Chapter 20

Time Management for Salespeople

A salesperson does so much more than simply sell. A salesperson prospects, qualifies, cold calls, warm calls, networks, follows up, generates leads, serves customers, asks for referrals, develops marketing plans, prepares proposals, handles objections, role-plays and rehearses, researches, troubleshoots, files, mails, and asks for the close.

Yet all this boils down to that most fundamental function: making the sale. Boosting the bottom line. Generating revenue. Producing income. The efforts and energies of the salesperson all have to flow in the direction of selling. And the more time the salesperson can devote to making the sale, the more successful the salesperson becomes.

Top performers use their time more effectively to create and convert leads at a higher rate per hour and invest less time convincing people to buy, to buy through them, and to take action now. In the world of sales, time management is a critical skill.

Through decades of experience as a sales leader, sales coach, motivational speaker, and consultant, I discovered that few sales professionals understand exactly how to effectively invest their time when faced with the many tasks required of the job. Early in my career, I developed a system for time management that has served me and thousands of my clients well. By sticking with this program, I achieved and exceeded any sales goal I ever set for myself. And you can, too. In this chapter, I share these not-so-secret secrets with you.

Breaking Your Time-Investment Portfolio into Three Categories

Just as a good financial planner chooses diverse investments to balance a portfolio, a professional of any sort balances the way he or she invests time in the many job-related tasks required on a daily or weekly basis. And just as the well-balanced investment portfolio differs for individuals at various life stages, time investment varies according to profession.

For the salesperson, that time-investment portfolio divides naturally into three categories of activities that make up a salesperson's job:

Figure 20-1 shows an ideal breakdown of your time into DIPA, IIPA, and PSA. When I take on a new client in my practice as a sales coach, the first thing I look at is where the salesperson invests his or her time. In the vast majority of cases, I discover the time allocation between DIPA and PSA is completely out of whack, with the person spending as much as seven hours a day on these production-supporting activities and as little as an hour — sometimes less — on tasks that produce income!

In this section, I discuss what each of these categories entails.

The money-makers: Direct income-producing activities (DIPA)

The job of a salesperson is to create and keep customers — after all, these are the people who produce income. To keep customers, you have to understand their expectations of service and performance and then ultimately deliver on that while communicating at regular intervals, checking the customers’ results, and gauging how satisfied they are with the service.

When working with customers, you should also explore other problems and challenges that your customers are experiencing. You can then provide solutions that enable them to reduce or eliminate those problems. Significant time can be saved by cross-selling products and solutions to existing customers. This can save you a large amount of time in working to acquire new customers. In sales, you want and need new customers, but if you can sell more to people with whom you already have business relationships, your income is more stable and consistent.

As a salesperson you might sell payroll services to companies. If your firm also offers accounting services or retirement plan compliance management, cross selling those services as well to your existing customer base can create more income and potentially fewer customer accounts to service.

Customers, whether they represent a high-dollar or low-dollar account, require a certain level of personal interaction with a salesperson. By using your relationship and exploring other additional services you can provide your clientele, you increase sales save yourself (and your client) some time. Remember: Business owners or managers want high quality-service from the fewest number of vendors. This saves time when problems and challenges arise and reduces invoicing and accounting as well.

Any and all activities that lead to producing revenue for the company — and thus income for the salesperson — are considered direct income-producing activities, which I refer to as DIPA. What, exactly, can DIPA tasks consist of? Here are some of the biggies:

The secret to success in sales is maximizing your DIPA time. The activities that comprise DIPA have a higher hourly value than anything else you do during the day. The most successful salespeople make a conscious decision to invest more time in DIPA as soon as they understand the value and power of actions directly linked to dollars.

How much time you can invest in DIPA depends on what you're selling and on your service support system. At a minimum, you want to invest 60 percent of your time in DIPA daily. Certainly, more is better and increases sales more quickly. Also, you want at least half of that time to be in the prospecting and lead follow-up categories of DIPA.

As a sales professional, speaker, and coach, I've discovered three actions that lead directly to leveraging your career and increasing your income: personal development, role-playing, and evaluating personal progress (I discuss all three in the “Planning your day around DIPA” section, later in this chapter). I've yet to meet a salesperson who didn't achieve top level when he or she consistently applied these three DIPA actions over time. The best news of all is that you can dive into these actions from day one of your sales career and never stop.

