To Build Your Business Up,
You Must First Clean It Up
Most salespeople spend only 25 percent of their time selling because they spend 75 percent of their time managing the sales they’ve made. That’s because most salespeople don’t understand the value of quality. Quality systems, quality clients, and quality sales produce a quality career. But the problem is that in most schools of sales thought, “quantity” is the highest standard of measurement. As a result, most sales careers are quantity-heavy—how many hours you work, how many units you sell, how many clients you have, and how many calls you make. And in the process, you end up with an unbalanced business practice in which you’re only spending 25 percent of your time, or less, actually selling. But the Law of the Broom teaches just the opposite.
The Law of the Broom says that to take your business up to higher and higher levels of trust and effectiveness, you must first clean it up. In essence, the result is taking the unbalanced equation and flipping it around so that you’re spending the majority of your time selling.
As I write this, it’s been just over a year since business partners Brian Crist and Tres Miller learned the value of applying the Law of the Broom; and they’ve already seen tremendous results. It was at one of my sales events that Brian and Tres realized how inefficient their business had become. Both had been sales professionals for approximately two years and had managed to survive on their tenacity and sheer determination. But as they listened that day at the event, one of the speakers described how important his own discoveries of inefficiency had been in reaching a higher level of success. When Tres heard this, it hit home. In fact, it was a “Eureka!” moment. He literally slapped himself on the forehead for having missed it, then motioned to Brian that he finally understood what was holding their business back. Brian was in full agreement—it was time to do some sweeping.
For the next four months, the partners cleaned up their sales business beginning with their personnel. Some of their people had displayed an inability or lack of desire to efficiently handle their responsibilities. This had been compounding Brian’s and Tres’s hours every week, as they had to regularly put out fires that could have been avoided and redo tasks that were carried out in a substandard manner. It was taking from their time to sell, so they let some people go and replaced them with better fits.
Then for their newly formed team, Brian and Tres created fresh job descriptions, making certain that everyone on the team knew exactly what was required of them and was empowered with the tools to excel. Before long the two partners were working in a much cleaner, streamlined environment, which allowed them to delegate the majority of their tasks and focus on what they do best. Today, Brian and Tres spend their days doing what they love—building relationships. And while you might think that the two had to sacrifice some revenue to make these changes, that’s not the case. In fact, they have both increased their profitability by 25 percent in less than a year. And if that doesn’t catch your attention, maybe this will: since cleaning up their sales business, they’ve had to hire a coach to help them determine what to do with all the extra time they’ve freed up, which is currently about fifteen hours a week. Not a bad problem to have, is it?
Like Brian and Tres, have you ever had more than enough time to run your sales business? I bet the 100 percent question from the previous chapter was appealing to you because we’d all like to spend the majority of our workdays doing the few selling tasks we enjoy most. But since reading the question, perhaps you’ve asked, “Is it really possible?” If you did, you weren’t the first person. The truth is, most salespeople probably have a hard time believing it’s possible in the sales profession to spend the majority of their time doing the one or two things that they both enjoy and at which they excel. But it is possible, and it’s not as difficult as you might think. In fact, it all starts by following the Law of the Broom.
IF YOU AREN’T PROACTIVE,
YOU’RE REACTIVE
I recognize that there are probably thousands of different kinds of companies and products represented by the readers of this book. But regardless of the size or structure of your company, or the type of product you sell, there is one thing that is certain if you’re involved in sales in any way: You could spend more time doing the things that advance your career if you could get rid of the things that are holding you back.
You could spend more time doing the things that advance your career if you could get rid of the things that are holding you back.
Now, that may seem rudimentary. But consider for a moment the following dilemmas that arise from a “messy” business:
• If you can’t find the time to do things right, when will you find the time to do things over?
• If you spend most of your time with clients who don’t completely trust you, where will you find time to build high trust with the right clients?
• If you don’t have time to call your clients back, how will you make time to talk when they call you?
• If you don’t have time to make quality sales, does your quantity of sales really matter?
Now consider the following reactionary truths:
• If you don’t show customers your trustworthy way of doing business, they will assume you do business any way.
• If you hurry your sales, you usually end up waiting on sales.
• If you don’t return calls, the calls return to you.
• If you don’t have an assistant, you are your assistant.
• If you don’t tell people when to call you, they will call you whenever they want.
• If you don’t take advantage of your time, your time will take advantage of you.
Most of us understand the essence of reactionary relationships because of something we probably learned in high school science or physics class called Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The same phenomenon occurs in your sales business. One positive action usually elicits another positive action. One negative action, or no action at all, elicits another negative action. And generally speaking, there is only one remedy for avoiding the negative results of doing business in a reactive way; that’s becoming proactive about how you do business.
