What Do You Do With The Time You Can't Use to Sell?

What you do during the unproductive selling hours of your day or evening?

The hours you spend on board of an airplane. The 20 minutes you spend on a parking lot because you arrived early for a customer meeting? In the back of a cab on your way to the hotel?

Without internet access or outside of business hours. Perhaps both.

Here’s an idea.

Sign up for toread.cc – a simple and free service that lets you email web pages to yourself for offline reading. You install a little button in Internet Explorer or Firefox and you’re off to the races.

Imagine this. You’re working on a new opportunity and you’re doing a bit of research on your prospect. The products they sell, services they offer. Their mentions in the news or the folks on their management team. Pre-call planning and research is critically important and we’ve written extensively about it.

But instead of spending time reading all of this stuff when you could be working on customer facing tasks, you quickly visit the pages you found and just click the toread button in your web browser.

Automatically, you’ll receive an exact copy of the page in your mailbox. Perfect reading material when you’re not connected to the internet. On a plane. In the cab. Whenever you have some time to kill.

Now, If you’re smart you’ll create a special folder in your email program so you can store your research for this prospect all in one place. Easy to look up and easy to share with your others in your selling team. All it takes is forwarding the email you received from toread.cc.

And if you combine this with Morning Coffee, a Firefox only plugin we reviewed before, you could have your favorite websites open up automatically when you start your browser. All it takes is a quick click on the toread button and you’ll have your news digest in your mailbox for later reading.

Your thoughts?