The prep work: Indirect income-producing activities (IIPA)

As a salesperson, you keep busy with a lot of actions that, although they don't directly bring in income the way prospecting, following up on leads, or making a sales presentation does, are essential because they support these activities. Indirect income-producing activities, which I call IIPA, include the following:

Although critical, IIPA shouldn't be time-consuming — keep these tasks to an hour or so (or 10 to 15 percent) of your day.

Many salespeople have a pretty easy time finding the right balance of IIPA time. Those who find it more challenging tend to lean toward the marketing side of sales: creating new marketing strategies or perfecting sales processes or sales systems.

It seems as though everyone invests a fair amount of time on social media websites. For salespeople, social media provides a way to create leads and generate sales while sharing everything from personal experience with a product to special pricing events. Sometimes, those who see your postings will be curious about you and your company, and they might check out your profile on LinkedIn. So remember to keep your information current, responsive, and (most of all) professional.

The amount of time you invest on social media needs to be balanced. Far too many salespeople have gotten caught up in reading and posting, much to the detriment of their sales efforts. It's easy to lose track of time and end up spending hours on, say, Facebook, and before you know it, the day is over.

Social media is an IIPA that needs to be done, so to avoid wasting time, take 15 minutes when you come in to post an article or blog post in LinkedIn or share a quote on Facebook. Then move on to other tasks. During your lunch time, catch up and engage with a few people; then create a post for the end of the day. Your business-related social media efforts should total around 30 minutes a day.

In coaching thousands of salespeople, I've observed that the overload of IIPA usually comes in bunches. It's not a day-to-day problem but rather a weekly or monthly challenge. A salesperson devotes a few days straight to tracking, analysis, or marketing strategies, for example. Based on a 40-hour work week, if you invest, say, even 80 percent of your time for four workdays in a month, that equates to 26 hours of time invested in IIPA, for a total of 16 percent of your time.

Although important to your overall results, marketing efforts can consume more of a bite in your schedule than is warranted. Overinvesting time in IIPA can throw off your DIPA attention and, as a result, lower your sales. If you see evidence of this, here's the solution: Pick up the phone now.

Administrative stuff: Production-supporting activities (PSA)

Numerous tasks support the direct and indirect income-producing activities — you know, all the administrative details (processing orders, crafting emails, servicing customers, monitoring delivery and implementation of what was sold, and filing paperwork) that are unavoidable parts of the job. These tasks don't generate revenue or even indirectly lead to income, but someone has to do them as part of the DIPA and IIPA process.

As a salesperson, keeping in touch with your clients, confirming specific service details, and ensuring customer satisfaction are important tasks that lead to long-term business relationships. And the only way to have long-term clients is to meet with potential customers.

Calling on a prospect is clearly a DIPA action; then developing a sales proposal for the prospect is an IIPA project. But the actual process of compiling, organizing, and sending of the proposal — and all this process entails — is a production-supporting activity (PSA). The administrative staff often manages these tasks, but even among the most fully staffed sales departments, the sales folks themselves have to handle some of the PSA tasks.

Your goal is to reduce the time you invest in PSA to the smallest amount possible. Are you controlling your time so well that you're investing 10 to 15 percent — or less — in this area? The PSA work's value is set by what an administrative assistant in your company earns per hour. If more than 10 to 15 percent of workday hours are spent on administration tasks each day, you run the risk of not achieving your financial goals.

Although DIPA can be worth thousands of dollars an hour, PSA time is probably valued at $10 to $20 per hour, depending on the market rate for good administrative help. The time you devote to the big-money activities is diminished, and you earn much less than you could.

Letting the numbers scare you straight

After asking hundreds of thousands of salespeople the normal amount of time they invest daily in DIPA and PSA actions, I've come to the universal numbers of two hours per day in DIPA and six hours per day in PSA. Does that sound like you? Here's a scenario that'll scare you straight. Say you earn $100,000 a year and work about 2,000 hours over that time. That means your value or worth is $50 per hour, or $400 a day based on 250 days of work.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Even if you invest the majority of your time in constructing, filing, copying, attaching, researching, organizing, compiling, and emailing a proposal, you're making decent pay for secretarial work. But consider this: Administrative skills have a market value of $15 per hour. So if you're spending six hours of your day on PSA, your earnings for that time are a total of $90 — which means in the two hours you spend on DIPA, you're earning $310, or $155 an hour. That's more than ten times the value of your PSA time!

