HOW TO MANAGE YOUR SELLING TIME

As a salesperson, your most precious resource is, arguably, actual selling time. While there are always going to be some forces you can’t control, you can control how you manage your selling time.

A Sales Funnel is a time-management tool that allows you to focus your work in order to accomplish the following essential tasks:

·         Define where you are in the selling process by categorizing your sales opportunities into four different “stages” of the funnel

·         Track each sales opportunity’s progress as it moves “down the funnel”—from first contact to signed order

·         Prioritize the opportunities in each stage of the funnel

·         Allocate time to each opportunity in the funnel so that you’re consistently performing four essential kinds of selling work (see below)

·         Forecast future income based on how rapidly and smoothly your opportunities are moving toward the close

The four distinct stages of the Sales Funnel are segmented into four different kinds of account activity, with each one corresponding to a different type of selling work:

1.     Prospect

2.     Qualify

3.     Cover the bases

4.     Close the order

Since it’s likely you’ll have many possible orders working at the same time, all at different stage of completion, you’re not going to be doing the same kind of work on all of them at the same time—you’ll be prospecting or qualifying on some pieces of business while you’re closing others and covering the bases in still others.

By consistently doing the right kind of work on each potential order at the right time, you’ll be able to move your various sales opportunities down the funnel at a steady, predictable rate—so that your income is also steady and predictable.