Month: January 2011

Article Contributed by Jeremy J. Ulmer

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” – Paul Meyer

In the world of sales, finding ways to increase productivity and get more done in less time is essential to achieving great sales results, making more commissions, working less, and having more personal free time.

Here are 10 sales coaching tips to boost your productivity to new levels:

1. Most Important Things First. The most important task you need to get done each day should take priority over all other tasks. However, we all know that interruptions can pop up and the important task often gets put off.
If you put the most import thing off until later in the day, they often don’t happen. Your goal should be to get your most important things done first thing in the morning before doing anything else.

2. Wake Up Earlier. Get up just 30 minutes earlier and you can get a jump start on some of your most important tasks for the day. Decide what you’d like to accomplish each morning, and design your routine around your most important tasks.

3. Streamline Information. Think about all the information you receive on a daily basis: emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blog updates, newsletters, mailing lists, magazines, newspapers, and mail. Start to edit and remove anything that you no longer are using or benefiting from.

4. Clear Of Your Desk & Get Focused. Get rid of everything off your desk that you don’t absolutely need. Remove all distractions and focus on one thing at a time. With a clean and clear desk, it becomes much easier to be productive and organized.

5. Get To Work Early; Leave Early. Ever notice how much you get done when no one else is around? Consider coming into work a little early to start on your most important things without interruptions. The trick here is to make sure you set an end time to your day. So if you want to leave a 4:00PM, commit to it and it will also help you focus on getting more done before that time.

6. Schedule Your Meetings & Avoid Last Minute Meetings When Possible. Consider each situation, but in general, see if you can aim to always schedule your meetings instead of taking on the spot meetings in your office that will throw off your momentum. Remember that whatever is on your schedule for you to be focusing on, should be treated like a meeting that is already in progress.

7. Eliminate Non-Essential Work. You will only be productive in sales if you are working on activities that are going to move you towards your goals. Remove or delegate non-essential tasks from your to-do lists, and start to say no to new requests that are non-essential.

8. Do The Tough Stuff First. Do these first thing in the morning. If you put the tough tasks off, they will only become more and more difficult to accomplish.

9. Shut Off Your Internet Connection. Schedule times when you will be online to check email or research on the web. Working off-line can help you increase your productivity as you will be focusing on one task at a time without distractions. For many people, this one seems almost impossible, but challenge yourself to try it out and see what happens.

10. Get Passionate. If you truly care about what you are doing, you will work like a machine to get it done. It will flow and you will plow through your tasks without procrastination. Find the deeper meaning of accomplishing your goals and being productive. What will being more productive in sales enable you to accomplish, to do, to be?

About the Author:

Jeremy J. Ulmer is one of the most dynamic and requested sales coaching experts in the country. His company specializes in working with executive sales leadership, organizations, and individual sales performers to transform their sales results. They deliver customized sales coaching programs and sales seminars. Sign up for free sales tips and free sales coaching webinars at: http://www.SalesCoachingHabits.com/ or Follow @JeremyUlmer on Twitter.

Article Contributed by Michele DeKinder-Smith

When a female entrepreneur is ready to hire help, delegating to an assistant may seem more cost-effective and less complicated than hiring an entire team. While working with a team yields great results for most entrepreneurs who choose to do so, an assistant can provide an extra set of hands immediately and a link to a team in the future. An assistant can handle some of the daily tasks the entrepreneur doesn’t have time for, such as listening to voicemail messages, checking e-mail or running errands. Also, an assistant can help an entrepreneur stay on schedule and can act as a sounding board. In the future, an assistant can act as a liaison between an entrepreneur and her team.

A recent study from Jane Out of the Box, an authority on female entrepreneurs, reveals there are five distinct types of women in business. Based on professional market research of more than 3,500 women in business, this study shows that each type of business owner has a unique approach to running a business and therefore each one has a unique combination of needs. This article outlines three of the five types and provides tips for each one to consider when hiring an assistant.

Merry Jane business owners typically are building a part-time or “flexible time” business that gives her a creative outlet (whether she’s an ad agency consultant or she makes beautiful artwork) that she can manage within specific constraints around her schedule. She may have a day-job, or need to be fully present for family or other pursuits. She realizes she could make more money by working longer hours, but she’s happy with the tradeoff she has made because her business gives her tremendous freedom to work how and when she wants, around her other commitments. About 19 percent of women business owners fit into this category.

Because a Merry Jane business owner has many responsibilities in addition to running her business, she might consider selecting an assistant who has the confidence to work independently, and the knowledge to make the right decisions for the company and to handle the business details so Merry Jane can exercise her creativity. Merry Jane enjoys a smooth-running life, so a detail-oriented assistant who can keep the different aspects of the company in order will prove helpful as well.

Merry Jane-run businesses often do not generate enough work to justify hiring a team, but as the entrepreneur’s circumstances change and she evolves into a different type of business owner, the business may grow, too, requiring more sets of hands.

