Utilising technology for sales effectiveness

Looking to boost the results performance of your salespeople? Logan Wedgwood identifies self-management and technology adoption as the key to success.

Why is it that some salespeople seemingly have all the natural capability they could ask for, but lack the performance to bring results?

Often, the answer is much simpler than assumed.

It comes down to personal daily structure, sometimes referred to as ‘self-management’.

It’s about how an individual sets themselves up for success every single day. And there’s no excuse for it, really. There are free or cost-effective tools all over the Internet to help with this.

As an example, some of the areas one could explore include:

• A morning routine that sets one up well for the day.
• Rules around how one engages with emails.
• Rules for how one sets their daily priorities.
• Food, exercise and clothing that makes one feel good about themself.
• Awareness of personal strengths and how to utilise them.
• Structure to support weaknesses and mitigate them.
• The minimisation of administrative overheads and activities that detract from sales-generating activities.
• Effective calendar and time management.

A recent Forbes study[1] suggests that the average salesperson spends less than 36 percent of their time on selling activities. If the average amount of daily effective time is less than four hours – imagine the lift in performance and achievement across the team if this was increased to just six hours per day? Six hours of effective sales-generating time out of an eight-hour day isn’t an unreasonable expectation.

So, how do we start to address this?

Firstly, which areas are the individual’s responsibility (within their control)? And which areas are the organisation responsible for?

The individual is responsible for their morning routine, their health and personal presentation and the attitude that they show up with.

The company is responsible for providing the training, support, tools and guidance for self-awareness, administrative tasks, prioritisation and email and time management. You could consider ditching internal emails altogether and moving to a chat group like Slack, WhatsApp or Viber.

Some of the many apps I’ve encountered that can help with personal effectiveness include, but are not limited to:

• For prioritisation: Eisenhower Matrix
• For email management: EmailAnalytics and CleanEmail
• For calendar management: Calendly or VirtualAssistant
• For personal health management: SleepCycle and Mealtime
• For personal strengths: Breakthrough – Tony Robbin’s mobile app
• For administrative overheads: Startstopcontinue, which generates a survey every 90 days and creates a list of ‘stop doing’ tasks that are detracting from sales activity and failing to create value.

(Note: not all of these suggestions are free, and I have no affiliation with any suggested.)

Watch those reports

Speaking from the perspective of a salesperson, one of the most frustrating things that you can do is ask people to spend time generating reports that don’t get read.

DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. Just don’t.

If you are asking for a report, ensure that you are discussing them – together and regularly – and that you’re coming away with concrete actions, or don’t waste their time. Let them spend their time selling. (OK, rant over now).

Personal effectiveness is not something you can hope will occur naturally. It needs focused attention, structure and regular review. This leads to more effective self-management and higher performance.

It takes work, but it’s worth it.

If each of your salespeople were more effective for just one additional hour per day, imagine that potential.

Logan Wedgwood is CEO of strategic execution advisory firm Advisory.Works (www.advisory.works)

For a free sales leadership canvas, email: [email protected]