A piece of advice that I often give to salespeople who have trouble making their quotas is to stop working for minimum wage. Often, this strikes them as being a little bit confusing... and possibly even offensive. After all, what salesperson would go through the agony of finding new clients every day just for a few dollars an hour?
Probably a lot more than you would think.
It isn't that salespeople work for minimum wage outright - even average producers in nearly every industry are getting several times that - but that they do a poor job of rationing their time. And so even though it ends up being hidden in their monthly commission checks, the fact the matter is that they have spent a lot of their time working for minimum wage: they just haven't noticed.
You might be thinking that this doesn't apply to you, and it might not. But ask yourself this: how many hours have you spent today filing, cleaning your office, making updates to your calendar, doing basic research, or performing other low-level tasks that could have been assigned to someone else? Each of those represents a loss of your time - time that could have been spent generating business and putting yourself in a higher tax bracket.
As a commissioned salesperson, you are by definition paid to sell. Knowing that, it only makes sense to maximize the hours you can spend with qualified potential buyers. Other parts of your job can, and should, be delegated elsewhere. If you can help it, don't waste another hour doing miscellaneous office work. Your company hasn't spent all that money training you so you can become an expert typist, maintenance person, or e-mail writer.
You might not have an assistant, but that's no excuse: the Internet and job boards have made it easier than ever to find help for just about any administrative tasks. What's more, many of us have spouses, family members, interns, and even students we know who would be willing to help out for a very low wage. Take advantage of their availability and maximize your sales time. In most cases, it won't take more than an hour or two to show them how they can help, and then you can move on to prospecting, qualifying, and closing.
The more use you get out of this way of thinking, the more profitable you can be, because it's a great positive feedback sales cycle: you free up more your time to for sales, and so you sell more; that, in turn, sales leads you to free up even more of your time, sell even more, and on and on...
At the end of the day, salespeople get paid to close, negotiate, and produce. While there are always going to be other jobs and duties that take up pieces of your time, these should be minimized as much as possible. There's no use working for minimum wage, when the sales profession offers so much more.
