Sometimes our problems with using time effectively are internal, silently lurking in the confines of subconscious routines. You can create the greatest plans in the world, have the best intentions, be full of energy and thoroughly prepared, but be rendered ineffective by mindless time-wasting habits, many of which you are probably not even aware.
Recently, I was interviewing salespeople for a project for one of my clients. One of the salespeople mentioned that he often obtained demonstration samples by coming into the office, visiting the warehouse, opening a box of the product he wanted to sell, taking one out, and re-closing the box.
As you can imagine, this gave the warehouse manager fits. However, there were more consequences to this practice than a furious warehouse manager. This is an example of salesperson’s gunk!
What’s gunk? Any practice that detracts from the time you spend with customers. In other words, unnecessary things that you do instead of meeting with customers. Usually, these are mindless habits that waste time—things you do routinely and rarely think about.
Most drainage pipes, over time, accumulate layers of gunk that clog up the system. The gunk accumulates silently and slowly until it eventually stops the flow of drainage completely. Most salespeople accumulate layers of habit that erode the time you spend in front of the customer. It builds slowly and mindlessly, gradually accumulating to choke off the flow of positive efforts.
When we boil your job down to its essence, it is clear that the one thing your company wants of you—the one thing that you do that brings value to your organization, the essential reason for your job—is to interact with the customers. Everything else is a means to that end. So, in terms of priority, interaction with your customers and prospects is number one. Gunk is any practice on your part that reduces the time you spend with customers.
Salesperson’s gunk
Samples
In the example above, not only did the salesperson detract from the purity of the inventory, cause needless stress for the warehouse manager, and potentially short ship a customer, he also spent time doing something that took him out of his territory. The hour or so he spent gathering samples was time that he could have spent making sales calls.
In a gunkless sales routine, you would call or e-mail the person who was responsible for maintaining samples, and ask for the appropriate sample to be sent. It should have taken 30 seconds to send an e-mail requesting a sample instead of an hour driving back and forth to the office to get it.
Sales literature
In a gunked-up system, you regularly drive into the office to collect the sales literature you need. In a gunkless system, you maintain literature inventories in your car or home office, and regularly replace your inventory by e-mailed or faxed requests.
Emergency shipments
I was recently scheduled to interview a number of salespeople for one of my clients. We had sessions scheduled every hour. One of the salespeople didn’t make the appointment. The reason? He had to drive home, exchange cars with his wife, use the larger car to drive to the warehouse, pick up an emergency shipment, and deliver it to a customer.
While on one hand we can applaud the salesperson for taking care of the customer, on the other we need to recognize that this practice is an instance of extremely costly gunk.
This whole episode probably took the better part of a half-day of the salesperson’s time. Not only was that a very expensive delivery, but the episode detracted from the salesperson’s time and focus. Several sales calls were not made, and valuable face time with a customer did not happen, because the salesperson was acting as the company’s highest paid delivery driver. The company could have hired a limousine service to deliver the product for less.
In a gunkless sales system, an inside person expedites back orders and arranges for emergency shipments so that you are free to concentrate on interacting with the customers.
Office time
This is one of the largest contributors of sales system gunk. In a gunked-up system, salespeople come into the office regularly. Maybe you start every day there. That time in the office is generally your least productive time. There is coffee to drink, phone calls to take, mailboxes to empty, colleagues to talk with—all gunky practices that take up expensive selling time.
This is such a large issue that I have even developed a law similar in scope and dependability to Einstein’s law of relativity. I call it Kahle’s Law of Office Time. It states: Whenever a salesperson has 30 minutes of work to do at the office, it will always take two hours to do it. You know this to be true—an accurate observation of an immutable law of how the universe works. Whenever I’ve mentioned this law in my seminars, all the salespeople nod their heads in knowing affirmation.
This law has a huge impact on salespeople. Countless hours are lost every year in this specific glop of stinky gunk. In order to overcome it, you must strictly adhere to an important sub-commandment: Stay out of the office! Just don’t go there. Arrange yourself and your files in such a way as to be able to operate completely free of the office.
