{"id":2025,"date":"2019-02-06T16:03:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T16:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2023-10-18T17:35:40","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T17:35:40","slug":"help-salespeople-prioritize-handle-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/ca\/blog\/help-salespeople-prioritize-handle-business\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Help Your Salespeople Prioritize and Handle Business Without \u201cBusyness\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A rep is asked to step into a meeting. \u201cSorry, too busy,\u201d she might say. Another rep is asked, via email, to provide some insight to the marketing team. \u201cI won\u2019t be able to get to this until the end of the week,\u201d he replies — a day or two after receiving the message. For other reps, there might be similar inquiries and requests via their social media accounts, but anyone glancing at them will see they haven\u2019t been updated in forever.<\/p>\n

From an outsider\u2019s perspective, it\u2019s not always easy to tell if a sales rep has gotten what matters to a business<\/a> and mere \u201cbusyness\u201d confused. By saying \u201cno\u201d strategically to things that aren\u2019t really critical, for example, a rep may, in fact, wind up closing more deals. If the activities to which they\u2019re devoting their attention aren\u2019t directly contributing to a buying experience, however, they might have found themselves caught up in areas that aren\u2019t really worth the effort.<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons a good sales team relies on a strong manager or set of managers who can help delve deeper into the productivity and effectiveness of individual reps. They can offer coaching and guidance where they\u2019re needed, fine-tuning the rep\u2019s performance based on their individual strengths and weaknesses. This can be particularly important in a small or medium-sized business (SMB) where there are only so many sales reps to pursue the various customer and prospect opportunities in the funnel.<\/p>\n

One way to begin that coaching process is to provide some general guidelines or rules of thumb about how to strike the best balance between business and \u2018busyness.\u2019<\/a> In your next team meeting or one-on-one weekly touchpoint, discuss the following three areas and see where there might be some easy fixes to keep reps concentrated on the most vital priorities: <\/p>\n

1. Track — and weight — time spent<\/h2>\n

Sales reps aren\u2019t like lawyers in that they\u2019re charging \u201cbillable hours,\u201d but imagine for a moment if they were. How would they justify some of the time they allocate to sending around documents, talking on the phone to a lead that\u2019s going nowhere or even taking half the day to drive to the office of a prospect that\u2019s considering a minor purchase?<\/p>\n

Reps don\u2019t necessarily have to defend every minute of their day, but even an estimate of where their time breaks down will help identify how they might shift the balance a little. If you apply a weighting scheme of sorts, for example, is the majority of their time going to customers with a significant budget, or are they chasing too many smaller customers? Even if a rep could try time tracking for a two-week period, you might have enough data to have a more meaningful conversation about the degree of \u201cbusyness\u201d<\/a> that\u2019s keeping them from reaching their full potential. <\/p>\n

2. Scratch anything that shouldn\u2019t be done from scratch<\/h2>\n

Developing a sales strategy — even if it\u2019s as simple as a slide deck for a specific customer or prospect — may need to be fairly customized. A lot of the more administrative things sales reps do, however, can be automated with easy-to-use tools. The use of customer relationship management (CRM)<\/a> to organize all key data points about customers and prospects is a given, perhaps, but there are many other areas as well. These include:<\/p>\n