Here's the time investment of a typical salesperson:

See where this is going? Yep, if you invert those activities — working six hours on DIPA and two hours on PSA, your earnings would be $960 a day, or $240,000 a year. I know you may feel sick at this point, realizing how much money you may be leaving on the table. That's the normal reaction I get from salespeople when we look at the real numbers and costs of PSA. The good news is that now you're aware that you have a choice in where you channel your efforts, you can make a change.

Everyone knows about lawyers and their billable hours, the time they bill out to clients. I was recently having lunch with a friend, a long-time attorney, and asked him what his goal was for daily billable hours. “Seven hours,” he replied without pause. He knew his number.

Think of your DIPA time as billable hours and your PSA time as nonbillable hours. A $100,000-per-year salesperson who reduces PSA time by one hour per day and invests that hour in DIPA can see at least a $38,750 increase in income. In practice, the increase is typically more than that because the salesperson creates more momentum, increases his or her sales skills, and increases confidence.

Tracking Your Time to See Where You Stand

It's hard to know exactly how much time you spend on DIPA, IIPA, and PSA functions unless you've tracked your activities over a period of time to determine an average. Taking stock is important, and it supports an undeniable truth in sales: When performance is measured, performance improves.

Recording your activities

By tracking your time usage, you're guaranteed to increase your time effectiveness. Figure 20-2 shows a form I use at Sales Champions to help our clients record and report how they use their time in half-hour increments — in the appendix I've provided a full blank form for you to use. Most people have between 16 and 20 half-hour increments to invest at work daily. Here's how to use this form to help you make the most of those increments:

Repeat the time-tracking process at least every six months. Over time, habits and behaviors may creep into your routine to diminish your effectiveness. A routine check-up keeps you on track.

The indirect income-producing activities are more subtle, and the definition of IIPA is more fluid than the definitions of DIPA and PSA. For your sales products or the services that you sell, what you consider to be IIPA may be different from what I do. There's no question that prospecting or lead follow-up is a DIPA action; and there's no question that crafting documents, collecting data, and other administrative activities are PSA actions. However, the middle ground is more open to interpretation. The ambiguity can lead to a misrepresentation of your time.

My best coaching advice is to free yourself to decide which sales-creating actions fit in each category. Really define your DIPA, IIPA, and PSA actions and create a list for each category so there's no guesswork and faking yourself out when your time allocation is off.

Evaluating your time-tracking sheets

The most successful salespeople are brutally honest with themselves and confront their strengths and weaknesses. They're able to look at their performance in an objective, real, honest, and constructive fashion. To get the most out of your personal evaluation, you should assess where you currently are with your time management before you plan how to allocate your time, noting where you're doing well and where you have room for improvement. Use your time-tracking sheets to identify how much time you spend in each category and when you perform tasks of a certain type. You can then use the review questions in this section during your self-evaluation sessions.

Looking back at your day

How often do you exclaim at the end of the day, “Where did the day go?” When you feel as though you've gotten nothing of significance done in the last eight hours on the job, go back and review the mix of PSA, IIPA, and DIPA. Then pinpoint the problems, plan for the next day, and nail down a schedule that ensures maximum productivity and keeps you on the path toward success. Ask yourself the following questions to identify what to change for tomorrow:

Keep a level head as you evaluate your productivity by accepting that although today is gone, tomorrow is a new opportunity to get it right.

Reflecting on your week, month, quarter, and year

At the end of each week, wrap up with an evaluation of how you did, asking yourself the following questions. This needn't take any longer than 90 minutes.

When you're comfortable that you have a good handle on what happened this week, then evaluate what needs to happen next week:

Repeat this process at the end of the month, quarter, and year, asking yourself how far behind you are for the month, quarter, or year to date. Your monthly reviews may take a couple of hours; a quarterly evaluation, perhaps a half-day. And at the end of the year, you may want to set aside a day or two to replay the whole year. Your yearly reviews differ in scope from your weekly and monthly recaps because you're looking for big-picture trends rather than daily or even hourly work routines.

Several years ago, my annual self-evaluation uncovered that if I don't take an extended break from work at about the ninth week, my effectiveness drops dramatically. I need at least a five-day break to recharge my batteries. If I don't put that break in my schedule, my intensity, focus, concentration, and results drop dramatically with each subsequent week. Most people limit their work patterns and intensity. Understanding your rhythm can dramatically increase productivity and results.

