Sales: Install productiveness – not busyness

Q. Are my territory reps busy or productive?

A. Probably busy and not as productive as you’d like. At the end of each month, a sales rep explains all the calls they made, time they spent driving and money they spent on in-services – they were definitely busy. But how did that equate to productivity?

There is a missing factor in this equation. We should be looking for busy, focused and productive reps. All sales reps are busy. Some reps are busy and focused. High performers are busy, focused and productive. Let’s define each factor:

• Busy = activity. Sales calls made, driving time spent, in-services booked.
• Focused = directed activity from leadership. The rep knows why they’re making each call and how it moves the needle. They are locked in.
• Productive = measurable results. New referrals, increased set-ups, revenue captured.

Focus starts with the leader. If they haven’t set goals for their reps that are specific enough to separate busyness from productivity, the expectations are poorly set. Example: Measuring success by making a certain number of calls each week instead of by learning objective information from those conversations.

The rep holds accountability for focus, too. They chase noise. Calling on accounts that won’t refer, abandoning plans to tend operational fires, and letting their energy drift from actions they can control to ones they cannot.

For focus to stick, leadership must be the filter for this noise and support the rep by not allowing others to pull them away from their role: Selling!

If you think your reps are busy and not productive, check the goals set by you and by them. If the goals measure activity instead of results, you didn’t install focus. You installed busyness.

Then, ask them: “Of everything you did since we last met, what moved measurable results forward?” If they list activities instead of outcomes, you’ve identified the disconnect.

BJ Anderson is the president of QP3 Training Systems, Inc. He can be reached at BJA@QP3.com.