If you’re not making the sales you want for your small business, you should assess how much time you’re spending (or rather, not spending) on nurturing and generating sales. When you’re a solopreneur, it’s you who is responsible for not only sales, but also operations, marketing, admin… the whole gamut. While you can’t yet clone yourself, you do need to maximize the time you spend on each area, particularly sales. Here’s how.
Find Extra Time
Before you laugh at the idea of finding an extra second in your overstuffed schedule, hear me out. So many of us waste part of our days on the wrong activities, and it’s not even obvious until we really pay attention.
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
- 10-10:30 am: aimlessly surfed Facebook [time waster!]
- 10:30-11 am: spoke to client
You get my drift. 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. 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 Your Sales Goals
Simply being dissatisfied with your current sales isn’t enough. You have to clearly define what it is you actually want. How much do you want to increase them? Which products do you want to sell more of? By setting your intention, you can go a long way to dedicating more energy toward your sales and actually helping them increase.
Set Up Strategy Sessions
If sales don’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. Whether you schedule a sales strategy session with co-workers or just yourself, this time should be spent assessing current efforts and coming up with ideas to boost sales. If you have a marketing department, rope them in so the conversation can really dig in to how both sales and marketing can work together toward common goals.
Make It Priority
Every element of your business screams for your attention, but few have nearly the impact that sales do. To that end, make sure it’s priority for you and move things around so you can focus on increasing sales.
If you could use even more help with your sales; I have a great free gift for you. Creating a sales process is the key to creating a sustainable business. I — along with one of my favorite sales experts in the world, Jeffrey Gitomer — am giving you a free, five-part webinar series called, “How to Really Make Sales.” You’ve seen Jeffrey on the New York Times Bestseller list no less than three times with books like his masterpiece, “The Little Red Book of Selling.” Jeffrey is a master at sales and I know you’ll benefit greatly from his knowledge during the “How to Really Make Sales” five-part webinar series.
Register here: http://www.getsales14.com.
If you want to:
- Outperform the competition
- Network in ways that bring in sales
- Turn the hardest parts of selling into the easiest parts
- Build rock-solid relationships with your audience and the influencers of your audience.
Mark your calendar: The Webinar series will take place LIVE on GoToMeeting at 1pm and replay at 4pm and 7pm that same day.
- Thursday October 30, 1pm ET – How to Attract Customers
- Thursday November 6, 1pm ET – How to Network and Make an Appointment
- Wednesday November 12, 1pm ET – How to Make a Sales Call
- Thursday November 20, 1pm ET – How to Close a Sale
- Thursday December 4th, 1pm ET – How to Build a Relationship
If you miss one, not to worry, it will replay twice after it’s recorded, so it will be available for you when you are ready to learn.
Here’s how you can get your gift:
- Visit this link: http://www.getsales14.com
- Enter your first name in the registration box
- Enter your email address beneath that
- Attend all five FREE sessions on attracting the right clients and customers into your business.
We only have 1,000 spots open for this series. Between Jeffrey’s contacts and mine, we’re going to fill those well before the start date of the event. I want you to get in before we reach capacity. Register here today.
“Time Is The Face Of The Business” courtesy of stockimages / www.freedigitalphotos.net
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