VITO Rule #4: Because time is so valuable,VITOs don’t treat all potential business relationships equally, and neither should you.
After selling and training for over thirty years in the Fortune 100 and consulting with more than 5,000 mid-market selling organizations over the same period, I am in a position to tell you what amounts to a closely guarded inside secret. Ready?
About 70 percent of those companies I worked with initially either had NO clearly defined selling process or had a process but didn’t follow it.
What does that have to do with VITO, you, and your sales performance this year, month, or quarter? Everything!
The big point is that everything I teach you in this VITO Newsletter will “plug and play” seamlessly with your current sales process (if you have one)—or serve as your sales process if for some reason you don’t have one.
Before we go any further, let’s define what a sales process really is:
A sales process is a series of well defined, proven, repeatable sequential steps taken over some quantifiable period of time. When these steps are followed, a completed sale takes place that puts commission dollars in your purse or pocket and delivers revenue to the top line of the company you work for.
Let me offer a few words of caution:
There is a big, big difference between your sales process and your sales forecast. An accurate sales forecast is a result of having an effective sales process…and using it.
How about you and your sales process?
- Are you actually using one?
- Do you have one that you know is workable but don’t use it?
- Are you selective about the steps you use? Deleting some and using others?
As we move forward, I’m going to challenge you to assume accountability for one single word in our agreed upon definition of your sales process. It’s the last word of the first sentence…
Time: A sales process is a series of well defined, proven, repeatable, sequential steps taken over some quantifiable period of time.
In VITO’s world (and in yours and mine), time is a precious resource. It may well be the ultimate resource. As you’ll see as we move forward with my weekly VITO Newsletter, you and I must always respect the value of that resource in our approach to VITO as far as our interactions, written correspondence, telephone, in-person meetings, and all of our follow up is concerned. It’s been my personal experience that if I respect time in my own world (which by definition includes all of my sales work), it’s a heck of a lot easier for me to understand and respect the value of time in VITO’s world. Which brings us back to where we started this week’s Newsletter:
VITO Rule 4:
Because time is so valuable,VITOs don’t treat all potential business relationships equally, and neither should you.
Your time, your organization’s resources, and your sales process must reflect your most intelligent use of time. Before you continue with your work-week I strongly suggest that you take the time to complete the following e-lesson. Doing so will:
- Ensure that you only approach prospects that are pre-disposed to buy from you.
- Make every step in your sales process work more effectively and efficienctly.
- Get the most out of each Selling to VITO step you’ll be learning from this point forward
