A professional sales person is commission based and/or they own their business.  The buck starts and stops with you, and you need to make sure your head is in the game to win.  Now many business owners/sales professionals are former employees and that can lead to problems inhibiting your current success.

Employees mistakenly think time alone increases their value.  Here’s what I mean by that.  Employees have a strong propensity of thinking that just because they happened to consistently show up and do the job they’re paid to do for another year that it means they deserve a raise.  Hog wash!  And that thinking won’t work for you either.  Most employees don’t have 30 years experience they’ve had the same experience 30 times, and that doesn’t make them anymore valuable to the company or your customers.

Your value is not based on the amount of time you’ve spent doing something.   Someone who has never done a job can be more valuable than the person who’s been doing the job for 30 years because they bring more personal value to the work.  Your personal value determines your value as a sales professional/business owner.

Each year you should set goals for increasing your personal value to the business.  And that means more than just attending a seminar.  It means not just learning a new idea, but implementing actions that generate more value.  How might you increase your personal value?  Well, you could:

• develop your expertise in a specific body of knowledge and skill set
• become recognized as an expert by your peers
• develop new skills or improve your existing skills
• increase your productivity
• focus more on doing the right things and doing the right things right, and less on just doing a lot of things
• plan your success rather than hoping good things will happen
• expand your center of influence

And more…  The point is the success that got you where you are today will not be enough to get you where you want to be tomorrow.  So, if you aren’t moving forward you’re moving backward.  And unlike an employee no one is going to give you an unearned raise just because you think you deserve one.  So bolster your entrepreneurial spirit and pick at least one way you’ll increase your value and get yourself a raise!

Do you feel like you’re losing potential clients because your services are priced too high?  This is a common fear among service professionals.  And when you really need clients you may be tempted to cut your prices just to bring them in the business.

Don’t do that.  Doing so conveys two things about you and your service that are bad for business.  First, it indicates that you think your services are over priced.  Second, it attracts the price shoppers and you don’t want to build a business around price shoppers.

Why do you want to avoid price shoppers?  Because price shoppers keep your from receiving adequate compensation for your services.  More importantly price shoppers tend to be the highest maintenance least loyal clients you can ever have.

Even though the prospect wants you to think they’re saying no because of price the truth is, it’s never about price.  But in order for you to overcome this objection you have to convince yourself your service is worth the price.  You may have competitors who offer the exact same products as part of their service as you do, but the value comes from how you deliver your service.  If you don’t believe your service is worth the investment your asking it isn’t.  If that’s the case you have a choice to either lower your price, or you can determine what you can do to make the way you provide your service more valuable than it is now.  I’d vote for the later.

Most often the reason your given a price objection isn’t related to price at all, it’s related to why.  Every buyer has a reason why they want to buy a solution like your service provides, and why they want that solution now.  Until you’ve uncovered or discovered their reason why you can’t get to the next critical question which is, “why you”.

Most sales people try to jump to the “why you” question without discovering the “why” and “why now” questions.  That doesn’t work because it makes the prospect feel like they’re being sold, and drives them away from you.  Find out “why” and “why now”, and you’ll drive your prospects to you so they’ll want to hear “why you”.

Top Producers don’t have any more time than average or poor producers.  We all have the same number of hours in a day.  It’s how you choose to use those hours that makes the difference.

The problem is you allow far too many hours of your day to be eaten up by non-revenue generating activities.  You’re doing all kinds of things including procrastinating every day that aren’t moving you to a paycheck.  In fact, it’s easier to get caught up in these activities than it is to spend your time selling.

This exercise will be a real eye opener for most of you.  For one work week I want you to record on a piece of paper exactly what you’re doing each time you start and stop an activity.  So for example, if you’re working on client paper work and the phone rings and you answer that phone you’ve just ended your time on paper work and started a new time for phone activities.

Multi-tasking is a myth.  You can’t talk on the phone and fill out an expense report at the same time.  When you try that neither activity is getting your full attention so both take you longer than if you’d just worked on one thing at a time.

At the end of the week tally up how much time you spent on each activity.  Create broad activity categories.  You don’t need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.  Now evaluate how much time you spent:

• Finalizing the sale - these are the closing activities you have to do to get the paycheck
• holding sales conversations with qualified prospects
• marketing yourself to filter for appointments with qualified prospects
• deepening the client relationship and taking care of your referral system

The other things you spent your time on don’t even deserve to be counted.  In fact, as you spend more of your time on the right activities (that’s being effective) you should be delegating the other activities to someone else even if that means hiring someone (that’s efficiency).  You see the four activities that are worth  counting are  in alignment with your overall sales goals and objectives.  Everything else isn’t.

It’s a matter of keeping your focus on the right things.  If you don’t focus on sales you won’t earn enough sales to earn a living.  If you don’t focus on the activities that produce revenue you won’t produce revenue.  If you don’t effectively market yourself you waste a ton of time and energy meeting with the wrong people with little production to show for it.

How much selling time do you have?  If you found that you don’t have enough selling time it’s time to make a change.  Scrap your current time plan and build in the number of hours you want to devote to the four activities that are critical for a Top Producer, and fill in the remainder with the rest.