TSE 1069: Sales From The Street - "Your Time Management Ideas Are Wrong"

Many sellers elongate the sales process without even realizing it, and Steven Griffith is here to talk about how to take control of your time and to explain that your time management ideas are wrong. Steven is a performance coach and the author of the book, The Time Cleanse: A Proven System to Eliminate Wasted Time, Realize Your Full Potential, and Reinvest In What Matters Most. He explains how to close the performance gap and get hours back in your day. Performance research Steven discovered about five years ago that all of his performance clients were pointing to the same roadblock to their success: they didn't have enough time. He even discovered that he was feeling the same way. Technology has created more distractions and it prompts us to multi-task all the time. Our lives are moving at an incredible pace and we're all over-stimulated by toxins that steal and hijack our time. Old time management strategies worked when the phone was connected to the wall by a cord. We live by the notion that time is scarce so we're working to cram as much into each hour as we can. "If time allows" Most people have an adverse relationship to time, so Steven teaches his clients to establish a positive relationship with time so that time becomes abundant. It's a matter of viewing time as an ally rather than a foe, and working with it instead of fighting against it. Consider the phrase "if time allows." Steven routinely asks people whose time they are referring to when they use this phrase. We've conditioned ourselves to believe that time has the power to allow us to accomplish things. We buy into the idea that time is an outside thing that we're working against when, in fact, we are time. Compressing the sales cycle Steven talks about compressing a sales cycle to fit one year's worth of sales into one month. He tells the story of a real estate professional who sells luxury real estate in L.A. He had health issues in the third quarter and he was really underwater. They worked together to do a time cleanse that would help him compress his time. Steven said we all have a built-in belief system about how long a sale takes. We're conditioned by our industries to believe in ideas like slow seasons and high seasons. Our mental framework keeps us in that mindset, so we get stuck. We might go up or down by 10 percent but we'll always come back to our conditioned thermostat. Steven asked the agent if it was possible to complete a year's worth of sales in 10 months' time. Without worrying about how to do it, he simply wanted to know if it could be done. Could it be done in 8 months? Or 6? Steven worked to break apart his self-limiting beliefs about how long the sales cycle takes. By the time they got down to 8 weeks, he admitted that he didn't know how he would do it. They started building a new framework in which it was possible to do a year's worth of sales production in 8 weeks. Mandatory activities They started by identifying the activities that the agent absolutely had to do. Steven calls these ROT activities or high return-on-time activities. His biggest business-generating sales activities were his 10x10, (10 contacts by 10 a.m.) and researching the market for pre-qualified buyers. His time cleanse involved identifying different categories like technology, people,...