Time Management:
Why Sales Professionals Should Not Prospect!

In Hot Prospects, beginning on page 24, you will find a revolutionary concept. It flies in the face of probably everything you have been taught.

It is a very simple concept: Salespeople should not prospect.

I'm not going to repeat that argument here, except to say that it is based on stunning information on how much a professional salesperson is actually worth per hour when meeting with and talking to interested, qualified clients and prospects. If you have not ordered the book, you need to go ahead and do it, so you will understand the foundation of time management.

That dollar amount forms the basis for how a salesperson should manage his or her time. I will call the subject "Sales Time Management."

Time Management:
Make More Money as a Sales Professional

Like coaching, there are as many definitions for time management as there are people writing about it. One website even advertises: "Discover the 39 essential tools needed to maximize your effectiveness and win control of your time and your life."

39 Tools!!

The term “time management” shows up on 119,000,000 websites. You can get 8,900,000 sets of time management tips. 12,300,000 web pages offer help on time management techniques. The phrase "time management definition" occurs 10,400,000 times. You can receive instruction on "time management skills" at 18,500 websites.

Simplifying Time Management

Let's simplify this mess. We are interested in one thing, our selling time.

To begin, here's a helpful quotation from an interview with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.

"You can’t manage time, it just is. So "time management" is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do."

Managing all the events in your life is certainly beyond the scope of my book and this website. And this is certainly not an all-encompassing time management article.

Let's focus, then on "Sales Time Management."

Sales Time Management: The art of accomplishing the most profitable revenue-producing tasks.

As I demonstrated in Hot Prospects, you are worth an extraordinary amount per hour, meeting with and talking to interested, qualified clients and prospects. In an optimum world, that's all you would be doing.

Your time management would consist of:
• Look at your calendar.
• Study a file prepared by your team.
• Meet with the client.
• Write or, preferably, dictate instructions to prepare a proposal or set up the next step.

What else should you be doing?

If you do not have such a system in place, there is a lot more that you should be doing.

This is where Sales Time Management comes in.

Your most important activity today is to keep any appointments scheduled today.

Your next most important activity is actually lead generation. Unless you have leads coming in the door, you won’t have anything to develop, and certainly no hot prospects to sell to.

If you have to do the whole process – lead generation, lead development, and sales – you must spend some time daily making certain you have people to talk to. Since this is the hardest part of the day, if you procrastinate and leave it for last, it most likely will not get done.

When, and only when, you have met your target for lead generation can you then turn your attention to "lead development." If you have no leads to develop, of course you have to double up on "lead generation."

Yes, there can be other complications. You can have "fires to put out," service problems to deal with, and all manner of other tasks assigned by a misguided, but well-meaning company. But to the extent you are able to spend the majority of your time meeting with and talking to interested, qualified clients and prospects, your sales career will soar.