You’re a sales person, it’s Monday morning, the first day of the month and your only job is to sell. What are you going to do first? Start making phone calls to a “list of leads” someone gave you? Get in your car and start driving around and knock on doors, trying to get past the gatekeeper? Go to a local networking group? Call up your existing customers to see if they want to buy something? Have you ever experienced anything like this before? Wow, that just wore me out writing about it, mainly because that’s what my daily sales life used to be like. But the good thing is I don’t mind writing about this because if I can help just one person it would make my day. I don’t pretend to know everything about selling, but being able to go from really wanting to enjoy sales a lot more, while having all of it’s unnecessary steps, to having a real sales strategy and be able to sell and love what I do is a real life changer.

I never really had a lot of professional sales training, just the “as needed” training I received while working at different sales organizations throughout the years and of course the school of “hard knocks”. I’ve always enjoyed having that exchange of helping someone buy what they need or want and being able to help them get it. And of course the feeling of making money and more power of controlling my future. I’m telling you this because after selling for over 2 1/2 decades, I’ve probably experienced every trial and error possible. Plus I have spoken with so many other sales people (or people in a sales capacity) throughout the years and this has been the bulk of the feedback I usually get from them also.

Getting back to the subject of sales strategy. It’s not a perfect world, but the good news is, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes just a simple sales strategy adjustment is all that’s needed and that can be done even if the non-productive scenario in the beginning has been your strategy. So instead of a disarray of a unnecessary stress, let’s put that sales strategy together. So to work out the kinks in the 4 part “sales strategy” above, (1) Start making phone calls to a list someone gave you? Nope this is not the answer, don’t use an unqualified “list”, this is basically cold calling, they don’t want to talk to you, you might as well be in the business of giving your time away. You need targeted highly qualified prospects to talk to. (2) Get in your car and start driving around and knock on doors? This is as bad as number 1, except you are wasting gas along with your highly valuable time as a professional sales person. (3) Go to a local networking group? You could do this and you might get a few business cards and do a short sales pitch to the group, if you’re lucky. Then you may forget about the business cards you received by the time you get back to the office. (4) Call up your existing customers to see if they want to buy something? Sure it’s always good to touch base with your customers, but this exercise shouldn’t be your priority. This should be part maintaining your customer base and relationships.

None of the above “strategies” really are where you should be focusing your sales time, whether it’s Monday, first day of the month or any other day of the year. As I said before, I used to be there, until I said no more! So in a not so perfect world, I decided to at least make my sales world enjoyable and profitable by changing my whole sales strategy. Here’s my secret: I bypass all the cold calling, lead lists, driving around, dealing with gate keepers, etc, etc., and spend my time going straight to the decision maker by changing how and who I prospect to. That was the game changer. You can learn more by going to either www.TimFrisch. Written by Tim Frisch.