5 Ways You Are Wasting Your Sales Time

1. All but a very few of the emails you send in hopes of scheduling an appointment are a waste of your time. An email is a poor medium for a conversation in which you share the value proposition that might command a meeting. Email is ideal for nurturing (with no ask) and for following up phone calls where you make an ask.
2. The time you spend with prospects that are unqualified or only buy the lowest price is time better spent nurturing your dream clients. No matter how much time you spend with someone who can’t or won’t buy what you sell, it is time wasted. The time you spend with prospects who only perceive value as the lowest price deprives you of the time you need to win prospects that value what you do.
3. The time you spend researching clients between phone calls slows your efforts and causes you to produce poor results, results that would have been better if you’d gotten into the groove. Research isn’t prospecting. It’s something you do enough to be able to make a call, and it is something you shouldn’t do every day. When you make calls, make calls.
4. The wasted time trying to recover lost deals is time that is better invested in following your sales process and gaining the commitments you need in the early stages of a deal. Once the body is dead, there is no bringing it back. The best thing you can do is understand the cause of death, so you don’t keep killing your deals.
5. The time you spend responding to RFP where you don’t know the stakeholders, where you haven’t nurtured relationships, and where you haven’t created any value is time spent doing almost anything else. If you wanted to compete for this companies business and they are a good target for you, you should have spent the time necessary to position yourself to win long before the RFP was let.

Some of the things that you do feel like work and provide you the false sense that you are pursuing deals. If you want better results, stop wasting time.