Episode #367: Dealing With Organisational Distractions When Selling

We have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change. You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly. The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the predecessor was doing. If things had been centralised, now everything will be decentralised. Then here we are five years later, another CEO and we reverse course again. In the sales area, the goalposts keep moving. The raw numbers chase may now be leavened with big numbers, but from a better quality of client, as we move more up market. Or it may be that we spread the risks, by having a lot of middle level clients, rather than being too exposed and dependent on the big fish and our occasional whales. Or it may be profit, rather than market share, is the Holy Grail of the moment.

There is no doubt that these types of changes are distracting for salespeople. We get into a rhythm, and we are well organised and then next thing a big change swings through and we have to re-organise our lives and clients. We may have a campaign to get behind which alters how we have been working. It may impact the pricing, as we trade profitability for volume or the other way around. We may be on a mission to increase the number of new clients and bulk up the sales funnel.

One of the issues is that these distractions take our eye off the ball with our clients. We are suddenly wrapped up in admin activities and our time for prospecting is being diminished with endless meetings, new systems and more reporting requirements. Most salespeople are big picture expressive types. They hate the admin, the forms, the inputting, the detail focus. They feel they could be better off spending their time with buyers.

We may get a new Section or Division boss and the whole picture changes immediately as the new broom makes changes to territory or client allocation or commissions or whatever they feel like doing. These changes drive the entire team’s focus inwards and away from clients. We know this is bad, but we are swept up in the changes. We are desperately trying to navigate a fast flowing stream, which has just transitioned into deadly white water.

The answer to these externally generated woes is our time management discipline. If we think about it, time is all we have. Therefore, what we do with it determines our level of success. When we are under siege by these types of changes, we can lose control of our time and feel we are just being buffeted and beaten by the waves of the broiling white water, as we try to avoid the rocks and waterfalls. We know that Quadrant Two is where the gold is kept – Not Urgent but Important activities like planning.

We cannot do everything every day. That is just impossible in this modern business world, so we need to be focused on doing the most important things every day. The only way to get that done is to plan to do it and to stop all of the noise and distraction from taking us away from our most important goals for the day. The number of things we can get done during these distracting times may be less than normal, but at least if we are only doing one or two of the most key things, we will stay on track as the chaos unfolds around us. The important thing is that this is what we do every day and not just occasionally when the planets align. That regularity builds the discipline, because our time control is working to help us do better, with the time we have. Okay sometimes we are swept away by the chaos and our time is being wasted, but that loss needs to be sequestered to just that day. The very next day we get back into the discipline of regaining control over our time.

There are three groups of clients we face. Those who will never buy from us, those who will buy eventually and those who will buy right now. In times of chaotic organisational change, we need to be concentrated on those who will buy now and keep working on those who will buy at some point in the future. We need to be brutal with sorting out who is who and making some tough decisions about where we spend our time.

It may require us to fire some argumentative clients who take up a lot of our time, but don’t want to pay our fees and are basically a noisy pain. When we are short on time, we have to place a high value on how we spend our days and with whom we choose to spend them. Time is all we have so, we must invest it wisely and in chaos, that dictum become even more important. You can calculate the cost of your time – divide the income you want by the hours available to earn it and you come up with your effective hourly rate. It is always humbling to do this exercise. You quickly realise if you don’t keep a tight rein on your time, you can easily be working long hours for peanuts. Troublesome clients are expensive in this calculation. Fire them and concentrate your energy and time on wonderful clients, who will become lifetime business partners.