How You Can Use Time to Your Advantage to Be a Successful Saleswoman

Sales people are often looking for what they can do to give them the edge over their competition. Sometimes, however it is not that important to have a different skills or asset. Rather it is more important to be able to use what you have to your absolute best advantage.
So what is the one asset that you have in common with every other salesperson? The answer is "time". In fact the bottom line is we all have the same amount of time in each day as the next person, no matter how talented, successful or wealthy you are.
So what does a successful salesperson do with their time that is different to all the rest? Well they have mastered how to manage their time.
But it is important to say here that it is not how many hours you work that is the key to peak performance or profitable revenue growth. I am certainly not saying you need to spend every waking moment working just to get ahead. Instead it is the way you use your hours and how intelligently you allocate our hours to the tasks at hand which has the maximum impact on your sales career.
So in today's fiercely competitive marketplace you need to be the best manager of time that you can be. Because best use of time means increased sales and higher earnings. Or put bluntly, lost hours means lost sales and lower earnings.
Consider Pareto's Principle, the 80/20 Rule: Focus 80% of your time and energy on the 20% of your work. This is really important. Don't just work smart, work smart on the RIGHT things.
All successful salespeople spend most of their time doing what makes them the most money. They are disciplined time managers. In fact the top 10% of all sales people treat their time as their most precious asset and use it wisely.
You have to face it, in sales there are only 2 types of time; time that makes you money and time that does not. The time that makes you money is the time you deal with or handle customers and most of them are available between 9am and 5pm, unless of course you are selling in different time zones. So any activity that is not directly related to meeting people, building relationships and closing business should be done out of this time.
To determine of you are a master manager of time do a simple check. Over the next few days keep an accurate record of everything you do in your day. Just write short bullet points that reflect what you did and include everything, even when you stopped to grab a coffee or chat with a neighbour. Then go back through your notes and highlight the activities that were profitable actions. That is the actions that contributed to you making a sale or a profit. Then compare the time spent on these things to the time spent on non profitable actions. This exercise can be very revealing and help you decide if you need to rethink the way you plan or run your day.
Of course once you have done this exercise you then need become aware of what you do in your day and discipline yourself to stick to profitable actions during business hours and follow the Pareto Principle. Do this and the impact on your sales career will be amazing.