When it comes to being reactive or proactive in your sales business, one trend tends to either solve or create the need for the other. In short, if you have not established clean systems and tight procedures to run your business effectively, then your business is being run by the people and activities of your days. Your sales business is reactive (not run by you) rather than proactive (run by you). And remember that high trust does not happen arbitrarily—it must be proactively earned.
On the other hand, when you take the time to clean up your business by establishing systems and procedures to effectively deal with the most common and most productive activities of your day, your business becomes proactive and is able to continually expand. More than that, when your business is cleaned up, your time is freed up to do what you do best and let others handle the rest. That’s the essence of following the Law of the Broom.
GREEN-LIGHTING YOUR SALES BUSINESS
When you were fifteen years old, you probably spent many hours daydreaming about the prospects of driving that first car. You were knocking on the door of a new kind of freedom and independence, and you couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel without Mom or Dad sitting next to you. Ready or not, you wanted that feeling of being in control of your own destiny each day—even if that only meant driving to school. Back then, driving symbolized independence—it gave you the ability to go when and where you wanted to go. Or at least that was the plan.
As your sixteenth birthday approached, you no doubt sat through driver’s education classes and learned some pretty basic stuff designed not only to help you drive correctly, but also to save your life. While you most certainly knew what each of the colors of a traffic light already symbolized, a review was part of the class procedure because the colors on a traffic light are standard knowledge for driving effectively. And a few months later when you took your driving test, you probably made sure to pay close attention to the traffic lights on the road. You stopped when you came to a red light. You gave the car a little gas when the light turned green, making sure to not go too fast. And, as ridiculous as it may seem now, you probably even slowed down for a yellow light instead of speeding up.
But when you got your license, it was a different story. You just wanted to go. Didn’t matter when or where. You just wanted to drive—the faster the better. Red lights suddenly became nuisances. Yellow lights became lighter shades of green. And green lights became icons of your newfound freedom. But, eventually you probably learned that there’s more to driving a car when you received your first ticket or were involved in your first accident. There are laws for a reason, you learned. Laws that can be broken, yes. But laws carry penalties if broken. Penalties that can even take away your freedom.
I bet when you first started your sales career, something very similar happened. You learned the rules well enough to be given a license to sell something. And I bet you were even careful to do things by the book when you started, because you probably had someone watching your every move. But once you were given the keys to your selling independence, you just hit the gas pedal. Speed became the key to your success and freedom—selling to anyone and everyone as often as you could. Slowing down was out of the question—you had money to make. Therefore you considered anything that required you to slow your pace to be a hindrance to success.
That’s how most new sales professionals are taught to sell, isn’t it? Full speed ahead—never mind the signs. Quantity matters most—never mind quality. The problem is, you’ll never be highly successful in the sales profession that way. That’s because there are standards in the selling profession that regulate the speed at which you can sell effectively. Traffic lights of selling, so to speak, that indicate when you should go, when you should stop, and when you should slow down if your goal is to earn loyal, lucrative clients. Sure, you can always ignore the traffic lights, and even get away with it for a while. But eventually you’ll get caught, and the results could be very destructive to your business.
Imagine what would happen to your sales business if you started to heed the traffic signals that lead to success. What would happen if your green-light activities—those that build high trust and earn you more money—increased? What would happen if you began to remove red-light activities—those that don’t build high trust or increase your profits—by strategically heeding yellow lights long enough to determine then hone your most productive activities? The fact is, your days should be ordered this way.
Red-light activities include things such as
• filling out and filing paperwork
• faxing and copying
• managing crises
• dealing with high-maintenance/low-profit customers
• coping with telephone interruptions
• answering E-mail interruptions
• taking long lunches that aren’t necessary
• hanging out with whiners instead of winners
• gossiping with coworkers
• randomly calling on prospects, or calling on “easy” prospects or clients who don’t provide good business
These types of activities should be removed from your workload as much as possible so that the majority of your time is spent on green-light activities such as
• high trust relationship management and growth
• high trust partnership planning
• high trust referral follow-up
• new client prospecting
• high trust selling and reselling
• adding value to key clients
• adding value to key partners
And once you’ve removed red-light activities from your day, you can run your business as efficiently as possible, slowing down only at strategic times to determine if anything can be done better.
The 100 percent question asks you to consider what your career would look like if you spent all of your work hours on the few things that produced the greatest return for your time—if your path each day was illuminated with green-light activities.
Following the Law of the Broom helps you become more clear on what you need to do, and stop doing, to make the 100 percent question a reality—to green-light your sales business once and for all. And for most that begins when you slow down instead of speeding up.
SLOWING DOWN AND CLEANING UP
To be successful at high trust selling you must do more than seek out the green lights and avoid the red lights; you must also heed the yellow lights. As your sales business shifts to higher speeds, it will become necessary for you to streamline some of your practices and processes. The more high trust relationships you build, the more efficient your business needs to become.
