Time Management

Being on Time IS a Big Deal

“Time: plan, schedule, or arrange when (something) should happen or be done.”

I have a thing about being on time. For me, it is a sign of respect. It is also your job to be on time when you are in sales. Competition is tough. Why would you, as a salesperson, work hard to secure sales appointments and then blow it by being late?

The way I see it, if you’ve agreed to meet with me, there is no way that I am going to be late for that meeting. In fact, just yesterday I had a scheduled lunch with a new customer. I arrived about 7-minutes early and the host seated me at the table. As I was about to text my customer, he messaged me asking if I was already there, because he had just walked in. I quickly jumped up, greeted him and we walked back to the table. As we sat down, I said I was about to let him know I was there when I received his message. He said, “Barb, knowing you, I figured you were already here ahead of me.” I knew the reason for the compliment was because every time we had a meeting scheduled at his office, I was ALWAYS a few minutes early.

That’s how I roll. I’m on time.

It doesn’t matter if it is a phone or in-person meeting. And because I live in Atlanta where the traffic can become a gridlocked nightmare, I leave plenty of extra time to ensure I arrive early for an in-person appointment.

But I’ve been noticing that not all sellers view punctuality in the same way. Countless times customers or prospective customers have complimented me for being so prompt for our scheduled meeting. That always left me thinking, isn’t everyone on time? After all, time is a precious commodity. Buyers are busy. Why wouldn’t you be on time?

This hit home recently.

After a vendor was late for a scheduled call with me, I went on my way. I waited 5-minutes before I left my desk for a few minutes. At the 7-minute mark, I receive an email from the salesperson asking if we should now jump on our call. He’s late, and it will now take another few minutes just to get the call going? Being late didn’t seem to be a problem for him, but it was for me.

Am I just too rigid regarding time? I decided to ask my LinkedIn network what they thought.

I posed this question: “when you book an appointment with someone who came to you, how long do you wait if they are late?”

Many people said that they would wait 10-15 minutes, especially true if it was a customer or a prospective customer. Some of my customer’s calendars are so slammed with meetings that I will certainly give them grace if they are late, but guess what, they rarely are. Have I waited 10-15 minutes for customer? Sure. Things happen. Would I put up with that regularly? Not so much. My time is as valuable as anyone else’s. Fortunately, this has never been an issue for me.

What about someone who isn’t a customer yet?

In several comments, people told stories of being stood up completely with no notice given. I think back to one buyer, who approached me to talk about hiring me. We scheduled an appointment three times – twice they never showed for the call, and the third time they cancelled the call just 5 minutes before the meeting time. No respect for my time at all.

What do you do? Just keep putting up with it? Where do you draw a line?

As others on the LinkedIn question thread said, it would depend on how big the potential piece of business represented. I can see their point. And that buyer who bailed on me three times? I asked myself if it was really worth it, and thought about what I would be putting up with if they actually signed on as a customer. There wasn’t enough of a revenue opportunity to justify wasting more time, and I let it go.

What about vendors?

When I clarified my LinkedIn question and said that it was a vendor calling me who was late, for the most part people still said they’d wait 10-15 minutes. Me? I’m not that patient. When a vendor books time on my calendar, I expect them to be on time. And I certainly expect that if they are going to be late, they alert me. I will either then decide to wait or reschedule the call.

The story I shared about the vendor call gone awry isn’t an isolated situation. It has happened with other vendors before. Customers have told me about vendors keeping them waiting, which I just do not understand. If you are in the business of selling and someone grants you an appointment time, your job is to be there on time. Early even.

Okay – what are your thoughts?

What’s your time threshold when it is a customer, prospect, or a vendor who wants you to buy? Inquiring minds want to know. Please share your comments below.

5 in 15

By Barbara Giamanco 4 Comments

Whenever I speak, it is not unusual for people to tell me that they understand that social media is important to their business but that they just “don’t have time” to do it.

Here’s the thing. You need to make the time. It needs to be a priority.

You may feel you don’t have time, but I’d bet the farm that if you carefully evaluated where and how you spend your time for just one week, you would realize that you waste time or spend time on activies that are not leading to sales results. Let’s face it, everyone has time wasters on their calendar. Take the time to figure out yours. I wrote a post in April about managing your social time that you can read here.

I also know that it is easy to fall into ruts and convince ourselves that running around to all of those in-person networking events are worth the time invested. They usually aren’t. I’m not saying you shouldn’t attend in-person events. You should. Provided that you consider two things:

Is this your target buying audience? If it isn’t, should you really be attending?
What’s your follow up plan? Most folks are horrible at their sales follow up.

