Close More Sales by Jealously Guarding Your Time

Your Prospecting Mindset: Jealously guard your time.

When it comes to sales, you must jealously guard your time. Many salespeople spend their day without planning how to maximize their time. It’s this mindset that ultimately leads to a lack of a sense of urgency—and a lack of a sense of urgency leads to wasted time.

First, it’s important to establish what you’re worth on an hourly basis to your organization. This is going to require some very simple math:

Your Hourly Rate:

How much revenue did you personally bring in through sales last year (or how much do you realistically expect to bring in this year)? This is your annual sales figure. Write it here: $______________

How many hours do you work in an average week? _______________

Multiply the number above by 50 weeks ([# of hours in your workweek] x 50). What does that equal? _______________

This is the total number of hours you work in a year.

Now simply divide your annual sales figure from above by the number of hours you work in a year ([annual sales] / [# of hrs you work in a year]). What does that equal? $_______________ / Hour

You’ve just calculated your hourly rate to your company. It’s probably much higher than you might have imagined. This means that your job as a salesperson is to maximize each hour as much as possible. Wasted time checking emails, calling prospects who will never work with you, or grabbing lunch with anyone who invites you out, must become a thing of the past. Like one of my mentors always says, “If it isn’t making you money, it’s not worth doing.”

Written by Marc Wayshak, author of Game Plan Selling and a sales trainer in Boston, MA.