Time and time again my clients ask me to help their sales teams to become better at organising their sales activities.

Sales activities help you to organise your sales calendar to know when you’ll see your clients, host client appreciation events, coordinate your sales expos and even set the sales call to discuss the business potential, and confirmation of a transaction will occur. Organising your week, month, quarter and year will help you to avoid the following mistakes that most salespeople make:

1.    Timely Tim – Time Management is the key to your success. If you get your time organised, you’ll end up getting twice as much    done in half the time. Wouldn’t you and your clients like this? Gaining back time in your day, week, month or year is the number one motivating factor of stressed out salespeople.
2.    Last Minute Lucy – deciding at the last minute to do some sales calls to tag onto a Trade Show is not being respectful to your clients time and availability. If you know you’re travelling to a location, for any reason, work ahead of time and organise client meetings so you can make the most of your day too.
3.    Messy Melissa – your company has, no doubt, purchased a CRM system where you can keep your notes and organise your customer interactions, so why aren’t you using this to your best ability and knowing who you need to see and when. Categorise your customers so when you diarise to call on your ‘C’ customers, you’ll know who you should speak to and when.
4.    Chatty Cathy – Not having anything to talk to your clients about. If you don’t have any news, product or a reason for the call, then find one. Don’t call on your busy customers just to say ‘hi’. No one has time for that these days. Make sure the reason for your call benefits your client, and not you!
5.    ‘No’ Goalie Grant –  Not working your sales activity calendar around your full year goals, because your schedule and activities should always support your goals. If you’re calling on a client or taking someone to lunch and there’s no business on the table or to confirm, you’re wasting your time and money.

These are just a few pointers to take note before setting out your sales activities but they can be really powerful when taken into consideration and used to their fullest. Most salespeople often overlook these mistakes and end up spending valuable time trying to fix everything.

Lastly, make sure you talk to your marketing team, get their input into campaigns, promotions and anything else they can contribute. Afterall, if there’s no one to buy it, they mightn’t bother creating it.