Generally, people don’t think about their networking in a strategic way and it is important that you do if you plan to close business. Your goal should be to have a strategic mix of offline and online networking that is followed up with phone calls, email, email marketing, etc. It is not one thing that leads to the results that you want. It is a combination of approaches.

Using social media to create visibility and advance credibility for your work will speed up the sales cycle and help you close deals more quickly. That alone should be reason enough to stop procrastinating and just get going. Yes, you need to get some training to learn the tools and discipline yourself to incorporate social approaches into your daily sales process. The investment is worth it for several reasons.

Your buyers are there.

Your competition is there.

Which means…

You need to be there.

Let me assure you that the reason most folks flounder with their social networking activities is because they are not clear about what to do while online. So, here are 5 things that you can do in 15 minutes every day on LinkedIn that would go a long way toward helping you achieve your sales goals.

Invite someone to connect
Answer a question in a group
Post a status update
Share a whitepaper, presentation, case study or your blog post
Do research on 3 of your prospects

By the way, I can do these things using Twitter or Facebook.

Set a reoccurring appointment on your calendar for 15 minutes in the morning (before you get sucked into email, which is the subject of another post) and do five things daily to move things along.

Here are few more things you could do in your 15 minutes:

Post an event that you are hosting
Ask a question of the broader LinkedIn community in the Answers section (excellent way to gather feedback on trends or new ideas)
Update your book list
Promote the good works of a colleague
Make a recommendation for a peer

If you are sharp and laser focused and know exactly what you plan to accomplish, you can get quite a bit done in 15 minutes.

If you are serious about increasing sales, isn’t 15 minutes a day worth the investment?

Managing Your Social Time

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

As long as I’ve got the subject of time on the brain, I thought I’d write a post about the biggest objection that I hear from salespeople with respect to using social media as part of their sales routine.

“I don’t have time”.

That always gets me a little riled, because it says to me three things. One, they haven’t accepted that social media is as critical to their sales business, as email and smart phones have become. Two, these reps still believe that running around to lots of networking events is what gets them the greatest return on their effort even though, at most of those events, their buyer isn’t even in the room. Three, they don’t understand how to use technology to their advantage.

Adapt or fall further behind.

Whether you like it or not, buyer behavior has changed. Your sales approach needs to change too. Buyers do a significant amount of research online before ever engaging with a salesperson. Can they find you? And, if they do find you, is the information that you’ve shared on your LinkedIn profile (as an example) compelling enough for them to want to talk to you at all?

I know, I know. You never thought we’d do business over email either. Well, you were wrong. You are wrong about social media too! Every day business is being transacted over social sites. Unless you want your competitors to step up and kick your bootie, it’s time to move.

Ok, so let’s talk about those networking events.

When is the last time you carefully evaluated if the events that you are attending is netting you any sort of sales return? In general, you can choose to attend events for two reasons. One, you want the education, because you think the speaker is going to be awesome. Two, you are going to make connections with people who can buy your products and services. Let’s hope that most of you are using your networking time focused on #2. But here’s the problem. Buyers aren’t spending time at networking events like they used to. A friend of mine – he’s the decision maker for the technology providers who get in at his company – tells me that not only does he not spend much time at networking events anymore, he also doesn’t carry business cards to the ones he does attend. Buyers aren’t showing up, because they are tired of being pitched by sellers. Why are you spending so much time there?

What to do?

Free up some time by cutting out events you know aren’t getting you connected to sales opportunities. Spread that time throughout the week and use it to share content, post updates, research your target list of prospects, etc. using LinkedIn, Focus, InsideView, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, whatever. You can create some serious opportunities working social just 30-minutes a day. I know, because I do it. The key is to have a plan and know exactly what you want to accomplish.

Finally, use technology to your advantage. Unless you enjoy posting on LinkedIn, then jumping over to Twitter or your Facebook page, use Hootsuite as your social media dashboard and content organizer. Hootsuite’s free version lets you connect to five social media sites and/or RSS feeds. Got a blog you like to follow? Curate the content by setting up the blog RSS feed in your Hootsuite account. Every time a new post is published, a message shoots out from your account to your various social media sites. From your Hootsuite dashboard, you can send messages to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you can monitor the conversations from there as well. And, you have the ability to schedule messages in advance.

So, stop making excuses.

You do have time to integrate social media into your sales activities and like any change to the way that you do things, you have to decide if you will spend time on the activities that actually lead to sales – or not.

My Time Has Value

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

At the beginning of 2012, I cut out my horoscope for the year. In case you are wondering, I’m a Capricorn. As long as I can remember, I’ve always believed that messages we need to heed can come from a multitude of sources. It could be a book passage, something another person says in passing, a sign you see on you way to work that you somehow missed before, and in my case, an annual horoscope message, which I’m sharing with you here.