Keep your files at home. Store your samples in the garage. Create a workspace for yourself in the basement. Teach your kids to leave you alone when you are working there. Have the office forward your mail to your home. Ream this gunk out of your system!
I realize that this is an ideal that may be out of reach for many of you. Sometimes you must go into the office. The boss requires it. If you must go, then keep in mind the corollary to Kahle’s Law of Office Time. This states that if you go into the office at 8 a.m., with 30 minutes of work to do, you will not leave the office until 10 a.m. However, if you go into the office with that same 30 minutes of work to do, only you show up at 4:30 p.m., magically, you are done by 5 p.m.! So, apply sub-part A of the major rule:
Not making appointments—just showing up unexpectedly
This is frequently listed as the number-one time-waster by attendees in my seminars. You know what often happens when you just show up—if you get any time with the customer at all, it is preoccupied, leftover time where good things rarely happen. If your customer sees you, he often resents your unexpected intrusion into his day. More frequently, he doesn’t see you at all, and you’ve just wasted anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, and made him a bit suspicious of you. Bad move. Call ahead.
Small talk with people in the office
Okay, a little of this is necessary to cement relationships. But is it really necessary that you review last weekend’s football game one more time? Wouldn’t your time be better spent talking with a customer?
Not planning your day
Shame on you. Reread the Second Time Management Secret.
Reading the morning paper
Early in my career as a consultant and sales trainer, I shared an office with a colleague who had come out of the banking industry. He began every day by spending the first hour reading The Wall Street Journal. It drove me crazy. No wonder checking account fees are so high. By the time he got to section two, I’d have 10 phone calls made and be bouncing out the door. I had to restrain myself from tearing the paper out of his hands and screaming at him, “Why don’t you get to work!” Good thing he didn’t report to me.
Taking long lunches
When I close a big deal or work especially hard at a sales training seminar or a big presentation, I’ll sometimes treat myself to a long, leisurely lunch. I rationalize it by telling myself that I deserve a little R and R. Most days, however, I brown bag it. It takes less time, and I can use all the time that I can get my hands on. I don’t have to find a place to eat, park the car, wait in line, wait to order, etc.
When I’m on the road making sales calls, I try to either have lunch with a customer, or use the lunch hour to drive from one appointment to the next. I’m a master at eating while driving.
Not trusting the system, double-checking everything
Trying to do everything yourself instead of relying on your support people
These two combine to create one of the biggest slugs of gunk around. It is an almost universal problem of which almost every salesperson is guilty to some degree. That includes you.
For each individual salesperson, it’s a major time-robber. You know how it goes. You have to go into the office and write this order up yourself because your inside support staff just won’t understand the details. They’ll get it wrong. Or you can’t trust your customer service person to expedite a special order, so you have to do it yourself. Or you better go into the office and get that sample because your sales administrator won’t know exactly which one you need. Or you better meet the service technician at the customer’s place of business to fully explain the situation to him, because otherwise, he’s likely to get it wrong.
Any of this sound familiar? Of course it does. All of these are expressions of the attitude that you must do it yourself, because you cannot rely on other people in your organization to do it correctly, whatever “it” is.
Consider how many hours each month you spend exercising this noble attitude. It may cost you dozens of hours. It may even be the single most costly bit of gunk in your system. If you flush out this slug of gunk, you may be able to free up countless hours.
Where did this attitude come from? It’s been my observation that most field salespeople have an “independent” mindset. They enjoy the freedom that comes with field sales. They like making decisions about how to spend their time and manage their days. Many have aspirations of being in business for themselves one day—independent businesspeople. Naturally, they tend to think that they have to do everything themselves. When some problem crops up, their natural response is to solve it themselves.
That may be a description of you. Now, it may be that at some time in the past, someone in the organization dropped the ball and did not complete some aspect of a project to your specifications. That’s hardly enough evidence to warrant you jumping to the conclusion that you have to forever do it yourself. Especially in light of my observation that most of the time when someone inside the company doesn’t do something as well as you could, it’s because you have not fully explained the task, or you have not communicated as thoroughly as you should have. In other words, the problem was you, not them.
