Your Daily Sales Habit

What are your daily sales habits? How do you kick start each day to ensure you have a productive, results focused day? Do you get lost in your email? Do you grab a coffee and chit chat with friends?

Every morning I wake up and have a glass of water with a squeeze of lemon juice. It’s supposed to be good for the liver. What’s more important to me is that this daily habit sets the right tone for how I eat all day long. Starting my day with a healthy habit makes me eat healthfully all day.

It’s like that with daily sales habits. The first 30 minutes of your work day sets the pace and tone for the rest of the day. If you are productive right off the bat, you will gain momentum that will carry you through a very productive day.

I was speaking with one of my coaching clients last week who has a robust consulting practice, and she never takes her eye off her sales pipeline.

She has formed a sales habit to reach out to three people each day who can help fill her funnel and build the next wave of business. That way she is always in ‘sales’ mode even while she is in delivery mode with other clients.

An approach that I use successfully is to be intentional about my daily work habits. I create daily focus on my top priorities by asking myself “What are the three things that I must do that will tell me, at the end of the day that I was productive and produced the results I intended?”

Closest to the Money

For example, when I am in high sales mode, one of my daily habits is to set one face-to-face or ear-to-ear appointment with an existing or prospective client before I move onto anything else. That might take a few calls and emails or it might take only one. For me this is a high pay-off activity and ensures consistency in my sales results. A focusing question I often use in this context is “What activity is closest to the money?”

Rather that diving into mindless activities (email, coffee, the news, etc) it works better to create a daily focused plan and to start with high pay-off activities before I move on to other things. The morning is often when we have the highest energy, focus and concentration. This strategy primes the pump for a productive day.

Are you juggling glass or rubber balls?

We juggle many balls every day but one thing I know is this: When we juggle three balls that are rubber and drop one, they keep bouncing for a while and may eventually roll off into the corner. I can pick it up later without consequence. But when we juggle glass balls and one of them drops, it shatters.

It’s useful to think about all the balls you juggle on a daily basis. Which ones are glass and which ones are rubber? Remember to always keep your eye focused on your glass balls. One of the ways that top-performing salespeople separate themselves from others is by effectively using the first 30 minutes of the day.

It is highly beneficial to your productivity to know exactly what you are going to accomplish during this period. Therefore, it’s a good idea to determine the day before what you intend to do when you first arrive in the morning.

For anyone in sales, this means one thing: start the day by making a minimum of three sales calls before you do anything else.

Sales consultant Mark Hunter agrees with me. Here’s what he said in an article on the CPSA site called “Sales Motivation: The First 30 Minutes of the Day:” 

Many studies have shown that people waste on average 15 minutes each day just getting ready to make that first call. It is ironic to think that you will have made three phone calls in the time it takes the average salesperson to even start making theirs.

An additional benefit of this plan will come when you begin applying this same principle to the first 15 minutes after returning from lunch. Use that time to make three prospecting calls.

By establishing good sales habits, you will increase the number of phone calls you make every day by utilizing time that, in the past, was unproductive. Make it part of your routine at the end of each day to identify the three people you intend to contact the next morning and the three you’ll contact after lunch.

What do you think about this idea? Try it out. You may discover that one good sales habit like this in the first 30 minutes of your day will increase sales dramatically.

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