Managing your time is crucial. Don’t entertain anything or anyone not on your priority list. Good news on the money front: The stars indicate your cash flow will improve this year. When life falls into place, it can be better than you ever imagined.

I love the news about improved cash flow. Who doesn’t want their business to do even better than the year before? But what really got me thinking was the reminder of managing a very precious asset of mine…time.

For some time now, a core part of my sales and marketing strategy has been to leverage public speaking. I will often agree to speak at a local event pro-bono, in exchange for the visibility, but I also want to be given a copy of the mailing list, have the ability to sell my books or to have clips from the session videotaped. In other words, if I’m going to do something to benefit you and your organization without charging you, it seems fair to expect a little reciprocity.

Some groups apparently don’t get this concept.

Though I’m tempted to call them out, I will not name the group who is getting several great speakers (including me) to support their event but won’t let us capture clips of our talk on video. The reasons given were lame, but the bigger point is that we are donating our services, they are charging people to attend, yet, they won’t agree to something that would benefit us as professionals in return. Seriously, what is wrong with this picture?

Aside from the circumstance noted above, I’m also noticing that many groups asking for a freebie are also making unrealistic demands of my time. If I’m delivering a presentation to a group for free, that is time away from closing deals and supporting our clients, which, by the way, comes first. If I have made the decision to invest my unpaid time with you, please do me the courtesy of not asking for or expecting my slide deck weeks in advance of the event. That’s not how I roll. I work that in as time permits, which is often just a few days in advance.

Time is a valuable commodity. Once it is gone, it is gone. I probably will not say yes to anything else that is a freebie, and that’s a shame, because I’ve planned events with no budget for speakers and know what that is like. On the other hand, if you aren’t willing to respect the investment I am making in your group, well then, you have missed the entire point, and I won’t bother wasting anymore of my precious time.

What’s Your Social Sales Latte Factor?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Don’t get me wrong, I get that Starbucks is more than the coffee. It’s also about the experience. It’s a hip place to hold a meeting or perhaps work on planning for your next sales call. The question is have you considered the personal financial impact that your daily specialty coffee habit can have? Bach shows people how a $4.00 a day cup of coffee could be a huge boost to their savings account over time. Do the math yourself. It’s about $1,000 for coffee 5 days a week throughout the year. What if you put that money in a money market account with compound interest…well, you need to read David’s book to see where you’d be in 5, 10 and 20 years.

What does this have to do with sales?

The same “latte factor” analogy can be applied to evaluting the effectivesness of your lead generation efforts. Daily sales activities can be broken down and quantified into real dollars. Determine the “cost per sales hour” (CPSH) for all members of your sales team. You need to know exactly how much actual selling time is required to achieve revenue goals. Sales managers often overlook the importance of knowing the CPSH, but until they do, they won’t truly understand the impact of wasted time on the sales bottom line. It is expensive when sales people are not maximizing their lead generation time to the fullest.

Do a little digging

It can be easy to fall into a comfortable routine of simply networking at local business associations and chamber meetings. While these may be good, the best sales people do not assume. They also do not confuse activities with effectiveness. Attending a lot of “networking meetings” doesn’t necessarily mean that you are effectively generating leads and closing sales.

Here are a few of the questions that managers need to be asking their sales people:

Where are you spending the most time and why?
How many leads have come from your attendance?
Have we closed any business as a direct result?
What other networking opportunities could you be leveraging? Hint: social media, mastermind groups

Determine your social sales latte factor. Figure out where your time needs to be invested elsewhere and watch those lead generation efforts start paying off!

What's Your Social Sales Latte Factor?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I’m a fan of David Bach’s financial books. In his masterpiece,Automatic Millionaire, he talks about the “latte factor”. The premise is that people will often say that they don’t make enough money to save, but if you look deeper it is because they are wasting money in other areas of their life. Like on latte’s at Starbucks.
Don’t get me wrong, I get that Starbucks is more than the coffee. It’s also about the experience. It’s a hip place to hold a meeting or perhaps work on planning for your next sales call. The question is have you considered the personal financial impact that your daily specialty coffee habit can have? Bach shows people how a $4.00 a day cup of coffee could be a huge boost to their savings account over time. Do the math yourself. It’s about $1,000 for coffee 5 days a week throughout the year. What if you put that money in a money market account with compound interest…well, you need to read David’s book to see where you’d be in 5, 10 and 20 years.

What does this have to do with sales?

