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Sales Force Nirvana is Really About Balance

"A" players understand balance – they understand that the most important contributor to their success besides relationship equity with their customers is time allocation. That warrants repeating -- time allocation – and remember the currency to run a business is cash flow but the currency to run a sales territory is time management? A key principle for success is the ability to define and manage the activities that create success. What is the rule that many sales people allocate their time by?


"A" players understand balance – they understand that the most important contributor to their success besides relationship equity with their customers is time allocation. That warrants repeating -- time allocation – and remember the currency to run a


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business is cash flow but the currency to run a sales territory is time
In economics, business is the social science of managing people to organize and maintain collective productivity toward accomplishing particular creative and productive goals, usually to generate revenue.

The etymology of "business" refers to the state of being busy, in the context of the individual as well as the community or society. In other words, to be busy is to be doing commercially viable and profitable work.
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management? A key principle for success is the ability to define and manage the activities that create success. What is the rule that many sales people allocate their time by?

"I’m gonna go after the really big guys. I’ll call on my accounts – based on breaking them up into A’s and B’s and C’s".

An Old Rule

A’s are the really big guys – C’s are the little guys and you allocate suck up behavior based on size. So, you go out and call up on all the A’s – half the B’s and a quarter of the C’s. When you make it through the territory four times, you believe you reached "salesperson nirvana." You now believe you have maximum account coverage – GET A LIFE! There are a lot of sales people that still follow that old school practice.

A key best practice principle to manage your territory and maximize success states that you should allocate time by opportunity for increase rather than existing volume. Think about that. It makes a huge difference. Most salespeople allocate their time based on the account size and what it takes to service them. Right? That worked in the 80’s. It’s was a lone wolf concept. Back then we all thought we personally owned every customer.

A Huge Price to Pay

You’re paying a huge price when professional field sales people spend a majority of their time being high paid apologists or just calling on maintenance accounts and buddies. This is the key question. How do you measure opportunity? Remember you must be able to measure it. Most salespeople spend less than 25% of their time with customers face to face in wholesale distribution. What do they do with all the rest of their time? Don’t say –playing golf. It’s administrative stuff, non productive service stuff done by choice not necessity or just hanging out at the office. That can cost upwards of fifty grand a year.

Here’s a Typical Office Sales Scenario-

"Let me work out my quotes – let me sit and voice mail my manufacturer to find out where my stuff is – let me go buy the office to check on my special orders with purchasing—let me call on old Joe every Thursday and take him donuts because I’ve been doing that for tens years. Sure he only buys $10,000 per year but we have a great checker

"Management" (from Old French ménagement "the art of conducting, directing", from Latin manu agere "to lead by the hand") characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). Early twentieth-century management writer Mary Parker Follett defined management as "the art of getting things done through people."
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game every week."

That kind of stuff wastes a lot of money.

Now think about this for a second. If you have five salespeople on the road in one of your branches and all of a sudden you get a 5% improvement from each one of them on customer facing time – it gives you the financial equivalent of putting another whole field sales person on the road in terms of customer facing.

This article is not about the basics of time management. Go to a seminar. Buy McKenzie’s tapes on time management. There really good. He’s one of the Guru’s of time management, and he talks about – a daily prioritized to do list – you prioritize tasks just like you do accounts. Everybody should have a To Do list. I have a To Do list. Yesterday I did something that wasn’t on my To Do list --- so I wrote it on and then crossed it off.

Prioritize your list and learn to say NO! Most sales people have great difficulty saying NO. They have a disease called "OKitus". They want everything to be --- OK

"I want everything to be OK with my customer if things aren’t OK with my customer – what do I need to do to make everything OK – because my goal is to have everything in my life be OK!"

Learn to say NO!

"Here are the reasons I had to say No to your requests Mr. Customer – you can get a response to your request much quicker by calling Bobby in

A game is a structured or semi-structured recreational activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment (although sometimes for physical or vocational training). A goal that the players try to reach and a set of rules concerning what the players can or cannot do create the challenge and structure in a game, and are thus central to its definition.
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customer service directly."

Time management is called the queen of the management

Customer service is the provision of labour and other resources, for the purpose of increasing the value that buyers receive from their purchases and from the processes leading up to the purchase. With the rising dominance of the service sector in the global economy, customer service has grown in importance, as its impact on individuals, households, firms, and societies has become widespread.
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sciences and the reason why they call it the queen of management sciences is that. Time management – needs to be "romanced" –salespeople need to go through a fundamental management course every 12 months. People get lost in the forest and all they see are trees. Every time I teach a time management class, I personally get more organized – but in a relatively short period of time, I lose it – we all lose it. We all get overcome by all these little urgent things. We lose our perspective. As a territory manager you need to know that this varies by territory, product mix and even customer mix, but there is this concept of primetime and super primetime. You take a look at when your actual selling activity occurs – patterns repeat themselves. You have a month end rush – – it’s the last week of the month. Maybe there are a couple of months that are bigger than others. There are times of the day or days of the week that are much more active than others. There is a definite pattern to your territory. You need to go find it. Now as an example it could turn out that most of your selling is done early in the morning. You’re calling on contractors. So it’s May, which is typically your biggest month. Early in the morning in May when two of those times overlap – it becomes known as super primetime. You actually talk to your inside sales people. What time of the day do the orders come in? You’ll find there is a regular rhythm that you can plot – you need to know what this is. Build your strategy around prime and super prime times.

