We are already well into February 2020 – that’s right a month of the new year has already passed. It may be depressing to think about, but one month of your sales performance has already gone and you can pretty much guarantee that in most industries December is a right off, so you are left with only ten months to hit 2020’s numbers.
I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions – setting crazy unrealistic goals that quickly slip by, but I am a huge advocate for putting habits and routines in place that help you generate small improvements in your performance and set you on the way to achieving a bigger goal such as your 2020 sales quota.
The three C’s are the most important factor for me in anything that we do – that is consistency, consistency and yep you’ve guessed it – consistency. As James Clear states in his book ‘Atomic Habits’ it’s all about the one percenters and the compounded impact that these can have over the course of a year. If you can get 1% better each day by the end of the year you will end up with results that are nearly 37 times better.
As we all know consistently good is so much better than occasionally great – and one tool that is critical for a salesperson and will help you create clarity and consistency in your role is the DITLO (Day In The Life Of). Clearly mapping out the key activities that you should be completing on a daily basis to drive great outcomes.
Here are 5 routines and habits you should be following in your DITLO:
1. Social Selling
Spend 15 mins every day actively participating in social selling. Depending where your target audience engage will depend which platform you use. For example, a B2B organisation may well leverage LinkedIn and use Sales Navigator to identify potential prospects and provide value through posting articles or videos.
A fashion retailer may leverage Instagram due to the visual nature of their product and staff can connect through posting and engaging with their audience.
The key message is that if you are consistently doing this every day and working closely with marketing, you are likely to be generating leads.
******Did you know that 65% of salespeople who use social selling fill their pipeline compared to 47% of reps who do not (Hubspot, Feb 2019)******
2. Read
Take the time to read and research what’s going on in your market. When engaging with clients you want to be a thought leader, add value to them by being able to articulate what’s going on in the market and more importantly have an opinion about it.
A simple way of doing this is setting up google alerts for key words in your industry and receive this in a daily email.
3. Prospecting
Prospecting is always a challenging activity so to create a consistent daily activity around this can be very powerful, particularly if you make it a team activity. Use a ‘power hour’ with your colleagues where everyone in the team completes prospecting activity at the same time of day.
This reinforces the habit in the team, creates healthy competition and establishes a great way of learning from each other by reviewing outcomes throughout and at the end of the hour with the team.
4. Pipeline Management
Following up on your pipeline is seen as one of the biggest challenges for sales professionals and the number of calls needed to close a deal has more than doubled over the past 10 years.
Building this daily into your DITLO will drive the consistent behaviour of reviewing your pipeline, identifying deals that are not progressing and need action as well as driving proactive contact with leads.
5. Review the day that was and plan the next day
Great sales staff are strategic in how they go about selling and a key activity that these individuals do is to review the day. By reflecting on the day, understanding what has gone well and what could have been done differently, will enable you to make changes going forward or keep doing more of the same.
This can then feed into your planning for the following day and consider where your time is best spent as well as qualifying and confirming your client meetings for the day ahead.
Remember these five activities are only suggestions and its identifying what’s right for your industry and operating model. Maybe some of you are saying these are very obvious things to be doing.
Yes, it is simple – but be honest with yourself, are YOU doing this consistently day in and out? By executing these routines every single day, you will see the formation of habits and as James Clear stated those 1% improvements can make such a significant impact over the course of a year.
You can download my free ebook which includes tools and frameworks to support your routines and habits – Perform through Productivity.
https://downloads.ellivateconsulting.com/performthroughproductivity
Chris Ellis is the founder of Ellivate Consulting who focus on providing consulting, training and coaching support in the field of sales operations and enablement for SME’s. Chris has over 20 year’s senior executive experience in the UK, Australia & USA, within financial services and fast-growing technology businesses.