Suppose you were to reexamine all the tasks that you have, over the years, taken on yourself, when someone else in the organization could just as well be doing them. Checking on a back order and calling the customer to inform him of the status, for example. Make a list of all the possibilities. Consider every item on the list. How much time do you spend doing that thing yourself instead of trusting someone in the organization to do it? Next to each item on the list, put the number of hours per month you think you spend on that item. Use that number to prioritize your list, and pick one or two items on which to work. Later, when you have successfully dissolved those pieces of gunk, come back to the list and work on the next highest priority.
Now, take the one or two items you have identified as high priority, and think about how you can successfully turn them over to someone inside your company. It may be that there already is someone who is supposed to be doing them. The problem is you just don’t trust them to do it correctly. Here’s a question to ask yourself: “How can you change what you do in order to help them do that task more successfully?” Maybe you need to communicate more thoroughly what needs to be done. Maybe you need to set up a feedback system whereby they let you know when the task is successfully completed. Maybe you need to sit down with them and explain the way you would like to have it done. Maybe you have to apologize for your past rudeness to them. Maybe it’s you!
You may want to bring your manager into this project. I’m sure he or she has a vested interest in seeing that you are operating as efficiently as possible. If some part of the system isn’t working, then your manager needs to be aware of it. Enlist your manager’s assistance. Sell him or her on the project. Show how many hours you can devote to selling if you can delegate those high priority tasks.
Regardless, make it a point to successfully delegate that task. It may take a few weeks to pull it off in a way that allows you to be comfortable. Focus on those one or two high-priority items and work methodically at turning them over.
When you’ve successfully done that, discipline yourself to keep it turned over. Remember, gunk accumulates silently and stealthily. It’s easy to slip back into the mindset that you have to do it yourself. It’s a natural response for most salespeople. But that mindset is one of your greatest time-wasters.
Other mindless habitual gunk
You probably have your own bad habits that inconspicuously crowd out your selling behavior. Here’s a list I’ve compiled from my seminars. I’ve asked my seminar participants to reflect on their experiences, and identify some of these time-wasters; the following list contains those most frequently mentioned. I call them Frequently Practiced Mindless Gunk.
Hand delivering paperwork to the office instead of mailing it in.
Making personal calls on your cell phone.
Using the office computer to surf the Internet.
Taking long smoke breaks.
Making personal calls on company time.
Running personal errands on company time.
Eating lunch by yourself instead of with a customer.
Taking long coffee breaks.
Being unorganized.
Got the idea? You may have a special little time waster that you’ve treasured for years. If you’re going to be effective in our time-compressed age, now is the time to work to eliminate it.
The examples of gunk can go on and on. But you have the idea. Gunk is any habit or practice that detracts from you spending time in front of the customers.
From my experience, gunk is inevitable, and often invisible. Gunk habits develop with time and become part of the unwritten rules about how you do things. They become part of the mindless habits that occupy much of your day. Yet, they clog up your valuable time and energy.
One sure way to improve your productivity is to clean out the gunk, freeing your time and energy to devote to the essence of your job and the activity that will bring you revenue— interacting face-to-face with your customers.
How to de-gunk your routines
1. Identify the gunk.
Write a detailed blow-by-blow description of how you spent a day. Or dictate it into a handheld recorder. Repeat a few times. Then review your list. Look for gunk. As an alternative, use the Gunk Getter self-assessment from our Sales Time Management Tool Kit (available at salestimemanagement.com).
Sometimes, gunk is so deeply ingrained in your habits and routines that you won’t even recognize it. So, it may work better to have someone else review your notes.
Regardless, ask this question: Are you doing anything that could, at least in theory, be done better or cheaper by someone else? Anything that pops up as a response to that question is potential gunk. Then, when you have a list of a few gunky practices, prioritize them in order to work first on those that will give you the greatest improvement in sales time.
2. Decide to substitute some other action for any gunky practices you identified.
Remember that we’re talking about habits here, and habits are hard to change. To give yourself the best chance of succeeding, don’t try to just eliminate the gunk. Instead, try to substitute a positive action, and make that action a habit.
For example, let’s say that your gunk analysis revealed that you have the habit of starting each day with a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop while you read the morning paper. Okay, that’s clearly gunk. How do you get out of that habit? Not just by deciding to stop doing something, but rather by deciding to substitute something else more positive.
