Don’t think….do! In sales, the battle is half won simply by doing it. Many salespeople spend their time thinking about things and not actually doing them.
Every week, I encounter at least one salesperson who tells me how they’re not able to get their sales up to the level their boss expects them to achieve. When I probe them to determine why, the number one reason is the lack of follow-through they have in contacting the customer or prospect. When I push them on this, they claim they don’t have time because of the amount of other work they have to do. Yet, when I ask what the other things are, I’m always able to find at least one activity they’re doing that is not worthy of their time – time that could be better spent contacting customers. The real problem is that the sales person doesn’t want to spend more time contacting customers! They’d rather spend their time on meaningless activities and then complain about why they aren’t making their numbers.
Planning to make a sales call is one thing, but planning for the sake of planning (or, in reality, planning to avoid making a sales call) is a crime. An excuse I hear quite often is that they didn’t make their sales call yesterday because of all the planning they had to do to get ready to make it. The fact is they were really using planning as a stall tactic. There’s an expression I like to say: Too many salespeople spend too much time planning to plan the plan to allow them to plan the plan for their sales call.
Get over it and just make the sales call you need to make!
