5 Shortcuts for Salespeople

1. Spend the vast majority of your time prospecting. If you want—or need—faster sales results, the first thing you need to do is spend most of your time prospecting. Nothing produces more opportunities than time spent trying to produce more opportunities. You can make 1,000 calls over the next year, or you can make 1,000 calls over the next ten days.
2. Trade face-to-face meetings for phone calls and phone calls for email. You can get more done in a face-to-face meeting than you can over the telephone. You can get more done over the phone than you can over an email (or 100 emails). You can take time trying to connect and going back and forth electronically, or you can get face-to-face and get things done now.
3. Target and nurture your dream clients. You can call on everyone in your territory, searching for someone receptive enough to meet with you. Or you can carefully and meticulously choose a set of targets for whom you can create massive value. You can nurture those dream clients with value creating ideas, establishing yourself as a great potential partner now. Targeting and nurturing  is faster than sporadic, aimless prospecting.
4. Spend more time with your dream clients. The more time you spend on site with your dream client contacts and all of their stakeholders, the faster you will develop the relationships you need. Spending more time with your prospective clients also speeds up their development of a preference for you as a partner. You can try to develop relationships without putting in the time, or you can show up.
5. Sell your process and the commitments you need. Your buyer believes they have a process for buying. But following their process doesn’t take into account all the commitments they will need to make for you to do your best work in helping them. You can follow their process and end up with a loss or a no-decision, or you can sell your process and the commitments you need.

Fast is slow. Slow is fast.