How Are You Using Your Sales Downtime

Only about 1/4 of  a salesperson's time is spent in actual face to face selling.  The way the other 3/4 is spent is one of the big differences between a good sales person and an average one.  I know a guy at a large company.  His specialty is doing really big deals with other large companies that involve sums that are regularly in the millions of dollars.  Very little of his time is actual customer contact.  Most of it is spent in analyzing the facts and figuring out the most effective way to present his proposition.  Your deals may not run into these kind of numbers, but the more advance planning you do before meeting with prospective clients the better your results will be.  It's a great talent to be able to think quickly, to say the right thing on the spur of the moment.  But the salesperson who says the right thing usually doesn't do it on the spur of the moment, they have given it plenty of careful thought in advance.  What are your customers like?  What are their needs and desires?  What is the best way to appeal to them?  What offer could you make that would be most likely to get them to take action?  A good salesperson thinks about things like this any time of the day.  Even in your sleep your subconscious can be working on the problem.  While you are taking a shower, sitting in a restaurant or in a customers office.  You might be driving, flying, or riding on a train, but keep thinking about your customers.  The more you do, the more often you'll come up with the right answers, and an offer that hits the customer right  and closes the order.  Alert salespeople not only plan their approach to each prospect, but think about the objections that are likely to be raised in each case.  They figure out in advance the best way to overcome each of them.  They review their notes from the last contact to be sure there is nothing about the prospects situation they might have forgotten.  In  between planning your calls and approaches you should be charging you batteries with fresh information. Carry some reading material with you and have some good sales audio to listen to as you drive down the road.  Be prepared for the dozens of slack moments that are bound to occur in a salesperson's daily routine.  Make those moments count toward making yourself a better informed, better prepared salesperson.  If you figured the value of your time in cash at so much per hour you'd be very careful how you spent it.  You'd be shocked at the waste so many salespeople never stop to think about.