CRS Management

That stands for Can’t Remember Stuff! Teenagers and people over fifty have it. The rest of you are just carriers. We all get it eventually. Those of you with teenagers can relate to this. When my son was a senior in high school I asked him to cut the grass when he got home from school the following day.

"No problem Dad."

When I got home from work the following day, I noticed that the grass wasn’t cut. As we all sat down at the dinner table I asked my son why he didn’t cut the grass like I had asked him to. He looked at me for the longest time with that silly looking smirky grin that all seventeen year olds have mastered and he finally said;

"GEE Dad----- I Forgot!"

Being a baby boomer father, I kind of went off on him.

"Forgot, Did I forget to put

Science in the broadest sense refers to any knowledge or trained skill, especially (but not exclusively) when this is attained by verifiable means.[1] The word science also describes any systematic field of study or the knowledge gained from such study. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on empiricism, experimentation, and methodological naturalism, as well as to the organized body of knowledge humans have gained by such research. This article focuses on science in the latter sense.
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food on this table? Did I forget to put a roof over your head? Did I forget to pay the
Food is any substance, usually comprised primarily of carbohydrates, fats, and/or proteins, that can be consumed by animals (including humans) for nutrition or pleasure. Almost all foods are of plant or animal origin. Many cultures have a recognizable cuisine, a specific set of cooking traditions, preferences, and practices.
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insurance on that car you drive that’s sitting in the drive way?

What would happen tomorrow morning if I got up and just FORGOT to go to work?

Once again, he looked at me for the longest time with that smirky teenage grin and finally he said;

GEE Dad------- Maybe you could CUT THE GRASS!"

Dr. Rick Johnson (rick@ceostrategist.com) is the founder of CEO Strategist LLC. an experienced based firm specializing in leadership for wholesale distribution. CEO Strategist LLC. works in an advisory capacity with company executives in board representation, executive coaching, team coaching and

Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of potential financial loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a potential loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium and duty of care.
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education and training to make the changes necessary to create or maintain competitive advantage. You can contact them by calling 352-750-0868, or visit http://www.ceostrategist.com for more
Education formally is a social science that encompasses teaching and learning specific knowledge, beliefs, and skills. Good teachers in a given field use a variety of methods and materials in order to impart a knowledge of a curriculum to the students. Informally, teaching is the process of learning how things work including numbers, reading and language that are taught by parents and other members of the student's culture. There has been a plethora of journals, magazines, books, and digests in the field of education that addresses these areas. Such literature addresses the teaching practices,
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information.

Rick received an MBA from Keller Graduate School in Chicago, Illinois and a Bachelor's degree in

Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

Many people speak about the Information Age as the advent of the Knowledge Age [citation needed] or knowledge society, the information society, and information technologies, and even though information science and computer
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Operations Management from Capital University, Columbus Ohio. Rick recently completed his dissertation on Strategic Leadership and received his Ph.D. He’s also a published book author with four titles to his
Opera is an Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks, including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, and online chat.

Opera is developed by Opera Software, based in Oslo, Norway. It runs on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux systems. It is also used in mobile phones, smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants, game consoles and interactive televisions. Technology from Opera is also licensed by other companies for use in such products as Adobe Creative Suite.
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credit: "The Toolkit for Improved Business Performance in Distribution," the NWFA & NAF
Credit as a financial term, used in such terms as credit card, refers to the granting of a loan and the creation of debt. Any movement of financial capital is normally quite dependent on credit, which in turn is dependent on the reputation or creditworthiness of the entity which takes responsibility for the funds.
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CD "Roadmap", Lone Wolf-Lead Wolf—The Evolution of Sales" and a fiction novel "Shattered Innocence." Rick’s next book due in November is titled; Lone Wolf – LEad Wolf The Evolution of Leadership

A Compact Disc (or CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. The CD, introduced in 1982, is the standard playback format for commercial audio recordings as of mid-2006. An audio compact disc consists of one or more stereo tracks stored using 16-bit PCM coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Standard compact discs have a diameter of 120 mm or 80 mm. The 120 mm discs can hold approximately 80 minutes of audio. The 80 mm discs, sometimes used for CD singles, hold approximately 20 minutes of audio. Compact disc technology was later adapted f
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