Five Sales Productivity Mistakes that You’re Making Right Now

The single most valuable resource in sales is time. This means that you have a given amount of time during the course of a day to accomplish everything you need to do. There are a number of mistakes that salespeople commonly make that impair their productivity.

Five Sales Productivity Mistakes that You’re Making Right Now

#1. Checking emails all day. There’s nothing that will drain your time more than constantly checking your inbox. This will pull you away from the most critical activities that will actually make you money.

Rather than checking emails throughout the day, designate a few blocks of time specifically for email activity. Outside of that, leave your email program off-limits.

#2. Responding to emails immediately. Email by definition rarely requires that you respond immediately. If the sender truly wanted an immediate response, he or she would have phoned you.

Rather than jumping to respond to emails, focus on responding only to messages during the preset blocks of time specified strictly for email activity.

#3. Following a to-do list. A to-do list is a non-prioritized list of tasks that you’d like to get through during the course of the day. Rather than having a to-do list, create a list of time-dated tasks. And, if you find that you keep pushing a particular task over into the following day three times, it means that it’s not important enough to do and should be removed from your calendar.

#4. Prospecting when you have time. Prospecting is the single most important activity that you can do right now to insure that you’ll be making money in a few months. So rather than simply prospecting when you have time, block out a particular time during each day, or certainly at least each week, to provide sufficient time for prospecting. The most effective salespeople block out an hour or two during each day strictly for prospecting. Try buying a cheap kitchen timer use it to block out one-hour chunks of time with no distractions.

#5. Letting meetings run on for far too long. One of the most common mistakes that salespeople make is letting a sales meeting simply drag on and on. No sales meeting should exceed 60 minutes unless there’s a very clear agenda with extenuating circumstances. Most sales meetings can be conducted in a relatively brief period of time, thereby giving you more time to either set up other meetings or do whatever you must during the course of the day.

These mistakes create heavy baggage that just weighs you down. By avoiding these five sales productivity mistakes—which you may committing at this moment—you can free up your time to focus on what is most critical to making money.

Which of these mistakes do you find that you commonly make? Please share below in the comments.