Corporate Sales Guy

Not having a concise daily plan ensures that you will slavishly accomplish all the items that other people ask you to do in a day that aren’t necessarily high priority on your to-do list. Ideally this plan is formulated the evening before your work day. Here’s an overview of the typical day without a plan:

Get up early and get into the office
Check email and a bunch of little items litter your head and inbox
You can’t help but to respond to some and do some of the items given you to via email
You will answer the phone more willingly and actually “feel good” that you are accomplishing something.
Folks will drop by your cube or office and need to discuss things with you, you will allow this to occur and again will feel that you are “working”
You will respond to emails, do the items that come across and again feel like you are “working”.

Mean while, you will remember that you are in sales and you get compensated only for bringing in revenue. Your daily objectives such as:

Getting into a new partner for referred opportunities
Following up with a client that you sent pricing to last week
Get special legal terms in a contract approved by your legal folks for a prospect
Calling the company around the corner that was acquired who will require the product you sell to make the integration smoother with their new parent company.
Reviewing your pipeline to ensure nothing is slipping through the cracks
Getting face to face meetings with potential clients
Solving an issue for an existing client that has been great to you

This phenomena is the same one that allows sales people to call busy decisions makers on a Friday or the last day before a holiday and actually get results. The folks answering the telephone are looking to “work” and thus taking your call becomes “chatting with a vendor that can help us with (insert project here)”. It’s great when it plays into our favor but absolutely stinks when we are victim of it.

To help plan out my days I utilize an application (currently in beta, not yet for sale) called Omnioutliner. You can see it in action here. Sorry this is another Mac only application. For windows users who use Outlook try the Getting things Done plug-in for Outlook.

I know I’ve mentioned these applications before but if you don’t have a system in place I’d suggest good old fashion pen and paper setup which is the most reliable and portable system that used.