Eight Rules of Success
Rule Three: Manage Activity

By Troy Harrison

Too often in sales, the only feedback given to salespeople ties to their results. Certainly, results are important, and they are ultimately the measurement of achievement. Unfortunately, results are not something that can be managed. Results are history—they have already happened. Activity is what is happening, or what is about to happen. Clearly, then, activity becomes the manageable part of the sales force.

In most industries, sales activity can be broken down into a few categories:

•    Prospects are researched, gathered and qualified.
•    Initial contacts are made to qualified prospects, in person or by phone.
•    Discovery is conducted to assess the prospect’s needs.
•    Recommendations of product or service are made in order to address the needs.
•    Proposals are offered to place a value (price) on the recommended service.
•    Closing is the process of getting a decision from the prospect.
•    Follow-up processes are conducted, after each won or lost sale.

Most businesses need these activities to be performed by salespeople in a given amount of time. In order to get the most out of your team, it’s essential that you set a target amount of time for each activity, and evaluate each salesperson against the target.

So how do you actually manage activity? Begin by setting targets for each salesperson for each time period; I usually prefer a week. I’m also a fan of basing my scheduling on a 40-hour week working at a medium-to-high level. To design an activity pattern, we need to understand how long certain activities take.

Face-to-Face Appointments
Either initial or follow-up appointments usually take between 30 and 90 minutes, depending on the nature of your product or service. The more simple your offering, the shorter the appointment. Of course, you also have to include the necessary time to get from office to appointment, and from appointment to appointment. Here in Kansas City, you can get just about anywhere in 30 minutes. Add that 30 minutes to your anticipated appointment time, and you have your time intervals.

For example, if a salesperson were selling a complicated product or service, they would need to allow two hours per appointment (90 minutes for the appointment and 30 minutes for drive time). If you want your salespeople to perform 10 appointments per week, that eats up 20 hours.

Call Preparation
Prep work is another activity that can devour time. A rule that has always worked well in my experience is this: With rare exceptions, spend no more time preparing for an appointment than you plan to spend in the meeting itself. If you figure at least another half-hour per appointment for each meeting, our hypothetical salesperson is up to 25 hours of work already—and we haven’t picked up a telephone yet.

Telephone Work
Hitting the phones is another time-eater. It’s said that work expands to fill the time allotted, and this is no more true than when it comes to telephone work. I’m assuming that your salespeople are working from pre-set appointments, which they are setting by telephone. It’s harder to assign one-size-fits-all rules to phone work, but for a business-to-business company doing heavy telephone prospecting, it usually takes between three to five contacts (live telephone conversations with a decision maker) to get one new appointment.

If your salespeople are focused and dialing, they can usually achieve six to eight contacts in an hour. That means that, depending on your ratios, it can take 30 minutes to an hour of solid phone work per new appointment.

Some people claim to have “magic formulas” so they never have to do phone work to get appointments. Whether it’s networking, customer referrals, etc., I have yet to see one that works well if you don’t have a long tenure with the company, or the company doesn’t have a very large and loyal customer base. For small businesses, it’s safe to assume these conditions don’t exist (at least not in large enough numbers to completely fill your sales funnel). Your people are going to have to work the phones.

Time Management
Now, depending on the success of your salesperson in working the telephone, your person is now up to 30-35 hours per week—and we haven’t talked about administrative work, sales meetings, etc. The point of this exercise is to help you make good decisions on creating a sales activity pattern for your people.

After you have developed activity standards, it’s important to track and review them on a weekly basis with your people. This is a process that must be done on a consistent basis, and can serve as the platform for trouble-shooting sales underachievement (is the salesperson performing too low a quantity of activity, or is there a particular phase of the selling process that is causing trouble?). The review process also serves as a way to identify best practices for overachieving salespeople (in what part of the process does this person excel?). Manage activity, and the results will come.

Troy Harrison is a sales trainer and the owner of SalesForce Solutions, a Kansas City-based sales training, consulting, recruiting and assessment company. You can get more information about SalesForce Solutions and subscribe to the free “HotSheet” weekly e-newsletter by visiting www.salesforcesolutions.net or calling (913) 645-3603.