A DIPA success story

Kim, a one-on-one coaching client of mine, is an outstanding salesperson based in Eugene, Oregon. Every week, Kim gives me a report of her sales activity and time-investment breakdown into DIPA, IIPA, and PSA. I've worked with her for a handful of years and watched her income skyrocket from just over six figures to approaching seven figures this year. Her secret? She makes certain that her DIPA accounts for 75 percent or more of her time invested each week. She works an average of about 42 hours per week, with as much as 85 percent of those hours invested in DIPA. In addition, better than 50 percent of the DIPA hours invested are in the prospecting and lead follow-up segments of DIPA. She spends very little time in PSA. It's not a surprise that her income is higher than that of most heart surgeons in her town!

Planning Your Day around DIPA

Your first step in improving your time management is to decide to make DIPA a priority, to commit to it, to just do it! Stuff happens, and this is no greater a truth than in the world of sales. If you don't place your direct income-producing activities in your schedule, chances are that stuff will come along to commandeer your time — and the DIPA won't get done. If you fail to plan out the where, when, and how of your DIPA for the week or day, you can plan to fail.

Picking time for DIPA and using that slot wisely

Because DIPA tasks are the most important, you want to put those actions in the part of your day when you have the most energy, intensity, and focus. When are you better, sharper, or thinking most clearly during your day? When do you have the most energy and greatest focus? For most people, this period of high productivity is typically in the morning, but doesn't have to be.

Aligning your most productive time periods with your most important DIPA tasks is critical to your success on a daily basis. Whether you're an up-at-daybreak person like me or more like my wife, Joan — whose engine is misfiring until her second latte kicks in sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. — you want to determine your personal prime time sooner rather than later.

The best way to arrive at your alignment is through personal observation. Monitor yourself for a few weeks. You may even journal through your day, finding the sweet spot where you're most productive. You can also seek out the opinion of those who know you well. Ask your spouse or significant other, your co-workers, or your sales manager. You can even ask a parent, someone who's followed your biorhythms from your birth.

If you discover that your best time of day is the afternoon or evening, be especially diligent in protecting that high-powered period. As your day progresses, you encounter more opportunities for stuff to happen and derail your plans for an afternoon of DIPA. I'm not saying you can't do it, but just be aware that if you book your direct income-producing activities later in the day, you have to be extra wary of distractions, glitches, interruptions, and other trip-ups. (For advice on handling interruptions, see Chapter 15.)

Getting off to a good start

I'm at my best first thing in the morning. I have a greater storehouse of energy to invest, better intensity, and laser-like focus at that time. One of my critical DIPA actions is writing (as in this book). So when I'm in the middle of a book, I devote my early-morning hours to writing. In fact, I often wake up extra early to squeeze more morning into my day. With a 13-year-old and a 9-year-old, most mornings at my house are like a fire drill (and about that noisy), so it's not unheard of for me to be at my desk writing as early as 3:00 a.m.

When selling was my primary job — as it was for decades — I blocked my prospecting and lead follow-up time first thing in the morning as well (although I assure you I wasn't calling prospects at 3:00 in the morning!). I wanted to be sure that I aligned the high-production time with high-production action.

Giving priority to prospecting

Too many salespeople and even some sales trainers lump in lead follow-up with prospecting. Big mistake! These two actions are very different. Prospecting is the act of generating leads. Lead follow-up is keeping in contact with the leads in order to convert the leads into appointments or customers. During lead follow-up, you can dump some leads because their desire, need, ability, or authority isn't high enough or definable enough for you to serve them.

Combining prospecting and lead follow-up in one category is a mistake because most salespeople then take action only on the lead follow-up portion. When you're not creating or working new leads, your production and sales are only as good as the leads you have already. What happens if the leads are really low quality? What happens to your sales and earnings? Everything in terms of production, sales, and personal income is negatively affected.

I recommend investing at least 25 percent of your day — or at least two hours — to prospecting. You should also work to make that time consistent each day, meaning no bingeing on prospecting. Schedule the two hours each day and sew them in the schedule. Don't get to the end of the week, find out you're behind, and try to do marathon sessions to catch up.

Part of your prospecting investment is in qualifying prospects — determining their motivation, time frame, expectations, and experience; and which other companies may be competing for their business. You also want to know how they're going to make the decision. The questions you ask, whether on the phone or in person, help you use your time in the most efficient manner by eliminating prospects who don't exhibit the characteristics of a customer. The process also helps you craft the most on-target proposals to the prospects who do qualify as customers. Here are the three core elements to qualifying a prospect:

Leaving time for following up on leads

Lead follow-up is the process of converting your leads into customers — or at least into appointments. During lead follow-up, you can dump some leads when you determine they don't really meet the customer profile or it's clear that they're not in a position to buy at this time.

