This time management tip is for sales professionals/business owners helping them to be more time effective and increase their sales. You like activity and lots of it because you think if you’re taking action you’re being productive but frequently you’re shooting yourself in the foot. First, let me ask you where is your greatest potential for immediate sales?
The answer is, of course, your current customers. The people who bought from you once are highly likely to buy from you again and again and again. And among you’re customers you have customers who are responsive in that they buy from you occasionally and customers who are highly responsive in that they buy nearly everything you show them.
Because you’re entire financial security is dependent on sales you get that you need to focus on these people and give them a lot of your attention. But what you sometimes overlook are ways to get these sales with less work on your part. The end result you want is more sales with less work and you can get that if you just let your brain do the work over your legs.
If you want to increase your sales you want to spend more time in front of the people who buy from you. That means you need to have a set in stone plan for getting and keeping in front of those customers. Review your current customer base and determine how often you want to be either talking with or touching each and every one of them.
The more valuable that customer is to you the more time and attention you want to give them. But if you don’t have a plan for when, how, and why you’re going to make those connections it won’t happen because: you’ll get busy and forget, you have to keep chasing them down, and no one wants to meet with you to waste their time.
Once you know how often you want that connection to happen the next step is to plan the objective for each connection. Meaningless connections like automatically generated “thinking about you” cards are ok, but they aren’t really valuable. You can take the same concept and make it valuable by having something of value in each card whether it be a way to get really good information, a coupon, something that recognizes them, or a customer loyalty reward.
You want a set number of those connections to involve a one-on-one conversation. These of course, are preset sales conversations. Because you already know when you want the next sales conversation to happen you can increase your time management skills by setting the appointment for the next sales appointment at the end of the current one.
To make your customer eager to have and hold that next appointment there has to be value in it for them. That’s not a problem. As you set your plans think about what you can do to add value during each appointment over the course of the whole year each and every year. Then as you’re talking to your customer you can let them know that in 3 months you: will be able to tell them about something that will be very exciting for them, will go over one of the three biggest mistakes you see people in their situation make because they will be ready for that information at that time, want to invite them to an invitation only event where you want to introduce them to a couple potential customers for them, etc. Now there’s no need for you to keep calling and leaving voice mail and email messages to set your next appointment because you already have it, and they will keep it because they’re going to get something they want out of it.
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