurring patterns develop - tendencies on the part of sales people to do things that detract from their effective use of time. Here are the four most common time-wasters I've observed. See if any apply to you or your salespeople.....{Read More}
- The Ninth Time Management Secret: Nurture Helpful Relationships...
Early into one of my sales positions, my boss informed me that the operations manager was upset with me. I was too focused and task-oriented in my dealing with the company's internal personnel who made things happen in the business. I'd come into the office, drop projects and requests on everyone's desk, and head out again. My task-oriented behavior was upsetting people. As a result, they were balking at cooperating with me. My projects were being left on the bottom of the pile, and other salespeople were getting more cooperation. I had better change my attitude, he told me, or I'd find it very difficult to succeed in this organization. My lack of good relationships with the people who could make things happen for me was hurting my performance. Eventually, I came around to understand that. I swallowed my pride, bought each one a six-pack of premium beer, apologized, and started focusing on building positive relationships with everyone inside the company..... {Read More}
There are also many other action-packed articles for sales professionals that offer how-to solutions to every day sales problems that you can read online at www.davekahle.com/article.htm.
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