Does your office environment stimulate your highest level of productivity? Is there a place that you know you’re likely to be more focused and get more stuff done by just being there? Do you feel like you get more done in 90 minutes at this location than an entire day somewhere else? Maybe it’s not the location but the environment that puts you into a state of flow.
Commit to Nothing, Be Distracted by Everything
How does finding a place to zero in on your work translate into improving your sales?
To-Do List: #1 Prospecting
Does prospecting get you excited when you see it on your to-do list? It means unwelcome phone calls to prospects and email replies to remove them from my list. Prospecting is one of my strengths, but getting to the starting line to run the race is another story.
These are just a few techniques I use to avoid stepping up to the prospecting starting line:
- Bouncing from one call to the next
- Getting interrupted and interrupting others with instant messaging
- Responding to my phone buzzing and dinging with texts
- Checking email throughout the day
These days of futility happen for a few different reasons. Not planning my work the previous day is the biggest culprit. But not blocking times on my calendar dedicated to complete a task or not defending my calendar and letting it get hijacked with other people’s priorities are also to blame. Maybe the most important contributing factor to the futility is not defining when, where, what, and how long to perform a task, especially unenjoyable ones like prospecting.
Exercise Your Sales Muscles
Consider how well some of us avoid exercise. We know it’s good for us. We know it’ll make us feel better and that when it’s performed regularly over time, it produces great results. But we find endless excuses to skip exercising. Motivation or the lack of it is often praised or blamed as the reason exercise happens or not.
Here’s some good news. Motivation is not what’s needed to perform exercise consistently. This article by James Clear references scientific research that dispels the value of motivation to consistently exercise. Most importantly, the research identifies what actually works to routinely meet exercise goals.
The study above showed that simply writing down when and where you plan to exercise dramatically improves the chances of following through. It is easy to see that this same approach can be applied to addressing onerous, yet critical, sales work.
It feels effortless to start and complete a task without interruption, including even mundane administrative work like clearing your inbox or completing your expenses. For me, somehow the dust cloud of thoughts and ideas swirling through my brain dissipates for a brief time now and again, allowing me to focus. Finishing can feel exhilarating. Maybe it’s the sense of relief that the work is finally done. Being a habitually late filer of my expenses, that could certainly be my situation. But there’s more to this answer.
Can the Right Work Environment Improve Sales?
The type of work you’re performing can provide a heightened sense of satisfaction, for example, completing your prospecting goal for the day. Finding the right environment to conduct certain work seems to put us in the proper frame of mind, too. Here are the environments where I’m at my best. Maybe these locations and others are where you’re at your best too.
Places that produce focus or a state of flow:
- A coffee shop
- A hotel lobby
- A plane trip
How can a coffee shop with all the conversations and squelching of the espresso machine create an island of productive tranquility? The common thread across these locations is limited options. There is no refrigerator to mill through, dog barking, or about a million other things that are at my home office diverting my attention.
Get the Right Stuff Done More Often
First, we’re not robots, so thinking that we need to fill our calendar with eight hours of selling activities is a fool’s errand. Having been the fool chasing the errand, I know all too well about the negative implications. The constant sense of failure that I couldn’t complete what I planned was crushing. In David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, he describes how to plan your personal, family, and work life. It made me realize I was doing my planning completely wrong, but it gave me permission to see that three undistracted hours of work done most days is a successful workday.
A Better Work Formula
Here’s what we learned today about doing more fundamental selling work more often:
- Define when and where you’re going to do the task
- Block it on your calendar
- Limit the amount of time you plan to work on the task
- Pick the right environment
- Make the environment right
Applying the Formula to a Sales Function
Let’s apply this guide to a fan favorite selling function, cold calling.
Over the years, we know that calling at certain times like before 8:30 a.m. or after 5:00 p.m. may yield better results. Block your calendar to do these lovely calls at the time that works best for you. Let’s say the time and date are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 5:00 p.m. for 30 minutes.
Doing calls requires a quiet location, so it looks like the home office is where it will happen.
Finally, preparing the environment to be a distraction-free zone is critical. Let your spouse know you can’t be disturbed (let me know if this actually works for you, as it doesn’t seem to make two shits of difference at my home office). Next, either turn off the internet to your laptop or close down email and instant messaging. Have the list of people you want to contact in front of you and then get it done.
Fundamentals or a Hail Mary
None of this is going to make cold calling enticing or exciting for you. Along with the harsh treatment we often receive while doing cold calls, we occasionally find that gold nugget that helps us discover a new opportunity or push a deal forward.
Everyone remembers the Hail Mary play that won a game. No one remembers all the failed attempts to come back and win a game with a Hail Mary play. The percentages of winning with this play are below five percent.
Absolutely no one remembers or cares about all the practice that leads up to a win. You know, the overused cliche of practicing the fundamentals. It not only wins sports championships, but it’s also what delineates between good salespeople and lucky salespeople.