When you’re starting out (or restructuring the way you sell) you will spend extra time learning the trade of high trust selling; and that’s necessary to build the foundation of your future success. But the more you master the tasks involved in high trust selling the less time-consuming they will be, and therefore the more profitable they will become. In essence, once you’ve removed from your day the activities that do not add value, the process of building an efficient high trust sales business is simply a matter of progressing toward a green-lit pathway.
Of course, to remain successful you will still need to observe yellow-light periods in order to ensure maximum efficiency; but when you’re running your sales business efficiently, those periods of time will simply be a matter of strategy, not major restructuring. Some typical yellow-light activities successful salespeople invest time in developing are:
• improving product knowledge
• identifying the right new prospects
• generating and managing leads
• improving presentation skills
• improving objection-management skills
• creating marketing and advertising material
• creating follow-up material
These are the types of things in which it will take some time to reach maximum efficiency, especially if you have just inserted them into your daily or weekly routine. But whether your sales business is stopped, moving slowly, or a constant stop and go, now is your chance to clean things up.
It’s usually not long after a major upshift in sales that a slow-down period becomes necessary. However, many successful salespeople make the mistake of blowing through the yellow lights and, as a result, end up having to stop and backtrack. This hurts their relationships as well as their profits.
Or it might be that you need to slow down right now, and it’s not a result of tremendous sales growth. To the contrary, heeding a yellow light may be necessary because you’ve been trying to upshift your sales business without first cleaning up the processes that run it. That’s like entering the Indy 500 with a Model-T Ford. If that’s your situation, you’ve probably suffered your share of confusion, panic, and frustration. But if you’re careful to heed the yellow lights now and down the road, regardless of your level of success, it’s possible to avoid the red lights altogether.
Heeding a yellow light in your sales career is the equivalent of slowing down long enough to evaluate how you’re using your time. If you’re just starting out, that probably means slowing down for a brief period of time each day until you are comfortable with your sales practices, procedures, and performance. If you’re further down the road, that may mean settling into something I call the “third Friday” routine, in which every third Friday of the month is reserved for slowing down enough to evaluate your selling efficiency. But whether it’s daily, weekly, or a Friday per month, slowing down, making observations, and if necessary, charting a more profitable course of action is a hallmark trait of all top-producing, trustworthy salespeople—and it’s the key to following the Law of the Broom.
Successful salespeople understand that producing greater profits means giving more and more of their time and energy to green-light activities. By increasing the time you spend on green-light activities and reducing the time you spend on red-light activities, you know they will eventually maximize the value of your time. But to do so you must slow down enough now to evaluate what is—and what is not—helping your progress, then commit to slowing down later at strategic times regularly as you continually grow your sales business.
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A
HIGH TRUST BUSINESS
I ask people at almost every seminar this question: “How many of you have ever had a game plan for your day and by about 9:30 A.M it was thoroughly messed up?” Inevitably, I hear the chuckles and laughter. “Yep, that sounds like me,” they say collectively. Then I ask, “How many of you stay relatively messed up the remainder of the day?” Again, almost everyone’s hands shoot up. I then become very serious and ask, “How do you feel at the end of a day like that?” In more words or fewer, the collective answer is always, “We feel like the day was a waste.” At one time, if Tom Ramirez had been in the audience when I asked those questions, his hand would have been raised high in the air.
Tom was a hard worker—maybe the hardest worker in his industry. And he had the numbers to show for it. He closed an average of one hundred orders a month and was making top dollar for his efforts. But there was a mounting problem. Although Tom was working very hard, he was not working very smart. In fact, to maintain the same level of business month after month, he was putting in eighty-hour workweeks. As Tom saw it, the long hours just came with the territory as a top sales producer. But as he would learn, it was a breakneck pace that could only last so long.
In 1992, Tom found himself in the ICU of a hospital near his home. He had suffered a brain aneurysm and would have to have surgery. It was time away from the job that Tom thought he couldn’t afford—especially if he was going to maintain his productivity level. So as he sat on his hospital bed awaiting surgery, he began to make and field calls from three different phones, trying to overcome the inconvenient circumstances and meet his clients’ needs as best he could. But before long the nurse came in and instructed him to stop working. She reminded him of the serious nature of his condition and that resting was absolutely critical. Tom reluctantly complied. But the nurse’s words echoed in his head. In fact, for the first time in some time, Tom realized how destructive his long hours had become, not just to him but also to his young family. He realized that what really mattered was not how much money he made or how many sales he closed or even that every single client’s need was met right away. What was most important was being alive to grow old with his wife, to see his two-year-old son become a man, and to see his two-month-old daughter grow into a beautiful woman.
