Research shows that salespeople will never reach their performance potential without a well-defined sales-call procedure that they can follow and learn from. “Winging it” on sales calls has grim consequences – lost sales, extended sell cycles, margin erosion and no clear path to improvement. Bottom line: Your entire sales career can be mediocre if you “wing it” – even if you block out time to do less productive tasks.

Performance improves by as much as 50% when salespeople have a consistent game plan for their sales calls.

Most salespeople make the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. Without a logical sales process to follow, they can’t even identify specific problems, let alone correct them. A good sales process mirrors the pattern by which customers make buying decisions – (Salesperson, Company, Product, Price, Time to Buy.)

Another Great Sales Habit: Follow a sales process that mirrors how customers make decisions.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Bill, social media is creating an issue for many sellers as they haven’t developed the discipline to focus on making money instead immediate gratification. Unfortunately those who can’t develop the discipline may well find themselves monitoring their favorite social media sites from home while unemployed.

Time blocking has long been a fundamental skill taught to sales folks. I think social media, real-time, always on Web is making this harder to enforce. You have to have the personal discipline to do it and hit the sales pipeline.

Important stuff.

Good article. We have also found that the time it takes a Sales Professional to schedule a meeting can often take more time than having the meeting itself.

So to increase productivity, we created a service called Tungle that allows Sales People to easily schedule meetings with important clients. The clients never need to sign up to the service. Also, users can publish their availability and allow clients to schedule meetings with them. For example, my Tungle.me page is: http://tungle.me/Marc

Give it a try, many sales and BD professionals all around the world are using it.

Regards,

Marc Gingras
CEO & Founder, Tungle