One of the scarcest of resources anyone has, especially busy salespeople, is time. Planning your quarter is essential to maximize your sales performance. Below are listed tips to help you maximize your time and your income!
- Clean up the forecast
- Decide the Priority Accounts for this quarter
- Capture current news events on sector or companies available to color your dialogue with these Priority Accounts. Check Google, LinkedIn Groups for any interesting stories.
- Are you focusing on a sector for the quarter, a product drive, a geographical region and what you are going to do about it?
- Establish road maps to hit your targets. What deals are going to take you to that goal and what substitutes have you got in hand?
- Review your Metrics to see where your performance could be improved from last quarter:
- # of phone calls made.
- # of companies farmed per sector.
- # of demos completed.
- # of validation meetings with or without a Sales Engineer.
- # of Cold Calls graduated to Sales Lead.
- # of Sales Leads graduated to Advanced discussions.
- # of Quotes out.
- # of deals done and average selling price.
- Understand the marketing teams priority for the quarter and their planned events to ensure you deploy tactics to capitalize on their efforts.
- Consider blog posts and white papers you could help write.
- Review your Sales Process Playbook to remind yourself of tricks worth deploying this quarter.
- When reviewing progress on deals always establish first what has been achieved since the last meeting. Don’t waste time with irrelevant history.
- When time managing specific deals take control by setting deadlines, use reverse time lines to determine realistic interim landmarks and then build in a little slippage.
