How You Can Stay Focused and Productive When You’re Crazy Busy w/ Jill Konrath [Episode 351]

In this episode, Jill shares some essential tips and techniques to help you, the sales professional, jump-start your productivity in 2017. She provides time-saving and time-creating strategies that you can immediately put to use to stay focused and become more productive amidst the chaos of your daily sales life.

Welcome to Sales Kick-Off Week on Accelerate!

Joining me on Day Two of The Accelerate! Virtual Sales Kick-off Week is my guest Jill Konrath.

Jill Konrath is a speaker, sales expert, and author of multiple best-selling books, including her most recent offering: More Sales, Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies For Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers.

On Day Two of our 2017 Virtual Sales Kick-off Meeting, we’re going to focus on your personal productivity.

Want more selling time in 2017? Then listen to this episode now!

(Note: in this podcast, Andy refers to the previous episode with Jill Konrath as Episode 319, released on December 1. A scheduling change was necessary after the recording. The previous episode with Jill Konrath is Episode 331, released on December 15, 2016.)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Jill says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps in 2017 is ‘overwhelm.’ Sales reps are constantly running behind, in a time-draining digital swamp.

Newly-added technologies take time to learn and may not connect with each other. The more time you spend online, the more overwhelmed you feel.

Learn to segregate sales activities and online activities into different time blocks, and not to mix them.

Research shows that constantly jumping in and out of email lowers female IQ by five points, and male IQ by fifteen points. Being addicted to email literally saps your intelligence.

Jill researched physical and social sciences for her book More Sales, Less Time. One study showed the top 10% producers worked for an average of 52 minutes, then went off on a non-electronic physical break before returning to work.

Trigger events, either within an organization, or external to it, suddenly change the organization’s priorities. Jill gives examples of internal and external triggers that change organizational goals and lead to sales opportunities.

A sales professional who tracks specific triggers, can start a conversation before their competitors know about it.

Be the prospect’s first contact, with your viable vision when it is needed, and you have a 74% chance of winning the business. People buy what is ‘good enough.’

Plan a campaign at the start, including pre-written appropriate email messages, to roll out over the next month. Don’t rethink each contact step. Leverage your activities.

Examine where the prospect is. Be rigorous with yourself. Do not delude yourself into thinking you have more opportunities than truly are there. Unclog the pipeline.

Each morning, take a few minutes to ‘go quiet.’ Focus, settle into where you want to spend your time.

Go quiet before a prospect meeting. Cut distractions, to be more present in the meeting. They’ll feel the difference in you, leading to a different conversation, and a higher level of trust.

MORE ABOUT JILL KONRATH

Is it easier to teach a technical non-salesperson how to sell, or to teach a salesperson how to sell a technical product?

I would take a technical person and show them the system and the process, because there is a methodology for sales, and technical people are more likely to follow the system.

If you could change one thing about your business self, what would it be?

I can’t think of anything. I kind of like how I am. It took a full year for me to try out some of the strategies in the book, and see my results. It took time to pull it together, to become a whole way of working.

Do you have a favorite quotation, or words of wisdom, you live by?

“Never believe in never,” ― Robert Schuller. That has created new ways of looking at things for me, and not giving up.