You know, if there’s anything salespeople and sales managers love, it’s a good plan.
Developing plans, refining plans, targeting accounts, doing research for plans, all of it – you could fill every day with planning if you wanted to. Heck, some salespeople will make plans to make a plan! There’s only one minor trouble with this – none of it involves activity. In my language, sales activity is that work that we do that involves direct contact with customers or prospects.
Over the years, I have had a lot of salespeople work hard to convince me that all this planning has value; in fact, a lot of salespeople will try hard to sell me on the idea that the planning is actually better than the activity being planned. Which leads me to the question – when is no sales activity better than sales activity?
To answer that, we’ve got to break down the activity and sales process, and figure out how we make money. As I’ve written many times before, the basic equation of sales achievement is: Quality of activity xQuantity of activity = results. In other words, the more of it you do, and the better you are at it, the more successful you will be.
The value of any non-selling activity, then, such as planning, meetings, or training, is measured in the degree to which it can increase the quality of activity. This, of course, assumes that you would fill the time used for planning or training with direct sales activity, were you not in the planning or training – right?
Of course, sometimes planning is another word for “procrastination.” If you need a great plan to sell, and it takes time to develop a plan, then it’s unreasonable to expect you to engage in direct selling before the plan is done – right? Hardly.
Another way salespeople put off selling activity is through “research.” Some trainers and books have preached that you must micro-research new prospects before making a call on them. The idea is that you will discover information in your research that will greatly increase the likelihood of winning an appointment. In the real world, however, it hardly ever works that way, and the reason is the contact ratio;or the ratio of calls to conversations. That isn’t helped by pre-call research, and you’d almost have to win on 100% of your conversations to make the time spent in research worth it.
The same typically goes for planning. In my experience, you can develop 80% of a good sales plan very quickly; the devil is in the details, and the last 20% is the most time consuming – and the least profitable because it delays the activity. In the time it would take to develop the last 20%, you could be performing activity that would test your plan, and help you understand whether it works or not.
Training can be beneficial if you apply yourself and learn skills that increase the quality of your sales activity; assuming that the quantity of activity is good, an incremental raise in the quality of activity will continue to pay benefits long after the training is over.
So, back to the question, “When is no activity better than activity?” The answer is, “Not very often, and always tied to an increase in quality of activity.” Whenever you (or your boss) wants to spend time on non-selling work, always ask yourself, “Will this help me perform better day in and day out?”
