CEO Blog - Time Leadership

More Press

I seem to be receiving quite a bit of press lately. I was fortunate enough to be named one of the Top 20 Bulders and Visionaries for 20 years in Canada by Computer Dealer News.

I had an interview on startupspark.com and one of my articles was featured on helium.com's homepage.

Connect IT published one of my articles on the 12 Rules of Time.

One of my articles was printed in a new magazine called the Highland Marketer.

The following is the article that printed in the Highland Marketer.

Time to Sell

One of the challenges in sales is finding enough time. With unlimited time, we can clearly sell more. Given that our time in finite, we need to devise systems to help us sell more.

The following are my seven rules to finding time:

1 - Some of the reasons that people procrastinate on making sales calls and don’t make enough sales calls is because they have "cold feet". A lot of the techniques have to do with how to get over "cold feet". Some of the techniques include:
Make the calls warm by doing marketing, mailings, emails, etc.
Make them warm by getting referrals.

2 - Count failures as wins. I like to always set three goals whenever I make a sales call: one goal is to close the big sale; the second is to close a smaller sale; and the third goal is to introduce myself, leave a card and brochure. That way on every sales call I can achieve a goal. Count how many mini-goals that you achieve because they add up and in time will help keep you motivated.

4 - You will never know enough. Often sales people, especially those who sell technical products (like my business) might spend hours learning about the new technologies and the new products that are available. The fact is that you could study full-time and still not know everything. At some point you have to just jump in; so the rule is to not make any excuses, you have enough knowledge to sell now.

5 - Use mantras. One of my mantras is, "What the heck, go for it anyways." This is what you say to yourself when you are nervous about making a sales call or stopping in on someone unannounced. The answer is, "What the heck, go for it anyways." Another mantra I use is, "Back to work." Use this whenever you find yourself doing something other than spending time on sales.

6 - It is all about statistics. The more sales calls that you make to more quality clients, the more time you spend with them, the higher the quality of time that you spend with them, the more sales you will make. It is all about getting your statistics right and moving more time into selling time.

7 - Delegate and outsource non-selling tasks. Often the best things to delegate are the things that someone else can do considerably easier, faster, or better than we can. If we are in procrastination mode, we often allow some administrative tasks to take an inordinate amount of time.

posted by Jim Estill @ 10:39 AM