When Tom came out of surgery and was readmitted to the ICU, it was his family whom he thought about—spending more time with them. With his current workload he wasn’t sure how he could free up more time, but he determined to hire assistants to help him carry the workload, and a coach to help him work smarter. It would be the best move he had ever made in his sales career.
Before long, Tom’s assistants were becoming his business partners, capable of carrying out every aspect of a sale. His coach was no longer teaching him how to increase productivity but instead how to have more life. Tom would be the first to tell you that during this “housecleaning” he was nervous. He knew that as he trained his assistants to become partners and began to delegate many of his tasks to them, his business would experience a drop-off in revenue. And he was right—although it was much smaller than he originally thought.
Nonetheless, with the encouragement and affirmation of his coach, Tom continued to revamp the way he worked until he had whittled his weekly hours down to forty. Then he began to focus on only carrying out the tasks he was best at, the green-light activities—namely, meeting top clients’ needs and fostering productive, high trust relationships. Eventually, the unexpected started to happen. Tom and his team began to close more deals and produce more revenue than ever. In fact, today Tom and his team of partners close two hundred orders a month and bring in an average of $300 million in sales per year. Tom will quickly tell you that he never thought that kind of production was possible from a forty-hour workweek. But now he’s a firm believer in the Law of the Broom.
TIME BLOCKING
Let me be very candid: If you experience wasted days, it’s almost certainly because you’re not running a clean sales business. Wasted days happen when you don’t have a plan, when you lack vision, and when you’re not clear on how to establish trust with customers. When you don’t know how to say no to interruptions, marginal deals, or high-maintenance customers. When you wake up early to handle the stuff that didn’t get done yesterday, then try make your cold calls without warming up, then attend a sales meeting that doesn’t teach you a thing, then handle problem orders, then return calls to customers who are not satisfied, then become a courier, copy repairman, and coffee maker in one.
If you experience wasted days, it’s almost certainly because you’re not running a clean sales business.
Wasted days are rarely days without activity. Like Tom Ramirez’s days, your days can be very full—just not fully productive and maybe even destructive. In short, wasted days happen when you allow red-light activities to rule your day. But to be highly successful and run a highly trustworthy sales business, you must find a better way to structure your time. And that begins when you create, implement, and master a skill called time blocking.
Time blocking is:
• scheduling your priorities rather than prioritizing your schedule
• predefining your green activities that are necessary for your business to excel
• incorporating green “blocks” of time into a daily schedule that helps you maintain a sense of predictability and certainty
• an efficient way for your clients and your team to remain apprised of your activities without your having to return calls and E-mails
• initially challenging but ultimately cost-effective
Time blocking is not:
• trying to not waste time
• a rigid declaration
• yellow Post-It notes all over your desk
• a “To do” list
• a quick fix
On the following page is an example of what a time-blocking schedule might look like.
Time blocking is the foundation of business efficiency; and you must commit to mastering this principle if you desire to build a booming sales business. The fundamental rationale for time blocking is the knowledge that if green activities don’t get scheduled, they usually get done feebly, fruitlessly, or not at all. Therefore, great advances can be made if a salesperson determines to begin scheduling specific blocks of time for green activities, and commits to not spending time on red activities until green activities are done.
If you’ve been running a messy business for a while, it may take a few months for you to sweep out all the red activities from your routine. But don’t be discouraged. Just make it your goal to clean up the mess one red activity at a time until you reach the point at which you are spending the majority of your day on green, productive activities.
If you’ve never used time blocking in your sales business, a good way to begin is by committing the first hour of each workday to green activities. Make a sale, secure a prospect, set an appointment, manage a lead, add value to a current client, or prepare for future presentations; but don’t handle urgencies, crises, or interruptions until your second hour. Then maintain this timetable: one hour for green activities, one hour for red activities—for the remainder of the day. If you follow this schedule faithfully from 8:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M., taking a one-hour lunch along the way, you will have blocked four hours for green activities and four hours for red activities. That’s a good foundation to start with. And here’s the beauty in time blocking: If you were currently productive for only 25 percent of your day, you have just doubled your high trust selling time. Soon, your increase in productive time blocks will build a significantly larger profit base.
COMMENCING CONSTRUCTION
Starting with the next chapter, I will share with you several proven green-light strategies for boosting your selling success through the roof. In fact, as a result of the coming strategies you will be in a position to double, triple, and even quadruple your business in the next year if you are able to insert them effectively into your daily routine. And that’s why time blocking is so important for you to implement now, before you begin taking on more clients. The Law of the Broom says that you must get your business running as efficiently as possible so that when the increase in sales come—and it will come—you will have the means to handle it with excellence and integrity. To do so you must see each strategy as a weapon to increase your arsenal of green activities. You must see each new strategy as another block that will add to the stability and longevity of your business. Do that throughout the rest of this book, and by the time we’re through you’ll have built a much bigger business than you’ve ever imagined.