Do a little digging

Where are you spending the most time and why?
How many leads have come from your attendance?
Have we closed any business as a direct result?
What other networking opportunities could you be leveraging? Hint: social media, mastermind groups

Review sales networking activities carefully and often. Ironically the ROI of social media is often questioned; yet, these same sales professionals who question social media’s value waste time attending all the wrong networking events, but believe themselves to be successfully selling.
Determine your social sales latte factor. Figure out where your time needs to be invested elsewhere and watch those lead generation efforts start paying off!

Social Selling Isn't An Add-On

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In the rush, rush, rush that defines most businesses today, we are trained to cram every possible activity we can onto our calendars. The fine art of saying “no” is a masterful technique in and of itself, IF, you can pull it off that is. Often, we are at the mercy of others who have requests that demand our time, which we cannot ignore. Still, with all of this so-called multi-tasking going on, I wonder, are we really any more effective?
For years, we have been seduced into thinking that multi-tasking is a good thing. Sales people are given atta-boys for their ability to juggle multiple priorities at once. Sales managers praise their people for being able to take customer calls, do email and text all while taking a potty break. Nothing is more disconcerting than listening to someone take a business call from the bathroom stall next to you by the way. The reinforcement of this multi-tasking mania has now led to people texting and answering email on their iPhones and Blackberry’s while driving! Absolute madness.
Quite an industry has sprung up around this notion of “managing time”. The myth is that multi-tasking isn’t managing time, it is only wasting it. An August 2009 research report from Stanford University shows that so-called high achieving multi-taskers are only frying their brain. Guru’s far more experienced than me will tell you that time management has always been a myth. All of us have the same 24 hours in the day. The #1 key to social selling success comes from a single minded focus on the “right” priorities. Your objective is to focus on the one thing – the big rock – that you complete before moving on to the next. This is especially important as you integrate social media into your sales process. The idea is to save time not waste it!
As I talk to groups about social media and how to integrate it into their sales/networking approach, I always ask, “What are your top two or three concerns about using social media?” Predictably, someone always says, “I don’t have the time.” That attitude springs from the belief that you are “adding on” to what you already do now. In reality, you need to let something else go. Everyone has time wasters disguised as results driven activities hidden somewhere on their calendar. Many are hidden in plain sight.
Try this exercise. Write down how many face-to-face networking events you attended in the past month. Even if it’s 1 per week, you probably spent at least 3 hours when you include drive time plus the event time itself. That’s 12 hours – more than a full business day each month. Now consider your hourly billable rate and ask yourself if you secured enough clients from those activities to make it worth it. The answer – based on experience and the answers I receive from every group that I poll – will likely be a resounding no! Not even close. That’s why the effective use of social networking tools like LinkedIn is such a beautiful thing. Done right, you spend “less time” actually getting better results.
How we view time is in direct proportion to our attitude about time. Your peers, your competitors and your friends don’t have any more hours in the day than you do. It is all about how you use them. If you ever want to invest in finding out how you prioritize, I encourage you to check out our Time Mastery assessment. For as little as $31 and the investment of a 10-15 minutes, you will discover just how well you work with your daily 24 hour allotment.
Time management is a myth. How you choose to spend your time moment to moment is what counts!

Social Selling Isn’t An Add-On

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

For years, we have been seduced into thinking that multi-tasking is a good thing. Sales people are given atta-boys for their ability to juggle multiple priorities at once. Sales managers praise their people for being able to take customer calls, do email and text all while taking a potty break. Nothing is more disconcerting than listening to someone take a business call from the bathroom stall next to you by the way. The reinforcement of this multi-tasking mania has now led to people texting and answering email on their iPhones and Blackberry’s while driving! Absolute madness.

Quite an industry has sprung up around this notion of “managing time”. The myth is that multi-tasking isn’t managing time, it is only wasting it. An August 2009 research report from Stanford University shows that so-called high achieving multi-taskers are only frying their brain. Guru’s far more experienced than me will tell you that time management has always been a myth. All of us have the same 24 hours in the day. The #1 key to social selling success comes from a single minded focus on the “right” priorities. Your objective is to focus on the one thing – the big rock – that you complete before moving on to the next. This is especially important as you integrate social media into your sales process. The idea is to save time not waste it!

As I talk to groups about social media and how to integrate it into their sales/networking approach, I always ask, “What are your top two or three concerns about using social media?” Predictably, someone always says, “I don’t have the time.” That attitude springs from the belief that you are “adding on” to what you already do now. In reality, you need to let something else go. Everyone has time wasters disguised as results driven activities hidden somewhere on their calendar. Many are hidden in plain sight.

