Selling in a Crisis

28Three Choices for Your Time

Each moment of the day you are faced with three decisions about how to invest your time. You may spend your limited time on:

• TRIVIAL activities that add little value (e.g., cat videos, complaining).
• IMPORTANT activities that keep the wheels turning but do not create revenue and income (e.g., administrative tasks, email, meetings).
• IMPACTFUL activities that put new opportunities into your pipeline and move those opportunities through your pipeline. This includes expanding and retaining the revenue of existing customers.

The Law of Triviality describes the human tendency to waste time on unimportant activities while mission-critical tasks, like prospecting, are ignored.

It's why so many sellers allow non-sales activities to become an excuse for failure. The brutal truth is that it is not uncommon for salespeople to waste 50% or more of their time on low-value, trivial activities. In a crisis, when every employee is under a microscope, this is career suicide.

Of course, you must do the important things. If you don't take care of the admin work, keep the CRM updated, and respond to emails, you'll quickly be dealing with angry customers and a pissed-off boss. Even during a crisis, there is a bureaucracy to feed.

You just can't allow important work to take priority over impactful activity. It cannot become an excuse for not prospecting, selling, and expanding the revenue in your existing accounts. Important activities should support impactful activities, ...