In my recent newsletter, You Are Tomorrow What You Are Planning For Today, I discussed the importance of planning for sales success. Even though many salespeople put together "business plans" for their upcoming sales year, often it is nothing more than 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 the marketing activities they are planning on engaging in to help drive news names to the database. However, in the end, your sales business plan has to be much more robust than that. Greg Evershed has an in-depth articles posted about Planning for Success that provides a nice framework about what this plan should look like, smell like and 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 posts, I've covered:
2. Establish metrics for sales success
3. Setting high standards for your sales success
Today, I'll focus on this: Identifying those activities that you MUST execute on a consistent basis to be successful.
These activities MUST primarily be SALES activities or what I call GREEN activities. GREEN means GO, which means GO to the BANK.
Green activities would include and pretty much be limited to:
- Activities that lead to getting names - networking, speaking engagements, sponsored seminars, meeting with centers of influence and/or asking for introductions
- An outreach to assess interest or need
- Conversations and meetings to uncover a buyers buying journey
- Gathering additional information that when they buyer is ready to select you present a 'winning' solution
- Presentation/pitch meetings that lead to decisions
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 don't in Green Time, you are losing money.
