A sales career is built on self-balancing your time
For an effective sales career, you need to be self-balancing. In every sales role, there is a constant pull of your time and energy between two opposites.
For example: “Do I…….
- Focus on my current customers or focus on prospecting. The hunter-farmer decision
- Focus on the strategic few customers or treat every customer equally.
- Make sales calls or have an office day.
- Focus on one market segment or cover all of them in my geographic territory.
- Become a specialist versus being a generalist.
- Focus on technical and data to sell versus more of a relationship selling style.
- Being all about your commission versus being all about the customer versus being all about the most technically correct solution.
Salespeople tend to have an imbalance at any given moment in their sales career. Each of these areas has both positive and negative consequences. The successful strategy for you is to know when that imbalance is needed or when it is causing problems.
In the first example of the customer versus prospect imbalance, you can end up in one of two dilemmas. For the hunter who loves to prospect and go for the joy of making a sale, the problem occurs in your follow-up and maintenance of a customer. You are in your prospect’s face persistently until they buy. Then, you slowly disappear into other parts of your territory. You sign up a lot of new customers, but customer attrition slows your growth.
For the farmer-type salesperson, your focused follow-up and customer development are loved by your customers. Your struggle to grow sales will occur as your territory matures. Once your customers are buying everything they can buy from you, your growth hits a wall. Depending on your company’s needs, that might be ok until customer attrition starts to eat away at your sales. Customers retire or go out of business. Market segments come and go depending on their industry economics. Your comfortable set of customers begins to erode away.
The solution to the imbalance is to challenge your focus regularly. An imbalance might be just what you and your sales career need. If you inherit a set of mature customer relationships, then you probably need to focus on prospecting. However, prospecting without considering how you will service an account will end badly for you. You came in, made promises, got a sale, and then ghosted your new customer.
Balance needs to sway towards prospecting, but it can’t be a singular focus for too long. How long? That’s why you were hired. This article is simply to give you the concept that too much focus and imbalance lead to problems.
The solution is to be self-aware before the negative aspects kick in.
You balance the needs of your territory with your capabilities and your career satisfaction. Your first consideration needs to be your territory. What is needed at this moment?
Look at your customer list. Review where your gross sales, gross margin, net margin, and units of sales are coming from. Now, overlay the opportunity in your market. Where are the opportunities to expand into? What or who would I have to risk to chase those opportunities? Realize that you only have so much time to focus. Spend it wisely. Spend it with intention.
Now, consider your capabilities. What can you bring to the market that no one else can? What are your company’s strengths and unique capabilities that you can bring to the market? What are those capabilities worth to customers? Which customers value them the most? Are there enough of those customers to sustain your territory? If so, then you have a new focus market segment. If not, then they might be a side market for you to look at someday, but not right now.
Lastly, consider your career desires. If the customer segment you have to go after based on the market is something you don’t enjoy or want to go after, then it’s time to meet with your sales manager. I had this happen when I was going into sales. I wanted to get into sales, but the only positions open at the time were in dairy feed sales. I had zero desire to go into it. When a retail feed sales position opened up, it was an absolute fit for what was needed and what I wanted for a career in sales. Had I taken that dairy sales role, the imbalance would have eventually burned me out. Balancing the market, the company’s needs, and my career desire was the key to a successful sales career.
Now, it’s your turn. Look at the bullet points above and determine your balance or imbalance in these key areas.
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