Ever get to the end of the day and wonder first, what happened with all that time and second why didn’t I get nearly as much done as I should have?  Time is, as the cliché goes, the most scarce resource we have.  Yet even though we know each day what needs to get done, we find ways to put it off just a little more.

Salespeople are no different. Even the most successful sales people will fitter away the day, and put off critical pipeline-building tasks that aren’t nearly as onerous as they feel when you’re in the midst of procrastination.  Here are seven of the most common and deadly distractions, as well as some easy steps to mitigate or eliminate them.

1. Email
As a sales professional, you want to be responsive to prospects.  But that doesn’t mean you need to respond within seconds, or even minutes.  What’s most, the vast majority of email you receive isn’t from prospects or anybody that’s going to help you close more business.  The majority of email you receive represents someone else’s priorities, not yours.

Do your best to distinguish the urgent from the important, but better yet, keep your email in offline mode most of the time.  What you need to do right now likely has nothing to do with what might come into your inbox three minutes from now.  And for the emails you want to receive but can easily read later, set up some inbox rules to automatically file them in folders you’ll check at the end of the day, or just a couple times a week.

2. Social media
Let’s assume for a moment you aren’t checking your personal Facebook every 15 minutes.  That’s a big enough distraction on its own.  But even if you’re actively practicing social selling, you can suck up hours a day and justify it as prospecting, even though you’re mostly clicking around without a real strategy or direction.

Social media is increasingly an important, daily tool for sales professionals to prospect and manage their pipelines, but this time (like everything) needs to be managed and contained.  Have a strategy and process for how you’re going to engage in social selling each day.  Use a checklist, if necessary, to get in, do your work, and get out. As little as 15 minutes a day can do it, if you stay focused.

3. The general Web
We’re all adults here, so I’m not a big fan at all of blocking Web sites in a corporate environment.  Your team will just spend more time trying to get around that, or use their mobile devices.   But sometimes when we face a difficult or daunting task, we decide to check the news headlines one more time.

There are sites and services that will help manage your time on these sites.  Rescue Time, for example, will show you exactly how much time you’re actively doing productive work vs. killing time elsewhere. There’s nothing wrong with taking a quick brain break to check some scores or Hollywood gossip, just be cognizant of how quickly you’re able to get your mind back focused on what really matters.

4. Floor gossip
There’s a difference between sharing best practices and sharing gossip.  Sometimes – when it comes to customer or prospect situations – it’s a pretty thin line.  There aren’t any Rescue Time-like apps for people hanging over your cube.  But be aware that this is probably taking more time away from selling time than you think.  And you both have a quota to hit.

5. Caffeine
There’s a point of diminishing returns for the morning (and afternoon) Joe, or those silly little red bottles.  You get the energy and high, sure, but that often comes with mental jitters.  If you were likely to get distracted by something new or more fun or different before, caffeine makes it more so.

I don’t have a problem with using the caffeine source of your choice to help get started, but know it can have an adverse affect too.

6. Follow up tasks
After almost any sales call, you have work to do.  Update records in your CRM.  Prepare a proposal.  Get details or coordinate next steps with a sales engineer.  There’s no getting around these tasks, and they’re often instrumental to hitting your number.

But if you do them separately after each call, it forces you to engage in each system too many times over the course of the day.  Instead, wait until several calls have been completed and tackle your follow-up duties all at once.  Updating multiple records in your CRM at once will take far less time than logging in multiple times throughout the day.

7. Victory laps
You just had a great call with a prospect.  They were engaged, and agreed to next steps.  You’re excited, and you should be.  But instead of channeling that energy into the next call, you get up and talk to others about it.  Brag to your manager.  Tell someone else on your way for another cup of coffee.  And before you know it, it’s 30 minutes later and you’re still on that victory lap.  Don’t cut the laps out entirely.  Just be careful about their duration and frequency.

There are other distractions to be sure.  Which ones are your demons?  And what are you doing to keep them from holding you back?

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I found this announcement to be very disturbing, and I think you should too.  Fewer than 20% of the 600 plus companies surveyed by CSO Insights in their 2012 Sales Management Optimization Study had the discipline to continually track specific buying behaviors in order to assess the true state of their sales pipelines. More than half never bothered to track buying behavior, or only did so in an ad-hoc fashion.  The majority of the sales organizations surveyed – a representative cross section of businesses across multiple verticals and geographies – appear to be relying primarily on self-reported sales activity, rather than insisting on provable evidence of buying behavior when it comes to managing their sales pipelines.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that sales forecast accuracy continues to bedevil most sales organizations, with on average less than half of forecasted deals actually closing at the time or for the value predicted by the sales person.  However, the sales organizations that had implemented buying cycle tracking did far better.  If you want a simple justification for why it’s worth insisting that your sales people provide evidence of their prospect’s buying behavior, consider this: the sales organizations that did so won nearly 40% more of their forecasted deals than the organizations that paid no attention to it – and had far fewer losses and “no decisions”.  If you’re among the 80% of sales organizations that could and should be doing better, you must start by aligning your pipeline stages with the key phases in your prospect’s buying decision process.  At each stage, you must anticipate your prospect’s likely intentions, concerns and motivations, and align your sales activities accordingly. But most important, you must establish clear milestones between each stage of the pipeline that can only be navigated if your sales person can provide reliable evidence that the prospect has made a significant, observable and clearly defined step forward in their buying process.

 CSO Insights make one particular recommendation that I believe every sales organization needs to implement as a basic discipline: after every significant interaction with the prospect, and most particularly when needs are identified, requirements established or the decision process or criteria agreed, the sales person must record their understanding in an email to the prospect and have the prospect correct or agree their assumptions – and attach the correspondence to the opportunity record in the CRM system.  If you implement this process – and given the dramatically better performance shown by organizations that have embraced this, I can’t imagine why you would not – you need to be prepared for a reality check.

 Inevitably, applying a rigorous, evidence-based approach to accurately placing your prospects in your pipeline based on the true state of their buying decision process will mean that a number of opportunities will slip backwards or fall out of the pipeline altogether. This may make it appear that your pipeline has shrunk.  But these deals were never real – or as well advanced as you thought – in the first place.  And you will be far better off flushing them out rather than continuing to fool yourself.  If you’re one of the 4 in 5 sales organizations that could and should be doing better, I’d encourage you to start today by:

• Redefining your pipeline stages to reflect the buying process
• Establishing clearly defined gates or milestones between each stage based on observable evidence of buying behavior
• Insisting that your sales people re-qualify every opportunity and review their conclusions with you – backed by the evidence
• Insisting that your sales people document their agreements and assumptions and validate them with the prospect

 Your prospects will appreciate it – your organization will come across as highly professional.  But most important of all, you could end up winning as much as 40% more of your forecasted opportunities.

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