By asking this question in management consulting sessions, different types of attitudes and responses are received.
Those that are immediate and spontaneous generally demonstrate that this issue is not adjusted enough to achieve highly productive performance, through the facts that can be verified later.
When you have a good level of salespeople, trained in the development of their activity so that they can achieve the results expected of them, few people in the structure are really concerned with analyzing what happens to their daily hours and minutes to make it happen.
This important variable that governs us, and does the same with the potential clients of our market, is not something that we can regulate or store, so it only enables us to manage it.
As a result, in order to manage it efficiently, a fine-tuning is required on a permanent basis so that all the productive potential that each of the team's representatives has translates into results such as expected and even higher.
Before proceeding, it is very appropriate to highlight that successful salespeople or star salespeople of all sales teams, who are characterized by always reaching or exceeding their monthly objectives, have their own method of managing management time that is very effective for them. to dump its full productive potential.
An appropriate diagnosis
Before starting it, it is necessary to generate an open mind about it, without which nothing that is analyzed in relation to time can be effective.
In each modality and management methodology, there are three clearly defined areas that should be analyzed in order to establish the time currently applied to different aspects of the activity itself:
• The Pre Sale. All activities that represent personal strengthening, training, preparation of materials, daily management reports, daily, weekly, monthly task planning, answering phone calls, answering written communications (e-mail, fax, etc.), and many other activities more are those that allow each daily interview to arrive in a timely manner and with total efficiency.
• The interview. It represents the «face-to-face» contact with each of the opportunities detected and qualified that allow the results to be generated. This may occur, depending on the case, as "local" or "visitor" by the sellers depending on the type of sales in application.
• The Post Sale. After the purchase, there are other unavoidable tasks that the seller performs in order to ensure that the customer who purchased the product or service, acting as the person responsible for their sale with the company, solving with other sectors each inconvenience that has not been satisfactory. It will depend on whether they can buy from you in the future and provide referrals for sale.
Using the agenda itself and the records of the management reports, the objective of the analysis in this diagnostic stage is to dump into three columns corresponding to those management stages everything that has actually been done and the time used in each one. of them.
References
Each item of sales activity has its own standards, which can contribute to make valid comparisons as a reference and establish the potential that can still be improved to make adjustments that contribute to the increase in productivity that each representative potentially has.
At the end of it, you will surely be surprised by all the activities that are carried out such as: the absurd waste of time in administrative tasks, travel times, waiting in reception, talks in the corridors, meetings in the cafeteria sector or in external bars, prolonged lunches, visits or unnecessary or repeated interviews for failures or omissions in their preparation, etc.
Each one of these activities are the ones that should be deepened, discussed and adjusted so that they can be modified or eliminated so that the time of daily contact with sales opportunities can be substantially increased.
For this, it will be necessary to adjust said pre and post sale activities in those hours that do not affect spending as much time as possible in sales interviews, which is, ultimately, where the results are generated.
Given that the productivity of each representative is the responsibility of the person in charge of the sector, this analysis exercise should be planned and coordinated by the supervisor or manager who has the possibility of carrying it out in one of their sales meetings in which all the members of the sector participate. equipment.
conclusion
Time passes, whatever we do, without being able to stop it or store it to use it better.
It is like an iron ingot, from which its greatest value can be extracted depending on what we do with it, since we can make horseshoes, pins or high-precision pieces for watchmaking.
In short, each one is master of his destiny and what he decides to do with his time to get the most value that he has in our lives.
© Copyright 2008, by Martín E. Heller
