Limited Selling Time

One of my favourite discussions with sales teams is around the subject of limited selling time. Most sales people are simply too relaxed, assuming that they have 12 months –or roughly 225 working days, to hit their sales target. If only they knew how little time they actually had…

365 days a year minus weekends and personal/public holidays and typically you’re down to 228 days. (That’s 365 -104 -25 -8).

Once time grabbers such as sales meetings, exhibitions, product launches, training and of course illness are taken into account, somewhere between 20-40 days a year are lost.

So take off say 28 days (which helps keep the maths simple) and we’re left with 200 selling days a year. If we assume a maximum potential of 8 hours face to face time a day, this equates to 1600 hours available each year.

But wait…what about those daily breaks for lunch or urgent errands? It’s easy to lose an hour a day, so now take a further 200 hours off the total.

Than there’s the ‘biggie’ –travelling. How much harder has that become over the years? Let’s assume 30,000 miles a year at an average of 30mph, (the AA say 28mph and RAC 35 by the way) and you’ve lost a massive 1000 hours!

So now we have just 400 hours -or 50 days a year, to do our numbers. It’s a truly scary thought and one which most sales people are blissfully unaware.

So have you wasted time today and simply promised yourself to do better tomorrow? Well the clock’s ticking…

Times are tough. “Get sales but keep costs under control” is the mantra. Businesses keep talking about sales efficiency -although I remind them that they should be focusing on effectiveness not efficiency! But then that’s a conversation for another day…

One area of selling that seems to be under constant scrutiny is the role of the external sales person. Many businesses feel that the additional costs of a field sales team versus an internal sales operation -coupled with lower productivity rates, means that it’s becoming less attractive to keep people ‘on the road’.

They have a point. Think how many face to face meetings are achieved daily compared with the number of conversations achieved by an outbound telephone sales team. What’s more, if customers have all the relevant product information to hand and see the value in dealing with your company, why can’t one of the internal sales team close the business? Office-based sales teams can react quickly to customer demands –for quotes, samples, answering questions etc and ultimately, they’re more productive. Let’s be really modest and assume they make 5 outbound calls per hour (allowing generous time to sort things out between calls), multiplied by 7 hours a day (allowing 1 hour for lunch). That’s 175 (hopefully quality) calls a week -how many visits will the equivalent external salesman achieve? Even 8 visits a day only gives us 40 meetings a week. The numbers tell a convincing story don’t you think?

Or is there more to this than just simple numbers? Ultimately it’s about closing business and the big factor that has to be taken into consideration is the type of product your business is trying to sell. Some products automatically lend themselves to telephone selling; think bags of cement or rolls of polythene. All you need to know is how much and when can I have it? Indeed I could almost argue that you don’t even need a sales person; just publish your prices and delivery schedules online!

But what about the more ‘sophisticated’ product sale? How quick and easy is it to sell a new IT system or a piece of machinery costing over £100,000? This may require many meetings to build credibility, demonstrate capability, position the value of your solution and negotiate an acceptable deal. Some of this can be done over the phone, but the majority of the time we need to be face to face with our prospects, managing the sales process.

So in theory it’s easy to argue the case for either removing or keeping an external sales team. For sure, field sales people need to be really effective with their time and keep a close eye on the profitability element of their deals, but there will always be a place for them in certain businesses or situations. I reckon the future will see a breed of ‘super reps’, possessing excellent selling skills and sound technical knowledge and perhaps focusing on opportunities of a certain size or value. Let’s see what happens as we come out of the downturn….

There’s a line in the new Gary Barlow/Robbie Williams song where they sing: “Words come easy when they’re true.”

That got me thinking about the principle of selling with integrity and the notion that we should always tell the truth to customers. This is based upon various things that I’ve heard sales people say over the years, such as: “The odd white lie won’t matter” or “What the customer doesn’t know won’t hurt them” and unbelievably, “I say whatever it takes to get the business”.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve realised that if we always aim to sell with integrity i.e. with the best of intentions, then we won’t have any trouble finding the words to convince our customers, because what we say –or do, will resonate with them –and even if you do lose a particular piece of business, you will have the knowledge that you did the right thing, which always reaps rewards in terms of the overall relationship longer term.

Successful selling is all about ‘aligning needs’ (those of you and your customer) and if we always bear this in mind, we should never have a problem articulating a solution that genuinely works for both parties.

This is a question that I have often asked groups of sales people that I’ve been working with and I have to own up here, because I’ve changed my mind about the answer over the years…

When I was 16 and working part-time in a supermarket to earn pocket money, I used to look at the sales people that came in and think that they were really good –naturally charming, extrovert and with all the great one-liners for the store manager.

And I grew up believing that you either had the ‘gift of the gab’ or you didn’t, that successful sales people were born with that X-factor, that special something that not all of us possessed.

Then I started working in sales –eventually for over 15 years and subsequently moved into the field of sales training. What became apparent over time was that the relationship is everything. People buy from people and without the relationship you will struggle to enjoy regular business from a customer. But I’ve also learned that it’s more than this. Really successful sales people always follow a process, which is closely allied to their personal sales approach and underpins everything that they do or say.

What’s more, the really successful sales people don’t even realise they’re following a process, because the sequential steps from opening a call or meeting through to closing the conversation or concluding the deal come naturally to them, so naturally that they can deviate from them during a customer conversation and still get back on track. The thing is, good sales people make it look easy.

So for me, selling is merely a process, a set of selling milestones that anyone can learn, whether or not they are ‘naturally outgoing’. The only caveat is that when the going gets tough, something else kicks in –a little something called desire or hunger. Now can that be taught? Well that’s a discussion for another day!