Mastering the World of Selling: The Ultimate Training Resource from the Biggest Names in Sales

Chapter 41. Biggest Time Wasters for Salespeople

Dave Kahle

The DaCo Corporation

Good time management for salespeople has been an obsession of mine for more than 30 years. In the past decade, I've been involved in helping tens of thousands of salespeople improve their results through more effective use of their time. Over the years, I've seen some regularly occurring patterns develop—tendencies on the part of salespeople to do things that detract from their effective use of time.

Here are the four most common time wasters I've observed. See if any of these apply to you or your salespeople.

ALLURE OF THE URGENT/TRIVIAL

Salespeople love to be busy and active. We have visions of ourselves as people who can get things done. No idol dreamers, we're out there making things happen!

A big portion of our sense of worth and our personal identity is dependent on being busy. At some level in our self-image of ourselves, being busy means that we really are important. One of the worst things that can happen to us is to have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing going on. So, we latch onto every task that comes our way, regardless of the importance.

For example, one of our customers calls with a back order problem. "Oh good!" we think, "Something to do! We are needed! We can fix it!" So, we drop everything and spend two hours expediting the back order.

In retrospect, couldn't someone in purchasing or customer service have done that? And couldn't they have done it better than you? And didn't you just ...