Work smarter not harder
What is the most common mistake I see in sales departments? The mistaking of activity for results.
What do I mean by that? Put simply, good sales people are adept at seeming busy. They can show all the calls they have made, how full their pipeline is and how many appointments they had booked. But they claim they just “need that lucky break” whenever you quiz them about the lack of new business.
The attitude of being “busy being busy” is highly corrosive. When it gets out of hand the management can accept the excuses, even feeling sorry for the luckless sales people. But you don’t get rewards in sales for making phone calls. You get the rewards for closing deals (this is certainly the way it works in successful sales departments!).
If you are an individual, managing and motivating yourself, take a moment to look at what you do each day, each week, each month. Be hard on yourself and be objective. Are you attending a lot of events, persistently following up the same prospects week after week, adding new products to the portfolio, blogging (!) and spending a day going to see a prospect at the other end of the country?
Be really critical and decide where you should actually spend your time most productively. Stop doing the enjoyable things that you can’t prove to yourself actually yield business. Stop living on hope and being exhausted each day with no closed sales at the end of each month to show for it.
Begin to work intelligently and stop worrying about looking busy. You get paid for the business you write not the hours you work. You will soon start working smarter not harder and the revenue will follow.