How do you become incredibly successful in Sales? You get highly organized to the point you are obsessed with it. Being organized means you know where you are going, how you’re getting there and when you plan to do it. Are you organized?
Endless scribbles and note taking mixed in with an “I’ll update the CRM later” attitude and you’ve got a recipe for Sales disaster. The last thing you need is your Sales Team being clueless as to who they’re speaking with or why they are speaking to them.
If you’re a Sales Manager, emphasise the need to be highly organized, even paranoid of failure if it means everyone adopts the need to be organized.
Play out the worst case scenario to the team and see who starts to question or double check their approach, chances are most will but it’ll save a lot of embarrassment and wasted time with the customer.
Here are 12 ways to become highly organized
#1 Write every little thing down – leave your mind free to concentrate directly on the customer or task in hand.
#2 Clear up your space – remove all the clutter that seems to always be plaguing your workspace (even consider it for phones, laptops etc., as they are also notoriously bad for this).
#3 Everything needs a place – habits form quickly if you stick to routine, this includes putting things in the same place time and time again.
#4 Smart with tasks – check through your written list of what you have coming up, batch things together be it on the basis of similarity of task or location etc.
#5 Plan of action – create this right before you go to bed, on waking up you’ll have a defined set of tasks and you’ll know how you need to go about them.
#6 Bring in support – don’t let your ego take control. If you happen to have a stubborn account to deal with then call in support to guide, advise and ease the task.
#7 Stick to what’s familiar – Trying to break a habit or do something that you’ve never done before is generally frustrating at the beginning (the euphoria of doing so will follow shortly though) so leave this to a slow day or during your free time.
#8 Take on problems – Try and take out the biggest problems first as soon as possible, mundane and boring tasks can be widely outsourced or taken care of during a slower part of the day.
#9 Know everything – Study your accounts, your business, products, competitors, markets, industries so you know everything.
#10 Delegation – Some of us Sales people are hot shots in specific parts of the Sales cycle, using up your time and stressing out on other stages should be minimalized (lead generation etc). Instead find people that are the hot shot of that department and work with them.
#11 Personal lists – Things like time to yourself, food that you eat and how you spend your money should be compiled into a personal list. This is all about not guessing and causing stress, instead you know what you’re doing, how, when and why.
#12 Stop negative thoughts – Sales is a hard career to be in, the emotional battering you get on a daily basis can get incredibly tiring. Instead of thinking that the product sucks, the market doesn’t exist or so on, focus on the past successes and learn from them.
If you study the most successful Sales people within your company and outside of it you’ll generally notice a common theme – they are all incredibly organized and know exactly what they are doing.
Ask them why they are doing it and they’ll never look clueless, instead they’ll have an answer that leads them to the next stage and the next stage and so on.