Try this exercise. Write down how many face-to-face networking events you attended in the past month. Even if it’s 1 per week, you probably spent at least 3 hours when you include drive time plus the event time itself. That’s 12 hours – more than a full business day each month. Now consider your hourly billable rate and ask yourself if you secured enough clients from those activities to make it worth it. The answer – based on experience and the answers I receive from every group that I poll – will likely be a resounding no! Not even close. That’s why the effective use of social networking tools like LinkedIn is such a beautiful thing. Done right, you spend “less time” actually getting better results.

How we view time is in direct proportion to our attitude about time. Your peers, your competitors and your friends don’t have any more hours in the day than you do. It is all about how you use them. If you ever want to invest in finding out how you prioritize, I encourage you to check out our Time Mastery assessment. For as little as $31 and the investment of a 10-15 minutes, you will discover just how well you work with your daily 24 hour allotment.

Time management is a myth. How you choose to spend your time moment to moment is what counts!

There is Always Time for the Important

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

A common complaint from social media resistors is that they “don’t have time” for all of this technology stuff. Reading my post right now, you might be saying to yourself…exactly. No time – that’s why I’m not there. In the only way that I know how to say it – you are already being left behind! Make time for the important.

Making Time

I know, I know. You are absolutely positive that 100% of your business time is used to upmost effectiveness each and every day. But on the off chance that you are like pretty much every other human being I’ve ever met, everyone has time wasters on their calendar. Everyone! Evaluate your time usage for the next week, and I promise you the results will be surprising.

What do you need to do to get started?

Clock what you do each business day in 15 min increments. It may be tough at first, because you won’t be used to tracking what you are doing. Once you get going, it becomes a habit. Don’t overcomplicate the process though. It can be as simple as keeping a legal pad of paper with you to note it all down. If you’d like to have technology lend a helping hand, I recommend TDF Tracker for the i-Phone. TDF Tracker is an easy to use, powerful tool designed to keep track of time/expenses/mileage. I’m a new user and getting the hang of it. I love that I can track my time and email a weekly report to my client, as I receive a copy at the same time. No clumsy spreadsheets to handle. For purposes of this exercise, you would use TDF Tracker to note what you are spending time on and when. Your personalized report will tell all!

Once You Know

Clear the obvious “junk” from the calendar and block that time – RIGHT NOW! – to work on your social media/social networking knowledge and experience. Business communication has changed. Sales and marketing must adapt. New worker capabilities are required. If you want to get hired, do what Laura Gainor did to gain the attention of her next employer, Comet Branding. The story is quite something and a brilliant example of using social media to further your next career move.

The Allure of Time Management

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

We are nothing if not a society hell bent on cramming every possible activity we can onto the calendar. A few business people I know try to push more than one item into the same time slot. Does that make sense? Of course not.

For years we have been seduced into thinking that multi-tasking is a good thing. Employees are given atta-boys for their ability to juggle multiple priorities at once. Managers praise their people for being able to take customer calls, do email and text all while taking a potty break. Nothing is more disconcerting than listening to someone take a business call from the bathroom stall next to you by the way. The reinforcement of this multi-tasking mania has now led to people texting and answering email on their iPhones and Blackberry’s while driving! Am I the only one who thinks that these people should have their drivers license suspended…forever?

Quite an industry has sprung up around this notion of “managing time”. Multi-tasking isn’t managing time, it is only wasting it. An August 2009 research report from Stanford University shows that so-called high achieving multi-taskers are only frying their brain. Guru’s far more experienced than me will tell you that time management has always been a myth. All of us have the same 24 hours in the day. The #1 key to success in achieving our goals is a single minded focus on the “right” priorities. Your objective is to focus on the one thing – the big rock – that you complete before moving on to the next.

Try this exercise. Write down how many face-to-face networking events you attended in the past month. Even if it’s 1 per week, you probably spent at least 3 hours when you include drive time plus the event time itself. That’s 12 hours – more than a full business day each month. Now consider your hourly billable rate and ask yourself if you secured enough clients from those activities to make it worth it. The answer – based on experience and the answers I receive from every group that I poll – will likely be a resounding no! Not even close. That’s why the effective use of social networking tools like LinkedIn is such a beautiful thing. Done right, you spend “less time” actually getting better results.

How we view time is in direct proportion to our attitude about time. Your peers, your competitors and your friends don’t have any more hours in the day than you do. It is all about how you use them. If you ever want to invest in finding out how you prioritize, I encourage you to check out our Time Mastery assessment. For as little as $31 and the investment of a 10-15 minutes, you will discover just how well you work with your daily 24 hour allotment. Time management is a myth. How you choose to spend your time is what counts!

What does this have to do with sales?

Do a little digging

What does this have to do with sales?

Do a little digging

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