Reach your goals faster and easier by focusing on your High Payoff Activities (‘HPA’). These are the activities that will drive the immediate results you need to keep your business thriving and well. HPA for sales examples include calling a prospect the same day they visit for retention and relationship reinforcement and replying to an e-lead within 15 minutes in pursuit of catching them while still online. In other words, ‘strike while the iron is hot.’ Both examples involve moving a buyer closer to the point of sale. What could be more important than your next sale?
Busy work should be delayed and/or delegated whenever possible. Busy work examples include Internet research, ordering office supplies, purchasing holiday décor, responding to interoffice e-mails, filing, etc. These things can be important and, of course, must be done. They may even eventually impact business opportunities. Most, however important, can typically wait while your HPA’s simply cannot. Keep in mind, many ‘busy work’ items will still be completed today, but, only after the top HPA’s are marked complete. This ensures that HPA’s are always complete by day’s end and, at times, ‘busy work’ is deferred to the next day. For the sake of your investment, “let it be!”
The simplest way to ensure that HPA’s consistently align to your actions and are completed in the most constructive and time-effective manner, is to compile a formal list of all responsibilities and required tasks, then to prioritize them from greatest financial return on time invested to least. Always work from top to bottom, ensuring the top 10 are, at minimum, completed daily.
Please note the term ‘time-effective’ versus ‘timely.’ In other words, completing a task or assignment within ample time to create the greatest propensity for a sale is much more important than completing it within socially and statistically acceptable time tables.
For example, missing the opportunity to communicate online with a live e-lead in real-time may result in courting and chasing of the e-lead for a reply over the next 10 days versus setting up an immediate appointment with a motivated buyer for this afternoon. If this happens while creating new files, you may not have been working within your HPA zone. On another note, keep in mind that the standard response window is 2-hours, however, 15 minutes is the extent of the window, on average, where you have an opportunity to ‘chat’ live and now about what is ‘front and center’ on the prospect’s mind. Would you rather have a shiny new pen to expense or shiny new sale to report?
Sure, there is an ‘ebb and flow’ to all of this and, yes, salespeople need to step up and complete administrative tasks now and again. Even the best of the best have to manage through ‘other’ tasks. Still, making money is your objective and it is what you were hired to do. Top ranking salespeople spend 80% of their time in HPA’s, or ‘the zone,’ whereas average salespeople spend only 20%.
Where will you land today?
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