So, you decide to make your first appointment every day at 8:15, and to make your coffee at home and take it in a Thermos to drink as you drive.
You have now decided to substitute a positive action: 8:15 a.m. appointments, for a negative one: wasting time at the coffee shop.
3. Publicize your commitment.
You are much more likely to follow through on this change in habits if you publish your commitment. There is something about the pressure of telling someone else how you are doing that adds some energy to your effort.
Write down your commitment as specifically as possible. I call this creating a Precise Prescription. That’s a prescription for your new behavior. The more precisely you write it, the more likely it is that you will follow through.
You could write down this statement, for example, I’ll make early morning appointments instead of stopping at the coffee shop. That’s a good intention, but it’s not very precise. Suppose you rewrote to express it like this: I will make an 8:15 a.m. appointment every day of the week. That is more precise.
Notice that it is also measurable. Every day of the week is quantifiable. At the end of the week, you can look back and measure your performance. Did you accomplish your goal 100 percent of the time, 80 percent, etc? The more specific and measurable is your prescription, the easier you will find it to complete.
Now that you have it written down, let someone else know about it. Actually, the more people the better. Let your family know. Notify your boss. Tell a couple of colleagues about your plan. When you do this, you are setting yourself up for success. It is just more difficult not to do the new behavior when you know that several people are expecting that behavior from you. On the other hand, if you don’t tell anyone, who is going to know if you blow it?
4. Monitor your progress.
Keep track of how you are doing. Each day, or at least once a week, review your progress and give yourself a rating. (See our Sales Time Management Tool Kit for a form to use.) When you reach the point that you are mindlessly doing this new behavior, that you don’t have to think about it, you just do it. At that point, you will have created a habit. You won’t have to monitor your performance anymore. You can go on to the next layer of gunk.
Preventing future gunk buildup
The unfortunate truth of the gunk in your drainage pipes is that as soon as you auger out the pipes, gunk will immediately begin accumulating silently. So it is with the gunk in your regular routines. You can never rest. Once you have successfully eliminated some gunky habit, be assured that you’ll find another one lurking in the dregs underneath the first.
But take some comfort in this. Just as keeping the gunk from building up in your drainage pipes is easier than unplugging a stopped drain, preventing gunk from building up in your sales routines is easier than ridding yourself of habits that have been solidifying for years.
Just as you use a small dose of drain cleaner as preventative maintenance to keep your pipes clean, so too you prevent gunk accumulation in your sales routines by using a small dose of the same processes you used to rid yourself of gunk.
1. Identify potential gunk.
Once a month, while you are doing your monthly planning (see the Second Management Secret), ask yourself, “Did I do anything this past month that, if repeated, could turn into gunk?” You may discover that you made a run to the office to pick up a sample when you didn’t need to, or that you spent too much time enjoying a leisurely lunch.
2. Resolve to substitute some other behavior.
Right now, while it is on your mind and before you have an opportunity to repeat that gunky behavior, resolve to substitute some other tactic. For example, if you discover that you made an unnecessary run to the office for a sample, resolve right now to call and ask for the sample to be sent to you the next time you need one. Or if you discover that you spent too much time enjoying a leisurely lunch, resolve right now to make that 1 p.m. appointment 45 minutes away from your 11:30 a.m. meeting.
The time to prevent gunk buildup is now, before it has a chance to harden into an unconscious, time-wasting habit.
You’ll need to be gunk vigilant for as long as you are in the business. Just like the pipes in your home need maintenance forever, so does the gunk in your routine.
To implement this management secret:
1. Analyze your current routine, identifying any gunk.
Write or dictate a detailed list of how you spent a few days, or
Use our “Gunk-Getter” from the Sales Time Management Tool Kit.
2. Prioritize those slugs of gunk that you want to work on first.
3. Write out “Precise Prescriptions” for your new gunk-less behavior.
4. Publish those prescriptions.
5. Substitute some positive behavior for the gunky practice.
6. Repeat and monitor it until it becomes a habit.
7. Move on to another slug of gunk.