Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople By Todd Duncan
I would highly recommend that a person who is in sales industry to read this book, Time Traps, by Todd Duncan. The book begins with the question: "WHY is TASK Management Important?" to you. It goes into why we cannot manage TIME, per se, (b/c time is fixed for everyone) but we can manage our tasks and what we choose to do during the time we have.
The Typical Salesperson = 170 Interactions Every Day, or 850 Interactions Per Wk.
(Divided by 50 hrs. a week) = 17 Interactions / Hr.
Which Means We Generally have about THREE minutes to focus on ONE thing w/o distractions! Ouch.
Salespeople scale back their workload through either:
1. Losing some sales 2. Saying NO more often
Brian Tracy in a book, "Sales and Marketing Marketing," survey:
The average salesperson sells 90 MINUTES a day, or 20% of the time. I had to read that chapter a few times b/c it says that we work 90 minutes out of an 8-hour workday. Yikes! We spend only 20% of time actively selling and prospecting, if we're a typical salesperson.
So, the author has a lot of suggestions to increase productive time, mostly through decreasing interruptions. If you do the two main things he encourages, you can increase your productivity from 90 minutes to 3-4 hours during an 8-hour workday. :)
Tasks are broken down into 3 categories and we need to focus MORE on productive tasks (below):
•1. Unncessary RED STOP these tasks
•2. Necessary YELLOW Caution w/ these
•3. PRODUCTIVE GREEN "GO" tasks
There are a few good Quotable Quotes from the book:
Example: Ben Franklin "Time is money."
The book sums itself up by saying that there are 3 Risks Worth Taking:
1. Creating an Impossible Vision
2. Become Accountable
3. Set Exceedingly HIGH Standards
What I got out of the book was most of the stuff at the beginning of it, which is decreasing the amount of interruptions I deal with on a daily basis.
Good book. Read it and implement some of the suggested strategies to improve yourself and your business practices.
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