Professional skills and experience Merry Jane should look for: customer service, financial knowledge, marketing knowledge.

Personality traits Merry Jane should look for: confidence, detail-oriented, decision-making capabilities, flexibility.

Tenacity Jane is an entrepreneur with an undeniable passion for her business, and one who tends to be struggling with cash flow. As a result, she’s working longer hours, and making less money than she’d like. Nevertheless, Tenacity Jane is bound and determined to make her business a success. At 31% of women in business, Tenacity Janes are the largest group of female entrepreneurs.

A high percentage of Tenacity Jane-run businesses are young – less than four years old. In many cases, a Tenacity Jane business owner has knowledge in her craft or skill, but not in running a business. Also, Tenacity Jane business owners tend to lack focus; while their boundless passion results in many wonderful ideas, their businesses cannot support all those ideas at once. Keeping both of these issues in mind, a Tenacity Jane business owner would do well to hire an assistant with experience in business particulars (whether it’s marketing, budgeting or planning), and with the ability to help Tenacity Jane hone her passion into a particular area until the business grows enough to sustain another bold vision.

Professional skills and experience Tenacity Jane might look for: business planning knowledge, marketing knowledge, planning skills.

Personality traits Tenacity Jane should look for: focus, confidence, reality-based thinking.

Accidental Jane is a successful, confident business owner who never actually set out to start a business. Instead, she may have decided to start a business due to frustration with her job or a layoff and then she decided to use her business and personal contacts to strike out on her own. Or, she may have started making something that served her own unmet needs and found other customers with the same need, giving birth to a business. Although Accidental Jane may sometimes struggle with prioritizing what she needs to do next in her business, she enjoys what she does and is making good money. About 18% of all women business owners fit the Accidental Jane profile.

Because Accidental Jane so enjoys her freedom, she (like Merry Jane) might want to look for an assistant who feels confident enough to make decisions on his or her own, and who doesn’t necessarily require traditional employment in an office. Also, Accidental Jane should hire an assistant with whom she enjoys working, even if the relationship is entirely virtual or by phone, because she deeply values all of her working relationships. Accidental Jane’s assistant must be customer-friendly because Accidental Jane business owners value their working relationships and because their companies typically thrive on repeat business and referrals.

In the future, if Accidental Jane chose to hire a team, her assistant must be capable of managing that team so that Accidental Jane could maintain her time freedom.

Professional skills Accidental Jane should look for: great customer service, the ability to work independently, excellent communication skills via e-mail or phone, managerial skills.

Personality traits Accidental Jane should look for: confidence, loyalty, a self-starter.

In many cases, hiring an assistant can provide a female entrepreneur with innumerable benefits, especially when the business owner takes the time to carefully select an assistant with the business skills and the personality to fit her needs precisely.

About the Author:

Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com

Article Contributed by Sharpenz

The benefits of sales meetings and consistent and timely connections outside the front line include improvement readiness, recharging, repeatability and retention. If these benefits are important, then how do you ensure your meetings are timely?

There are several ways:

1. Hold regularly scheduled meetings. Meetings need to be held often enough to keep sellers at top performance. Cars need oil changes every 5,000 miles, how often do your sellers? Weekly meetings with a purpose are still the ideal.
2. The time with your team should focus on what is most important – help them sell more to reach (or exceed) their goals and energize them. Many meetings default to “sharing” of numbers, product updates, operation issues, or process changes. If there is a lot of “sharing” needed, narrow it down to the basics for the “live” time together. Use other means (handouts, emails, etc.) to share the nitty gritty details.
3. Focus on different “times.” Past, Present and Future are all important. Most meetings I have observed focus on the past and the present — more of that “sharing” of information. A meeting becomes timely when more focus is on the future – equipping your team to sell more, get in front of more people, and build their confidence and competence to exceed quotas.

When Alice Kemper was a sales manager at Harte Hanks Communications, she broke her 60-minute weekly sales meeting into 45 minutes of training and 15 minutes of need-to-know information. Her results speak for themselves. “Our team had less turnover and higher results that many of the other teams,” she said. ”And each time a new branch was opened, the new manager-to-be was selected from my team. That time investment was a strategy.”

A guideline: Break whatever meeting time you have into:

• 10% focused on the past (sales results, wins, losses, etc.)
• 10% on the present (current promos, operations updates, etc)
• 80% building for the future

For a 60-minute meeting that’s about 10 minutes of what happened, 10 minutes of present information and 40 minutes to help them capture more sales in the future!

What do you do to ensure your sales meetings are timely? Let us know in the Comments section.

About the Author:

Sharpenz is dedicated to providing sales managers the resources and tools they need to motivate and equip their sales team to sell each week. Our 30-minute power sales booster programs help companies increase sales by providing the right tools and training – fast. Designed with the busy manager in mind, Sharpenz’ ready-to-go sales training kits will give your sales team the opportunity to grow and earn more – all in a half hour of power.  To learn more, visit www.Sharpenz.com and sign up for your free sales training kit today!