It’s my honor to share a new event I am starting today that I want you to take advantage of. In my book A Mind for Sales, I talk a lot about the importance of Mondays. In response to your comments, I’m pleased to now be a part of every one of your Mondays; however, you’ll need to sign up for it because in two weeks, it goes behind a wall and will only be available to members. It’s called Weekly Sales Kickoff, and I want you to sign up to get it every week.
Each Monday morning, the Weekly Sales Kickoff will contain three parts. One is inspiration, two is development, and three is application. What do I mean by each of those? Inspiration is first to kick your week off right. Second, development will help you from a training standpoint. Finally, application is all about how you can put it into play right away. If you’re watching this, I want you to show it to your sales managers. I want all of you to receive this every Monday, because it’s how you’re all going to make the most of Mondays. I did write the book A Mind for Sales, and there’s a chapter in it about how to make Mondays great. Let’s get into the first piece of inspiration right now this morning.
If you have the ability to help someone, it is your responsibility to reach out to them. Today – right now – more than 1,000 people need to hear from you. There are more than 1,000 people who need to hear from you, except they won’t hear from you unless you pick up the phone and reach out to them. You have the ability to help somebody, and if you have the ability to help someone, it becomes your responsibility to do so.
Think about this for a moment. If somebody knew you needed help and they could help you, regardless if you think you needed help, but they chose not to reach out to you, wouldn’t you be upset with them when you eventually found out? Yes, you would. You would be upset. This is what’s beautiful about the role of sales – we get to help people.
You see, if you have the ability to help someone, it’s your responsibility. Let’s say you saw a house on fire but didn’t know the people in it. Because you didn’t know the people who lived there, would you say it isn’t your responsibility to try to help them? No! You would immediately work to find out if they’re all okay and what you can do. You would do that, because you have the ability to help someone. You wouldn’t sit there and say, “Well, I don’t know those people, so I’ll let somebody else do it or well, maybe I’ll send them a Facebook message or I’ll try to connect with them on Instagram.” No, you would reach out to them right away. Sales is about urgency. Your job is urgent, because you have the ability to help people. I can’t stress this point enough. There’s 1,000 people – really more than a thousand people, there’s tens of thousands of people out there who need what you have – but they will never know unless you reach out to them.
Let’s move into the development part. This has to do with a piece I talk about in my book, A Mind for Sales. It’s called “CFT” – customer facing time. How much time do you spend customer facing? Challenge yourself by asking this question: am I truly spending time customer facing / CFT?
CFT is about one simple thing: getting in front of your customers or customer facing time. All too often I see salespeople spend their time doing everything but get in front of customers. They take care of this report and that, especially when it comes to prospecting, but they don’t actually spend time with their customers. I want you to focus on doing one thing and that is increasing your CFT. Break it down into CFT with existing customers and CFT with prospects. I find too many salespeople afraid to prospect, so they spend all their time with existing customers. That’s why you must break it down into these two buckets – CFT with existing customers and CFT with prospects. I told you in the inspiration part that there’s 1,000 people out there who need to hear from you. So, what’s holding you back?
With that said, let’s dive into the last section of application. I want you to look at your calendar and begin blocking out time. Create a matrix of four boxes, each of which contains some form of CFT. Now, there is CFT for existing customers and prospects like I shared with you in the development piece. Let’s break it down even further, because you will spend some of your time planning and some of your time doing.
While you set aside time on your calendar for CFT, talk with your sales manager and your peers about how much time you should spend prospecting. Then, when you break it down, devote time to plan to prospect as well as time to actually do it. Planning is like preparing the prospect. This includes getting your leads in order, getting your call-to-actions in place, and emails ready, etc. All of that is preparing the prospect, and then there’s the actual prospecting time. You see, if you wind up only having one bucket, you’ll spend all your time planning and preparing without actually doing, or accomplishing, anything. So, take time to set aside two separate buckets which are two of the quadrants in your four-quadrant matrix. In the other two quadrants, there’s CFT for existing customers and CFT work that you’re doing for existing customers. It’s interesting that the CFT work for existing customers always seems to overpower everyone’s calendar. Therefore, you have to block it and tell yourself you’re only going to allow 30 minutes for it – that’s it! Otherwise, if you don’t block that time, it will wind up taking up the whole day. You’ll be busy, but not productive.
Your application here is very simple. Create four boxes and start assigning an amount of time to each one. You don’t have to assign time every single day in each of the four. Chances are, you will assign time every single day with existing customers, but maybe not with prospecting. That may only happen every other day or maybe only a couple of days a week. You know your situation, but you have to create dedicated windows of time.
The four windows / blocks of time for CFT are:
- Prospecting Planning
- Prospecting Execution
- Existing Customer Planning
- Existing Customer Execution
Plan and prepare first, and then do it – that’s execution. With prospects, that means picking up the phone, making the call, sending the email, etc. Make it happen! This is CFT in terms of working on customers and actually connecting with customers. Remember again that each person will have a different set of time allocated to each box.
This has been your weekly inspiration, development and application. My job is very simple: to help you have the most powerful, most incredible, most successful week possible. You start that by kicking off your Monday fast! Look for another weekly sales kickoff next Monday morning, and make sure you sign up to receive this every week.
Copyright 2020, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of A Mind for Sales and High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results.
