As sales professionals, we have the opportunity to be doing so many things other than selling, when we are in business. 

So, we can get busy with paperwork, we can get busy with many other things other than really driving our business forward, through activities that bring sales results. 

Now, if you are in sales and you are spending your time on anything other than activities to bring you the sales results, how much is that costing you? 

You know, it really is a lot more obvious if you are working for yourself, or if you are working on pure commission. 

Because if you spend your time in the wrong activities, you’re going to automatically feel the difference right here in your pocket, right?

So, here’s just some of the basic activities that you as sales professionals could be doing. 

And you probably want to do more of ones versus the others, so that you are able to achieve the results that you want to achieve to get to your goals faster and also even easier. 

So, what are the different tasks that sales professionals should be doing? 

Well, here we go. Number one it’s about “prospecting”.  Prospecting is looking for opportunities. 

Now, once you find the opportunities. The next thing is you have to be doing what we call “qualifying”. 

Qualifying is once an opportunity is identified, doesn’t necessarily mean you just send a proposal without knowing the people on the inside. 

So qualifying is you got to identify the various decision makers. You got to understand what are their goals, what are their challenges, who has most power within the whole decision making process, who can influence it?

So you really got to be visible for the various people inside. 

Now, next step is the “proposal writing step”, which you’re going to be taking the time to writing the proposal. 

And then that goes, once you submit the proposal, goes into the last phase, which is the “negotiation phase”. 

So, and then it goes into closed or not closed. This is just a very simple format of the sales funnel. 

Now, if you can either be prospecting, qualifying, writing proposals or negotiating. Well, which one should you be doing more? Should you spend the same amount of time on all four? Or should one of them have priority over the other? 

Now to me, it’s very obvious because, the key is what is the one action that I can take to help bring in the revenue the fastest? 

Now, it’s not just for you, but it’s for your company that cash can be better used internally than staying in and out of the company. 

So the one thing that really makes the biggest difference is anything that you can do on number four, which is the negotiation phase. Because once you negotiate, that will then little bit of time will happen, and you’ll know if it’s in or out. 

Now, of course you wouldn’t get to negotiating if you haven’t done the other three parts correctly, right?

So once you’ve done that in order to keep the pipeline filled up. You got to do some prospecting, do some qualifying and then do some proposal writing. And the proposal writing is whether you or your team is doing that.  So that you can submit the proposal and then get to the negotiation phase. 

So how much time should you spend?

Well, it depends on what is your strategy, what’s your current health of your pipeline. But maybe hey, 30% on prospecting, 30 or 40% on qualifying, and then maybe 10% on proposal writing, and 30% on negotiating. 

So I don’t know if I did the numbers right, if it adds up to a hundred, but again, you got to decide what is that alternative for you? However, the main element that you’re getting out of this is you can decide how to direct your time internally. 

But again, to me, the priority. Which should be your priority of course is drive the activities that are going to help you get the sale. 

So that you can enjoy the result of that, right? 

Until next time, make more sales.