You should be spending less time on lead follow-up than on prospecting. Shoot for a 2:1 ratio at a minimum, or an estimated one hour per day. If you invert this ratio, you may run out of leads sooner than you anticipate — and find yourself playing prospecting catch-up.

If you have an overabundance of leads, then swing the percentages to lead follow-up for a few days, a week at the most. Just don't remain there too long, or you'll find your new leads dwindling.

Blocking out time for sales presentations

Many sales are completed in the sales presentation, where you're meeting face to face. But the online presentation world — such as meeting via Skype, GoToMeeting, or JoinMe — has exploded and creates options and efficiency in sales. These programs create a personal connection and offer a more experiential presentation than can be done over the phone, especially if you send supporting documentation beforehand. These type of sales presentations can save time. They require preplanning and scheduling, thus I rarely recommend doing an online presentation on the fly even those online presentations offer that level of flexibility.

Preschedule sales presentations in your time-blocked schedule. (Turn to Chapter 5 for more on time blocking.) As a salesperson, I knew how long a sales presentation took to conduct, so I typically had preplanned slots to do them. When I was prospecting, I'd use alternate-choice closes to garner appointments, such as “Would Wednesday at 1:15 p.m. or Thursday at 3:15 p.m. work better for you?” It kept me focused on booking appointments, and it increased my effective use of time through better organization of my schedule. It also helped me avoid the poor technique that most salespeople employ, which is asking, “When do you want to get together?”

Planning for personal development

The books you read, seminars you attend, CDs you listen to, and videos you watch can all have a dramatic and positive influence your level of sales success. When you invest your time into these learning activities, you can count on a healthy return. Although formal classes and classroom study are good ways to continue your quest for knowledge, you can squeeze in lots of learning opportunities without giving up vast amounts of time. Here's how:

Continuing education: A lifelong journey

I remember attending my first professional sales seminar like it was yesterday. I was fascinated with the speaker's understanding of how to become more successful, how he broke success down to a simple series of actions. One of those actions was personal development. He asked the attendees how many books they'd read in the last year. I was relieved we didn't have to share our responses with the group. Reviewing the last few years out of college, I could count the number of books I'd read on the fingers of one hand. And it occurred to me at that moment that there was a direct connection between the low numbers in my bank account and the number of books read, seminars attended, and self-improvement CDs listened to.

That was 25 years ago. The amount of time and energy I've invested in continued learning and personal development is immeasurable. I couldn't count all the books I've read or experts I've listened to, but I can tell you they far exceed the number of fingers and toes I have — and probably the total fingers and toes of my family, employees, and professional colleagues combined. And undeniably, my bank account reflects the riches and wisdom I've collected.

Wherever you are in your journey of lifelong learning — whether you have a high school diploma or a doctorate degree; whether you're fresh out of school or many miles into your career — you can reap great rewards from continuing the process of learning. Don't feel limited to the confines of formal education; the knowledge you pick up from printed and audio books, downloads, CDs, seminars, continuing education courses, white papers, podcasts, webinars, and computer studies goes a long way in boosting your sales success.

Role-playing: Getting ready for prime time

I put a great deal of emphasis on role-playing in preparing for appointments and sales presentations. These dress rehearsals are much more than a fun and frivolous exercise; they're a critical step in increasing a positive outcome from a direct income-producing experience. If you invest your time in role-playing, and perfect your scripts and delivery skills, you're bound to grow your sales results.

The time to practice isn't when your commission check is on the line! Here are some tips for working in some practice through role-playing:

To improve the quality of your message, you can rely on the two following theories:

Your success in improving the quality of your message is determined by crossing the finish line (X) and using the shortest amount of time (Y) to get there. A top salesperson uses a combination of presentations to prospects and a larger number of practice or role-playing sessions to advance further faster when striving to improver message quality.

Evaluating your sales presentation performance

The time you invest in evaluating your personal performance absolutely earns a DIPA rating. What you do with your time, how you invest it, how you make decisions, how you use your skills, how you work to improve — all these actions influence your personal productivity, and all warrant your most honest attention. (Although some people may feel that self-evaluation is IIPA, I really believe most salespeople don't invest enough time in evaluation, limiting their improvement.)

