These tips come from years of not only training and coaching presentation skills delegates, but assessing them too. These are easily the most basic errors that inexperienced presenters make on their visuals. These errors have a catastrophic impact on audience perception and apart from immediately labeling you amateurish, will detract from your message and your [...]

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What is the most important part of a salesperson’s job? It is acquiring new business while maintaining the business we already have. Therefore, if that is the most important part of our job, what must we possess in order to make a difference? We do require appropriate behavior but that is not the top answer. We need prospects and customers.

Ultimately, prospects and customers are the most important component in our jobs. We have to relentlessly consider the needs of our prospects and clients in terms of when they want to be contacted or visited, what are their needs and desires, and what can we do for them in order to satisfy those needs and desires.
With this in mind, when is the best time for you to be contacting and spending time with prospects and customers?

The best time, for those of you selling business to business, is between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on any given business day. Real estate agents or salespeople in business to consumer sales should contact clients in the evenings and on weekends. We have to determine the best time to contact our target market and focus strictly on that time. I like to refer to this as revenue generating time or pay time.

Pay time is a certain time of day you can be in contact with customers knowing it will generate revenue. Let’s define pay time behaviors as behaviors that lead us to accomplish our goals or sales quotas. This includes networking, prospecting, telephone calls, follow up, face to face, presentations, customer service, and so on. Take a moment and identify the pay time behaviors you require on a daily basis in order to meet your goals.

Now let’s take a look at when these pay time behaviors should be conducted. A salesperson’s job is to be proactive whenever possible and less reactive. You already know the preferred time to call on your customers. If you are selling business to business, you know that Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are not the best of times to be calling on prospects or clients. Any other time of the business week is best. Your job is to identify the preferred times to be in contact with your target market and to carry out those pay time behaviors during those times.

The opposite side of pay time behavior generates absolutely no revenue. The no pay time behaviors are filling out call reports, writing letters, sending and replying to e-mail messages, completing and submitting expense reports, attending sales meetings, training, and other corporate demands. None of these behavioral activities generate more revenue or pay; however, they are part of the job requirement.

You must control these no-pay time behaviors. Although these activities are a necessity, when you do them makes all the difference. Never perform “no pay time” activities during “pay time”. The no pay time activities should be executed when the prospect or customer is unavailable or during the time before or after closing hours, holidays, weekends, etc. when no revenue will be generated.

Far too many salespeople do not manage their time well. They use no pay time behaviors as excuses to avoid pay time behavior. Manage you behavioral activity properly and reap the benefits of more sales, more revenue and rewarding results.

Tags: sales techniques, sales strategies, increase sales, goal setting worksheet