Corporate Sales Guy

I haven’t been putting many entries as of late. Definitely working on some hot topics but in the meantime check out my friend’s site. Seasoned veteran sales guy with a great track record.

http://www.lawrenceggbrown.com/brownblog/

If you’d like a great read about excuse making check out his entry here.

I’ve been the biggest culprit of working in short bursts of intense concentration, finishing something and then downshifting to 1st or 2nd gear for a day or two just to find I need to “floor it” and get back into 4th or 5th gear because of an avoidable emergency created by slowing down.

I think the intense bursts of energy work really well for some professions – not sales however. For instance I’ve spoken to programmers who take about 20-40 minutes to get into a zone. At this time they will burst for 2-3 hours and create quite a bit of code. Many of these folks will pull the telephone plug out of the wall, turn off their e-mail and cell phones so that they aren’t forced to invest another 20-40 minutes to get back into the zone.

5th Gear Selling is simple. It’s much easier to plan effectively 1 week in advance lets say on a Sunday morning and then spend Monday through Friday executing the plan to the fullest. During the planning it’s important to take the following things into account:

Planning the difficult things for early mornings when critical thinking is strongest for most people.

Planning to make use of downtime (driving, traveling) to do mindless things (returning calls).

Batching tasks of every kind for maximum efficiency. (Check emails once every 2 hours – 3 appointments on same day is better than 1 each day for 3 days)

Utilization of resources at times where they are more available. (your pricing department cannot give you a quote at 8 PM – if it takes them 2 days to turn around something then this should be the 1st task on your list)

The premise of this concept is simple, with a strong weekly plan it’s easy to stay focused and not grope around for things to do by the 2nd part of the week. If you’ve ever driven a car you’ll find that moving from the lower gears in the car taxes the car and requires more energy. Planes are a great example of this as well. In both cases once the car is cruising at 45 – 65 MPH or once the plane is off the ground the energy required to keep moving is less.

In the end you’ll find that spending 8 solid hours at maximum output and efficiency will drain you less than 4, 5, 6 hours of sloppy starting and stopping work behavior. Additionally at the end of the 8 hours when you’ve accomplished everything on your list (or close to) the feeling outweighs any tiredness that may arise. Lastly (the most important point of this all) after a solid 8 hour day of excellent efficiency you are much better suited to give yourself permission to STOP THINKING ABOUT WORK FOR THE EVENING. Sure, if a great idea hits you during dinner, write it down but for the most part – people that don’t have an effective 8 hour day will dwell on work for 12-16 hours to make up for the items unfinished during the day. This is mentally draining and is a sure fire way to ruin the productivity of the next day.

This maybe for some a blinding flash of the obvious but I see it all the time. The penance that we pay for an inefficient day is to sit in the office an extra 1-5 hours doing absolutely nothing with a brain that has gone into sleep mode.