Have you heard of the six P’s?
Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance? As you know this is true, here is a step-by-step process for preparing yourself before and after your in call selling process.
In step one you will take a macro view of your territory and organisation yourself for maximum efficiency.
In step two you will prepare yourself for the actual sales call for maximum effectiveness.
Finally in step three you will review you call against your objectives, to help prepare for your next call.

STEP ONE – Territory organisation and planning

You could perform your territory organisation and planning at the Sales Strategy stage , as this could highlight particular geographical areas that you could target. Otherwise, during your Prospecting phase , you could divide your time and resources according to your planned territory.

Territory

Most professional sales people will have a geographical territory to work on. This could be anything ranging from Continents down to Streets, depending on the nature of your business.
For the purposes of this illustration we will assume your territory is region within a nation, for instance a common one in the UK would be the Northwest of England, including North Wales.

Sub-territories

The first step would be to divide your territory into four equal sub-territories, based on the market size of the prospective customers in that sub-territory. If at this stage you don’t know what the potential business in your territory is, just divide it based on the size of the population numbers or conurbation sizes. Label these territories A-D.

Next, if you can get hold of a physical map, wall chart or atlas of this area, mark on the territories and the location of known customers or prospects.
There are several ways to do the next stage, where you allocate a day in the week to each territory. I will highlight the simplest here. I will show you other methods on later blog posts.
This method is a great way if it doesn’t matter that you only hit one sub-territory on a particular day of the week. In this way A is Monday, B is Tuesday and so on. Friday is free for Admin, Office Work or whatever.

Which customers & prospects to visit?

In the next stage, you use a four week journey planner like the one below, to start to allocate your current customers.
Your criteria for allocating customers and prospects to particular days are as follows:

How often to visit them? Do you need or wish to visit this customer quarterly, monthly or sooner? You can use the ABC or Pareto methods to prioritise how often to visit. The ABC method is where you separate your customers into three groups depending on their monetary value to you.

Let’s say your biggest customer is worth £100,000 to you in sales per year. You could give customers of £50K plus status A. Customers of £10-£50K would be B and those less than £10K would be C. in this case you can then choose to visit your A’s monthly, B’s quarterly and C’s just receive a phone call.
The Pareto method or 80:20 method is based on the theory that 80% of your business comes from just 20% of your customers. You would then choose to maximise your time with these customers.

Your task, when you are filling in your journey planner, should be to maximise customer-facing time and minimise travel. Your objective when you are prospecting, is then to start to fill in the gaps in your planner with prospect calls

STEP TWO – Pre Contact Objectives & Planning

Pre contact objectives and planning is deciding what you aim to do and how you aim to do it. In a way this you can link it to your macro level Sales Strategy.
As you can see below, you want to have a What and a How, to be focussed and competent.

Contact Objectives

When should we set objectives? We can set objectives at different times:
Post customer contact ie. Directly after a visit.
The day before the contact.
There are benefits to both of these. After every customer visit, it is fresh in mind. However conditions or opportunities may have changed since the last visit and so the day before could be beneficial. Another option could be to set the objective directly after a visit and then review it the day before the call.

Test criteria for objectives.

Clearly define your objectives, so there is no ambiguity. Set the objectives against a recognised standard that is clear for both you and the company.
Next, your objectives should be measurable. This means it should be clear when it is achieved. They should also be performance driven.
It is great to have stretch goals and objectives, but they should be achievable and realistic on the one hand but motivating on the other. Stretching objectives test attitude and can foster personal growth. They also generate business growth.

Check list

I’m a big fan of creating checklists as they support self-discipline. Consider the following checklist for your in-contact sales call objectives:

Review the account plan. Where is this customer against its sales target?
Review last contact
Note your objective
Prepare yourself for the Analysis & Investigation step of your in contact activity
What information do you need and what do you want to know?
Plan your questions. Write them out beforehand.
What will be the key point of your Proposal?
What objections do you anticipate?
How you can Close?

STEP THREE – Post Contact Review

In practising a skill to mastery, continuous improvement is what you are after. This is where small incremental improvements are compounded over time. A useful tool you can use to help you in this is the Personal Improvement Grid. After every performance you can review your results and ask yourself the 4 questions, which are designed to root out any areas for improvement or where you can improve further.
This is a great tool to use after every sales call. It is simple and should n’t take too long, but it is very powerful if done habitually. If you answer these questions honestly for yourself and then put into action your findings, you will grow and improve immeasurably.

What did I do well – and why?

What went wrong – and why?
Then what could I do differently – and how?

What could I do that is new – and when?

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Scheduling

If prioritising is deciding what to do, then scheduling is deciding when to do it. Planning to fail is failing to plan, as the old saying goes. One of my first Sales Managers indoctrinated me into the world of planning. The reason is that once Monday morning arrives, you are already into your week. You will be pulled in all directions unless you have a plan of what to do and when to do it. This is where scheduling comes in.

