Daily News Thursday, May 13, 2010

Activity Calculator (read and download yours)

By: Tibor Shanto

Activity, and levels of and the quality of activity, is one of the most often discussed topics when I meet with senior sales leaders. While some may think this is a preoccupation or one of those things sales leaders always bring up, it really isn't. In fact first hand observation and numerous studies have confirmed that activity is an area that presents a great deal of opportunity for improvement among sales people.

There are a number of factors that contribute to this challenge. In past articles and blog posts we have discussed people's inability or unwillingness to plan; this includes planning their time, where we have argued that they should allocate a specific time to specific tasks they need to accomplish success, and then manage their activities in the time allocated. This includes allowing time to "put out fires" and time for planning. The latter is rarely allotted for, or way under allotted, normally speaking we advise reps and managers to set aside at least 10% of their time to planning on a broad basis and account basis. By not allocating time to "fire fighting" reps open themselves up to disaster. The fires will come and they will have to be fought, but if you haven't allocated time, you will end up having to use time from another activity. Human nature being what it is, we usually take it from activities we like to do least, and for most reps that is prospecting. This takes us right back to where we started, inadequate amount and quality of a key activity, prospecting.

This is true for reps in geographic territories as well as rep handling major or named accounts. There is more to this than simply not liking to prospect, or the belief that they can make goal strictly from their base, by the way few can. Part of the reason they don't allocate sufficient time is they lack the structure or process. Many of these same people will adopt a process and work-flow to executing their sales, but will go without a similar process when it comes to prospecting for new logos or going deeper and wider within their accounts. A lack of process leads to a lack of direction and to an inability to deal with challenges that come up in the course of prospecting.

When they execute their sales process, and they come across a hurdle or a fork in the road, the work-flow helps them make decisions that move things forward, or allows them to change course or even park or abandon a prospect in favour of a better alternative, a "better" prospect based on their process. When they face a challenge in prospecting, and they don't have a work-flow, a road map if you will, they will make mistakes, become discouraged and give up on the activity. They will look for fires to put out, clients to "call on", or other things that make them "look" active or productive, but they know they are not. These same reps often complain about the ups and downs of sales knowing that they in fact are responsible for that, but they lack a process (or will) to change things.

Another barrier is a lack of a metrics or guideline to help them understand how much of key activities they need to do. In the past we have discussed the need to work backwards from your goal to know how much of each key activity one has to do. The other benefit of quantifying things in this way, is you can then begin to calculate how much time each activity will take. You can access and download a sample Activity Worksheet here. It is simple and straight forward, and is not the entire answer, but it is a start, it will help you quantify your activities.

You will still need to master specific skills, you will still need to be proactive in the way you execute, but at least you will have a plan, and a way to manage your activities and outcome rather than continue to approach it in a reactive way.

What's in Your Pipeline?

Tibor Shanto, Principal with Renbor Sales Solutions Inc., and author voted #1 by readers for top article of 2009 by Top 10 Sales Articles. Renbor has helped dozens of organization with sales execution - from filling their pipeline with real prospects - to driving real revenue. You can read Tibor's blog The Pipeline at www.sellbetter.ca/blog.

For more information on helping your team sell better, write to: info@sellbetter.ca, or call 416 671-3555. You can also follow Renbor on Twitter http://twitter.com/renbor.

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