quitting his job for something more motivating. He’d failed to see that his lack of motivation was caused by the lack of demanding goals. He reas- sessed his situation, set much more demanding goals, and doubled his income to more than $400,000.
HOW TO DO YOUR BEST The key is in developing a program that requires you to do your best. To develop such a program, start with goal setting. Lloyd Loffet of Northwestern Mutual recruited and coached more agents into the presti- gious Million Dollar Round Table than any other person of his time. I asked him once what was required to be a top-notch salesperson. “Two things,” he told me: “goals and time. When you have goals but not time, you’ll never achieve your goals. When you don’t have any goals, you don’t need time because you aren’t going any- where.” Once you have demanding goals, you must use time effectively to achieve them. To be motivating, a goal must meet eight criteria. A valid goal is: • Measurable, so you can measure your progress and know when you’ve achieved it
• Demanding, to motivate you to do the best you can
• Achievable, to challenge but not frustrate you
• Written, to prevent you from los- ing track of it
• Deadline driven, to give you a sense of urgency
• Consistent with your company’s and your personal objectives
• Participative, so those who had a part in setting your goals will help you achieve them
• Flexible so that, when conditions change, you can adjust your goal
HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS?
Setting high goals and achieving them are two different things. The first requires the nerve or courage to demand the best of yourself. The other takes the discipline to do it –
the persistence to do the hard work of using your time effectively. Effective time use requires that you: • Get and stay organized to be sure that what you are doing is the best possible use of every minute of your working day.
• Do nothing you can delegate to others who work with you or for you. You should strive to make every possible minute available for selling.
• Make timely decisions. The most important decision you will ever make is how to use your time. If you don’t plan to use your time, you will waste it. Your time is your life – it’s up to you how you use it.
• Always get your top priority done first. Your effectiveness will be greatly increased when the most important thing you should do each day gets done.
WHAT ARE YOUR BARRIERS TO ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS? The top five barriers to achieving de- manding goals for salespeople are: Attempting too much at once. If your calendar shows day after day so full of tasks and appointments that there’s no way you could get it all done, you’re attempting too much. Chances are, you’d sell more if you attempted less. Stick to the selling. Paperwork and red tape. Quite
likely, you should be delegating a lot of that. You should also learn the handle-it-once technique. When you pick up any piece of paper, read it and decide to do one of four things: 1) act on it by writing or phoning; 2) redirect it to a more appropriate person to deal with it; 3) put it in a follow-up file because you can’t act on it till you do something else first; 4) designate it for filing or throw it away. If you’re not going to have time to do one of those four things, don’t pick up the paper.
Crisis management. Learn to do “contingency planning.” Ask, “What could go wrong that would keep this from coming out the way I want it to?” Then identify what you can do to
prevent things from going wrong or to minimize the damage if the worst does happen. Telephone interruptions. Sales- people are always surprised to find that the telephone – so often their strongest selling tool – can also be one of their greatest barriers to suc- cess. If your phone calls are taking six minutes to accomplish what could be accomplished in three, you’ve wasted three minutes you could use to con- tact someone else. Big deal, you say? Do you make 10 phone calls a day? That’s 30 minutes wasted! Personal disorganization. You must know what you plan to do (have writ- ten daily goals); where and when you will do it (schedule the time); and then follow your plans and write your effec- tiveness in achieving your daily goals at the end of each day.
YOU NEED A SYSTEM A good system (such as Time Tactics) for getting and staying organized will help you manage your time and achieve your goals. The right sys- tem will guide you to translate your goals into daily, weekly, and monthly targets. You’ll be able to monitor progress and take corrective action to keep moving toward your objectives. You’ll know when you’re off course and by how far.
A system should help you manage your most precious resource: time. The most important characteristic of such a system is that it provides one place to record what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with. It com- bines weekly and monthly calendars with places to record your goals, plan the actions to achieve your goals and to calendar the tasks required, and a system of contact logs to record decisions and questions for co-workers, clients, and prospects. A system such as Time Tactics, which I developed, can save you time and make it possible for you to do more work in the same number of working hours – helping you achieve more demanding goals in the hours you put in now.
SELLING POWER SEPTEMBER 2018 | 17 © 2018 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
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