Organise and understand the value of your time

One option is to understand the value of your time and organise your day to be more productive  in generating business. Here are six concepts to help you do just that.

1. Money hours
Organise your day around the "money" hours. These are the hours that you can and should be talking with your prospects and customers. Going out on appointments. Calling on the telephone. Finding new customers and seeking opportunities with existing ones.

The money hours are too valuable to waste on non-revenue generating activities. Confine these activities to before or after your money hours.  This requires discipline doesn't it? How much easier is it to do a bit of paperwork rather than picking up the phone?

2. Best time to call

1. When calling 'c' level, persistency pays. Sometimes up to six phone calls are required.
2. Best time to call to get real people willing to do business is between 3:30 and 4:45.
3. Best time to get a "live" conversation is between 3:30 and 5:30.
4. Best results are obtained within 24 hours when returning incoming phone calls.
5. As you know, leave a good phone message.
6. Friday is the best.
7. Monday is the worst.

3. Prospecting hours
Dedicate a certain percentage of your money hours to prospecting for new business.  Vary the time of day you contact individuals to increase the probability of reaching them. As this is an activity most people hate, put it in your schedule. Then simply do it. Pick up the phone and as all telemarketers are advised, call with a smile on your face.

4.  Follow up
Do what you say you'll do. Ensure that you document your follow up immediately. Dollars to doughnuts if you set it aside for later you'll either forget to do it or you won't remember all the details.

Documentation can be your paper diary or even better your computer. Your proprietary or email software has the ability to be your memory and prompt you automatically. In Outlook you can use the Tasks or Calendar function, or To Do in Lotus Notes. When creating one, you can write notes, add attachments, - but more importantly you set a date and time for it to pop up and remind you to do the follow up.

Further use this prompting function to help you to maintain your follow ups when faced with a continuum of 'not yet's'. Persistency pays heaps, yet very few people persevere when they don't get an immediate yes. The prompt is also superb for those longer term "call me back in six months" follow ups.

To make it easy, standardise your most frequently used follow-up pieces for easy production and distribution. A little extra advice, with so much email clutter and spam filtering, if possible post the marketing or proposal material in addition to emailing. Emailing allows them to share and forward it. However many large corporations and government departments strip attachments or have mailbox sizes limited. So the recipient may never see your email or attachments. Posting a print version ensures they do.

5.  Keep improving
Make sure you schedule non-money hours for professional development such as sales skills, people skills or improving industry and/ or product knowledge

6. Know your statistics
Sales don't appear magically out of thin air. The 'yes' you got today from a customer, was generated by an activity that occurred in the past. One of the biggest problems for small business owners and the self employed is being too busy and allowing marketing and business development to slip off the radar.  In other words, not following point 1 - using the money hours correctly. If your sales funnel is four months and you were busy in February, neglecting to create activity, June will be unusually quiet.

Here are other statistics you should know:

• How many phone calls or emails to make contact with an individual?
• How many contacts to a qualified lead?
• Qualified leads to proposals?
• Proposals or Contracts to customers?
• Calls per hour?
• Follow up attempts before dropping?

By Debbie Mayo-Smith best-selling author and  sought-after international speaker. For a free quick tip newsletter, vast collection of 'how -to' articles and other resources to help you work smarter and save time, come to www.debbiespeaks.co.nz

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