CHAPTER 6

Earning Selling Time

If you’re in sales, time is your enemy. As much as any other factor, time conspires against you to frustrate and block your success in selling. It is the enemy that hides in plain sight and is largely ignored by most sales managers and salespeople.

Oh, sure, managers and salespeople are painfully aware of time in the context of achieving their assigned daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sales goals. Nonetheless, it is a striking paradox that professionals in a field so attuned to time in a calendar sense have so little awareness and appreciation of the critical role it plays in the most basic and fundamental interactions that are intrinsic to consistent sales achievement.

Time doesn’t have to be the enemy. It should be one of the most important weapons in your sales arsenal. Time should be the tool you wield to build trust, develop credibility, create value, and truly differentiate you, your company, and your product from those of your competitors. It is a strategic and tactical sales asset. And it will be a vital part of your efforts to elevate your sales capabilities and sales performance to the next level.

Before you can begin to use time to your advantage in your selling, it’s essential to understand the role that it plays at the very heart of every sales interaction. The concept may seem a little abstract at first. But once you understand how time works in selling and how customers make decisions about the use of their time, you’ll have a simple but powerful tool to use in every sales situation. Ready?

The first thing a customer ever buys from you is time. Before you can even sell your product, the customer must purchase your selling time, which is comprised of your own time as well as the information you can provide to help the customer move closer to making a decision.

The currency the customer will use to purchase your selling time is her time. But strings are attached to the customer’s investment. For her investment of time, she has to receive something of value from you in return that is equal to or exceeds her perception of the value of her time. This means that in each instance a customer invests in your selling time, you have to provide value in the form of information that will help move the customer at least one step forward in her buying process.

This simple barter transaction, this exchange of the customer’s time for your time and information, is at the heart of every sales interaction. The customer purchases your time. What will she receive in return? What return on investment (ROI) will she receive from you for her investment of time?

If you use the time the customer gives you to provide something of value, what should happen?

“They’ll give us more time.”

And what will you do with that additional time?

“Continue to sell to them.”

Exactly. If you provide something of value in exchange for the time the customer invests with you, then the customer will reward you with additional time to continue to sell to her.

What is a sales call? It is an investment by your customer. And like any investment, there is no guarantee that it will earn a positive return. Your job is to make sure it will. On every sales call, your primary responsibility is to make sure the customer earns a positive return on the time she has invested in you. (In Part III, I’ll share tips on how to maximize the value of every sales call.)

Busy people (such as your customers) must make hard choices every day about how to invest their limited time. In 1971, Herbert Simon, an economist at Carnegie-Mellon University—and a future Nobel Prize winner in economics—showed just how they (and we) do this. Simon wrote a prescient description of the upcoming information revolution and the impact that the ready availability of seemingly endless quantities of information would have on our ability to process and use it. Although Simon wasn’t specifically addressing the selling and buying of products and services, the conclusions he drew are certainly applicable in today’s sales environment:

[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Simon was describing a situation based on the laws of economics: The supply of any commodity, in this case the attention span of any consumer of information, is limited, and market forces will efficiently allocate that scarce resource among the various interests competing for it.

Let’s apply Simon’s lesson to the selling environment. Your prospects and customers are, by definition, consumers of information. They seek it from various sources—such as the Internet, social media, and salespeople—in order to make fully informed decisions about purchasing the right products and services for their needs. However, as Dr. Simon pointed out, customers have a limited supply of attention. At some point during their buying process, they have to make a conscious decision about how to allocate their limited attention bandwidth (that is, their time) among all the demands for that attention, which include vendor relations, administrative tasks, management responsibilities, meetings, phone calls, and e-mails, not to mention texting with their spouses, kids, and friends.

Your prospects make an economic decision about how they are going to prioritize their limited and valuable attention. Sellers who provide the greatest return to the prospect on the time invested in them will have the inside track; they will be given more time to sell. And sellers that waste their prospects’ time will not get responses to their e-mails and voice mails—no matter how many e-mails and voice mails they send.

Your customers calculate an economic return on the time they invest in you as a seller. This is called a return on time invested (ROTI). Every sales interaction you have with a prospect is judged on whether it provides value. If you are careless about how you spend the precious minutes your prospects have allocated to you, then they will make the perfectly rational decision to invest their time with another seller. Have you ever wondered why your prospects stopped returning your phone calls or your e-mails? Now you know.

The challenge for you becomes how to effectively cut through the thicket of information your prospects confront and become an asset rather than a liability on their attention’s balance sheet. The key is to accelerate your responsiveness. Responsiveness in sales is the combination of content and speed. In Part II of this book, I’ll show you how to accelerate your responsiveness by providing the complete and accurate information that your prospects need to move through their buying process in the least amount of time possible. If you do this, they will reward you with the time you need to help them make an informed purchase decision. Help your prospects get their jobs done more quickly, and they will continue to allocate more of their limited time to you because they’ve learned that you provide better value, and a better ROTI, than your competitors.