Sometimes I find life to be a never-ending hurdles race. At times the hurdles come together one after the other, at other times they are spaced apart – but in both cases time keeps on dwindling. Chasing suppliers, matching specifications, hounding leads, tracking purchases, etc.– an assembly line of objectives hurtle towards us demanding immediate closure and it’s challenging to keep track of everything. The average man in sales cannot simply wish this away, this is a reality that is out there and has to be handled. Identifying the issue is all well and good, but how to tackle them??

Start with the End in Mind

I find that I lose a lot more time and consequently stress more when I am winning through something. Taking five or 10 minutes to sit down and think through an action to reach a desired result clarifies the mind and gives it focus. For example, I got a lead that a project is coming up in X and I need to sell there. The final objective is to sell in X. Milestone 1 is to get to know the requirements. So when you achieve Milestone 1, you come across Milestone 2 – which is to get access to the gatekeeper. Which then brings us to Milestone 3, convince the decision-makers. And so on and so forth … Setting out the Milestones to reach the End now gives you a roadmap. But not everything goes every time according to plan. Sometimes you may not come across Milestone 1 itself and it just so happens that you munched a lot of miles and weaved through traffic to reach X. Which is where a Pivot Plan helps. While our original reason to reach X lapsed, we can drive around X to come across some other project or drop by some other client. Exploit each second to the max. When the Roadmap cannot be employed, the Pivot Plan comes in.

Playing around the Customer

Sales is a people-centric job, where your prime asset is your clout with your clients. It just so happens that what may be a convenient time for us won’t be a convenient time for them. This is where we give our primetime of the day to them and their busy hours become our task hours. This is where scheduling in advance saves the day. Chopping up the day into different zones – Client-Meeting Zone, Lead Developing Zone, Tracking Zone & Task Zone has a great way of focusing our brains and mentally shifts us into the right gear at the right time. This also parlays into our suppliers as well. Juggling Area Zones like China & Singapore means we have to schedule the top part of our mornings for those interactions, while we allocate the bottom half of the day to US clients and so on. We get a lot more room to play around when our contacts are in the Middle East, but places like US & China means that we have to prepare our groundwork in advance – we have a limited time window with them and to use it for maximum benefit, all our ducks need to be in order before we pounce.

Competing with Yourself

I find that the human brain has an overpowering capacity to give you the most fantastic, acceptable and logical excuse – if you are looking for it. And when the Devil of Procrastination taps on your shoulder, I am sure many of us become spellbound by it now and then. I definitely was a willing victim countless times. This is especially so when there are quite simply a shipload of tasks and you are alone out in the deck swabbing the saltwater under the hot sun.

Which is where another fantastic ability of the human mind, the Drive of Competition, will come in handy. I fired up the Timer in my mobile and started Lap Timing myself. As I completed each task, I would lap myself and quickly check the time. As my brain is now oriented towards the lap time, I use the subsequent competition to gear myself in seeing how I can better my lap timing.

I once had to do a task which looked pretty big and boring – I thought it would take 3-4 hours of drudgery. But once I started lap timing myself, I was surprised to find that I wrapped it up within 1½ hours! Think about it – this is the same human principle that is exploited in a lot of mobile games or computer games, to better the record. So why not replicate the same in sales and life? So next time the Devil of Procrastination faces you, here is your ally – your Drive of Competition. We have the same 24 hours as the rest of the world, what separates the wheat from the chaff is how well the same 24 hours are managed. After all, if you don’t manage your time in the office – the office will have a nasty way of creeping into your home. This Race of Hurdles is never going to get easier – but then, let’s manage the Hurdles so that we get tougher.

Vivek Thilakan
Co-writer
A Sales Engineer in KAR Trading. When not getting torn between the streets, the site and the office.you’ll find him lost in reading, playing dominoes or speaking before a crowd.