Sales & Sales Management Brew

My recent newsletter:You Are Tomorrow What You Are Planning For Today, I discussed the importance of planning for sales success.  Even though many sales people put together 'business plans' for their upcoming sales year often it is nothing more that a financial projection of estimated new business, known lost revenue, estimated lost revenue and current pipeline opportunities. On rare occasions there is some information about 'marketing activities' they are planning on engaging in to help drive new names to the data base.  In the end your sales business plan has to be much more robust then that.  Greg Evershed has an in depth article posted about Planning for Success that provides a nice framework about what this plan should look like, smell like act like.

When I think of a robust plan I don't mean that it has to be a published book but it must contain certain elements if you want to improve your probability of actually achieving your stated goals.

So far in this series of post I've covered:

1.  Start with the end in mind

2.  Establish metrics for sales success

3.  Setting high standards for your sales success

Today I'll focus on: Identifying those activities that you have to execute on a consistent basis to be successful. 

These activities MUST primarily be SALES activities.  What I call GREEN activities.  GREEN means GO, which means GO to the BANK.

Green activities would include and pretty much limited to:

1. Activities that lead to getting names:  networking, speaking engagements, sponsored seminars, meeting with centers of influence and asking for introductions
2. Calling a suspect on the phone for an appointment.
3. Conversations and meetings to qualify a suspect
4. Gathering additional information that leads to a presentation meeting
5. Presentation / pitch meeting that leads to a decision

That's it! Those are your green activities that lead directly to generating sales revenue. Everything else you do is in support of these five activities.  If you are like most sales people you MUST spend somewhere between 25% and 33% of your time in Green Time!  Every minute you spend not in Green Time you are losing money.