The Calendar or Diary

I am assuming that if you have a career or are in business, you will be making use of a calendar or diary to record your appointments. So it is not really important what format this is in; it is more important that you use it correctly.

The first principle in the use of a calendar or diary is that whatever you record in it, is a commitment to yourself that it will take place. The calendar is not the place to record your to do list, or reminders for things that spring to mind. It should also not be a place for things that might get done. If you are not sure if something will get done, avoid putting it into your calendar.

Ideally you will have different views in your calendar; this is why I now use the calendar in Gmail. I only have to add an entry once and it shows in all views. I can view my calendar by day, week or month. You will see later how this is useful. So what should you be putting into your calendar?

Appointments

Any appointment or meetings you are committed to attending, by time.

Time bound tasks

Record any task that has to be completed at a certain time on a certain day. This is not the same as a task that has a deadline, but could be completed at any time. For tasks like this, I would add these to your single action list or project list (if it’s part of a project). You could also include tasks that need to be done on a particular day, but at any time.

Recurring tasks and appointments

Add any recurring tasks that need to be done. Your daily review meeting should go in, as it needs to be done every day; likewise your weekly review. These are two commitments you are keeping with yourself, so I would treat these like an appointment with your boss!

Regular daily routines

Now you may not want to fill your calendar with such mundane things as meals and travel times and I can understand that. However, as we will see later when you start scheduling, it is important to block off the time that is otherwise being filled by everyday stuff.

In Google calendars, you can have a separate calendar called the Unschedule, which can be merged into one view. You can switch on/off the calendars, which means that when you are planning your time, you have a clearer picture of what is actually available.

Once you have planned your time, you can switch off the Unschedule, to view only your main calendar. I got the name Unschedule from Neil A. Fiore’s Now Habit, a great book about how to stop procrastinating and make a start on your projects.

Don’t overfill your calendar. It’s better to have less in your calendar and get into the completion habit, rather than overfill and be disappointed in your failure to complete.

The Weekly Schedule

Now that you know what you should be putting into your calendar, it’s time to get down to scheduling. At your end of week review you will set aside some time to plan your upcoming week. Here you would look at the Week View in your calendar to give you an overview of your week.

If you use the Google Unschedule calendar, this will show you where you might have overcommitted yourself. Make sure you are leaving time for meals and travel. Also make sure you have left time for preparing and debriefing meetings. Have you left enough time for exercise, family time or “me time”. If not put it into your unscheduled calendar. Once you have done this, you might be surprised at how little time you actually have left to work on your goals and projects. Now is the time to make some adjustments.

Weekly Goals

Look at your weekly goals. With your free time available, do you really have enough time to achieve what you want? If not you have two options – downgrade your expectations or remove something from your calendar. This means saying no to somethings that are not moving you towards your vision of the future.

Can you forgo an hour’s worth of TV, to go to bed an hour earlier? You could get yourself up earlier the next day and use this time productively. By the way an hour in the morning is worth two in the afternoon.
Once you are happy with your weekly schedule and goals list, it’s time to get back to the here and now.

The Daily Schedule

“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” – Thomas Carlyle.

Dale Carnegie in is timeless classic How To Stop Worrying And Start Living tells us the story of Sir William Osler who cures his stress by living in day tight compartments. Just like an ocean liner whose hull is separated into watertight compartments; if one such unit is punctured, the ship should not sink because the others will be intact. In the same way, living in day tight units means that you only concentrate on today. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.

If you have done your weekly scheduling properly, whatever turns up in your calendar today was totally planned for. What this concept means is that you have certain things you plan to achieve in a day and you will also have stuff happen. As you can only deal with what is in front of you, it is important to focus just on today. This is the art of working effectively.
As we discussed in the prioritising section , each evening you will plan out what your most important tasks are. Now you can assess your daily schedule, which will already include your appointments and any recurring tasks and appointments.

Daily Calendar Print Off

As I said before, my schedule lives in Gmail, so it automatically syncs across all my devices. Everyday, however, I print off my day view calendar. This is where I write in my most important tasks, preferably as early in the day as possible. This daily calendar print off is the document that runs my life. It details everything I am committed to achieving, doing or attending that day. There is nothing tentative in here and I will do my damnedest to finish everything on it. Once the day is complete, I file that day’s sheet, ready to start a new days’ sheet.

Finally I will finish this section with one of my favourite poems, which I think sums up why we should bother scheduling – so that we are free to enjoy each day.

Salutation of the dawn

Look to this day!
For it is life,
the very life of life.
In its brief course
lie all the verities and
realities of your existence:
the bliss of growth,
the glory of action,
the splendour of beauty,
for yesterday is but a dream
and tomorrow is only a vision,
but today well lived makes
every yesterday a dream of
happiness and every tomorrow
a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day!
Such is the salutation of the dawn.

Ancient Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa

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