If you have aspirations to improve and increase your income, you have to be willing to critique your performance. Ask yourself the following questions:

Also do sublevel evaluations for a sales presentation in the area of objections-handling and closing. These two areas really separate the top-level salespeople from the middle of the pack:

Honest personal evaluation takes guts. Focusing on your problems, mistakes, and faults isn't fun. Although many salespeople may rank prospecting as their least-favorite activity, I suspect that personal evaluation is really the most difficult task. But if you never look in the mirror, you may never glimpse those ugly truths and correct them so you can achieve the success you deserve.

Scheduling your DIPA time

To make sure you focus on the most essential direct income-producing activities, be sure to separate out the most important and devote a specific amount of time to each. Of the many DIPA functions that you regularly undertake, a handful are critical to perform regularly, if not on a daily basis. To stay focused, set aside time specifically for each function. Don't lump everything together in a single DIPA time slot.

As you schedule time for your direct income-producing activities, consider these tips (and see Chapter 5 for more-detailed guidance on scheduling your time):

Incorporating IIPA into Your Day

After you've worked your schedule around your direct income-producing time, it's time to fit indirect income-producing activities (IIPA) into your day. Because they aren't linked as closely to bottom-line measures, IIPA tasks shouldn't take up as much of your energy, but in no way should you overlook them, either. Your goal is to budget time for them but keep them from eating into the most lucrative activities.

Using IIPA time to review sales results

By figuring out what works — and what doesn't — you can channel your efforts into activities that multiply your income. Examining how many leads a particular marketing piece generates, tracking the conversion rate of leads to sales, and plotting average order and average commission all fall under IIPA.

The time you spend gathering and analyzing data doesn't earn you money directly, but it does show you what works and which DIPA efforts you may need to tweak. For example, say your tracking reveals that from 20 leads, you convert only one of those to a sale. The barrier is likely between the leads and the sales presentation. I'm simplifying (you may have problems at the presentation level or at other stages, too), but the point is that by analyzing each step of the sales process, you can zero in on your strengths and areas of further work. Here's what you may discover from results tracking:

Keeping IIPA in check

To keep IIPA in check while staying on top of everything, I suggest these four tactics:

Even if you do most of your prospecting and lead follow-up out of your computer customer relationship management (CRM) program (see Chapter 8), I still encourage some salespeople to at least print out a hard copy of their calls on paper during their IIPA time today before they leave. Some salespeople get overwhelmed with the call numbers in their CRM. Engaging in creative avoidance is harder when you see all these names on a page rather than on a computer screen. Some salespeople are better with a list and can see the check marks on their page. If that works better for you, do it. Technology for the sake of technology doesn't necessarily make things better.

Decreasing Your PSA Time

The goal of any salesperson is to get those administrative production-support activities (PSA) down to well under two hours a day, freeing up more time for prospecting, calling, lead follow-up, and other direct income-producing activities (DIPA). Awareness is the first step toward the proper alignment of DIPA to PSA. For a good gauge of where your time is going, track your daily activities for a period of several weeks using the form in Figure 20-2, earlier in this chapter.

Armed with the understanding that spending time on PSA saps your DIPA energies, you may be tempted to set a zero-tolerance policy for PSA. The truth is you'll never be able to avoid PSA actions completely, even if you employ an army of administrative help. Here's the conundrum: The more you invest in DIPA, the more PSA actions you generate. The two are interconnected. You make prospecting calls (DIPA), and a prospect wants a brochure, marketing material about a product, a quote, or even a sales proposal (PSA). Or you make a sale to a prospect (DIPA), and you now have to write the order, turn it in, follow up on the order and administrative team, coordinate delivery, check back to make sure the customer is delighted and using your product, and possibly train the customer on the use (PSA). So frustrating though it may be, generating more PSA work because you're increasing your sales is a good thing. Your goal is simply to keep the PSA in check, making sure that you keep your DIPA-to-PSA ratio at a healthy 6:1.

PSA functions surrounding sales tend to be recurring, requiring weekly or even daily attention. Here are several ways to keep these supporting tasks on a firm leash:

Questioning the way it's done

My late friend Zig Ziglar told a story about a 5-year-old boy watching his mother prepare a holiday meal. The boy asks her why she cuts off the end of the ham. “I don't know,” she says. “My mother always did it this way.” Now the boy says, “Let's call Grandma and find out why.” So they call Grandma and ask her why she always cut the end of the ham off. Her reply? “The pan was too small.”

People often continue to do their jobs a certain way because that's the way they've always done it. Sometimes the original reason for doing it is no longer relevant. Critically questioning your production-support activities can help identify and eliminate needless tasks, freeing up your energy for more-important activities.