This week kicks of the beginning of third quarter which means you have basically a little more than five months to reach you annual revenue goal. But if you are too busy making the donuts to focus on closing your next large donut order you will soon have yet another cash crunch. If you are the main sales person in your business and you’re not making the sales you want, it’s time to assess how much time you’re spending (or if we are keeping it real, not spending) on nurturing prospects and closing deals. When you’re a solopreneur, responsible for not only sales, but finance, admin, operations, and marketing.… it’s easy to become overwhelmed and forget about working on sales consistently. While we all wish that we could clone ourselves, you need to focus on the thing closes to money first. In other works, you need to maximize the time you spend on sales. Here’s how you can organize your time to boast your 3rd Quarter Sales efforts.
Make the Time
Before you laugh at the idea of finding an extra time in your action-packed schedule, trust me there are things you need to stop doing. I have rule, if your time is billable at $75-$400/per hour why would you spend your time on $15-$20/per hour work? When it comes to low level administrative tasks (that you might not be that good at anyway), you should outsource it, delegate it or automate it. So many of us waste our days on the wrong activities, and it’s not even obvious until your sales pipeline is dry. Once you start really paying attention, you’ll see where the time goes. For one week, write everything you do in a calendar, including how much time you spend on each activity. So Monday might look like:
- 8-8:30 am: checked emails and responded to them
- 8:30-8:45 am: coffee break
- 8:45-10 am: wrote blog posts
- 10-10:45 am: aimlessly surfed social media, especially Instagram [time waster!]
- 10:45-11 am: spoke to client
You see where this is going, Right? The goal here is to find those spots of time when you’re not doing things that will contribute to the growth of your company. You always want to be working on your most high valued activities. This exercise will also help you assess what tasks you could hand off to others. In this example, you could hire a freelance writer to take over the blogging and free yourself up tremendously.
Set Weekly Sales Goals
If you are dissatisfied with your current sales, your probably not holding yourself or your team accountable to weekly sales goals. You have to clearly define what it is you actually want to accomplish. If you are trying to generate $500,000 this year, that means you need to generate $42K a month, and if you need to $10, 500 a week. How much do you want to increase your sales this quarter? Which products do you want to sell more of? By setting your intention, and a specific sales goal, you can go a long way to dedicating more energy toward your sales target and actually increasing your results.
Do Weekly Strategy Sessions
If your sales pipeline doesn’t cross your mind until you see each quarter’s low numbers, move it to the front of your mind by putting it on your calendar weekly to check. Whether you schedule a sales strategy session with co-workers or just yourself, this time should be spent assessing current customers, pending sales efforts and coming up with ideas to boost sales. If you have a marketing department, roping them in so the conversation can really leverage how both sales and marketing can work together toward your sales goals.
Make Your Sales a Priority
Every element of your business screams for your attention, but few have nothing has the impact that sales do. It’s the lives blood of your business. Make sales a priority in your business and move things around so you can intentionally focus on your sales efforts so that you don’t get caught with increasing expenses and no sales.
Leave a Reply