Ideas in this free series

1. Compile a List of Competitors

Today your job is simple: Compile a list of up to 10 of your competitors. (More is better, but only if you have time.) Keep that list safe. We will be using it later.

Use Google Search to find them, if you have to. Search for the stuff you sell, and see who else sells it.

Then look at their websites. Look at what they are doing differently than you are. Look at their approach to the same folk you are trying to sell to. Look at the features they are selling, and the benefits they offer. It’s the cheapest marketing course you can possibly find, and it is directly relevant to what you sell. (Resist the temptation to compare your website to theirs!)

Put all of this on a piece of paper, and put it somewhere safe.

2. Staying Focused : A Simple Sales Dashboard

Long before the Internet, the daily work was piled on our desks in heaps of paper. And as we finished each task, we moved that piece of paper (or that file) into the OUTBOX.

It was simple, and if you were a lowly clerk as I was for the first eight years of my career, it was easy to pace yourself. The tasks arrived in your INBOX each morning. You plodded through each task as slowly as you get away with. A good day ended just as your INBOX reached empty.

Today e-mail spews out of your screen thick and fast like a fire hydrant. In a survey at a BW seminar a while ago we found that the average person is dealing with about 50 e-mails each day. Less than one these is a request from somebody to “Sell me something now please.” This is the main problem with email: It distracts you from your core role.

The next problem with e-mail is that there is no sense of progress. It’s like Hercules cleaning up the Augean stables. Within a few minutes your empty INBOX is filling up again. And as long as it’s filling up, you are not focusing on selling. There is nothing to prompt you to do the only work you will be paid for: Selling.

I have a simple but effective solution.

Choose how many sales you want to make each day. (If the number is less than one per day, then choose a number for the week.)

Gather the same number of Post-It Notes together. On each write JUST ONE MORE SALE. (Make sure that the sticky side is on the left hand side of the back.)   And then, number your post-it notes from one up to your daily target number.

Neatly stack them with the biggest number on top.  Stick the pile to the top right hand side of your computer screen. You’re not going to miss seeing that, are you? Now you know how many sales you still have to do today.

By lunchtime, after swimming through turds like a Norwegian salmon swimming up river, you won’t have noticed any change in that rather big number facing you. It’s at this point that you will realise that it doesn’t matter what you do today, unless that number starts going down as you make sales, you are not making any money for all of this swimming that you are doing.

And so, you will pick up the phone, or e-mail somebody, or write a marketing e-mail, or write a letter, or anything else that you can think of, to make just one more sale. And the moment you make just one more sale, Peel the top Note off and put it on the left-hand side of your screen upside down.

On the right-hand side of your screen will still be a reminder of the sales you must still make today. So make just one more sale.

Keep making just one more sale until all your Post-It Notes have moved across to the left. You are now my hero!

Tonight, just before you leave your desk,  transfer the pile of Post-It Notes back to the right. And, tomorrow, if you can, start selling a little earlier.

3. Do not open your email until your marketing is done.

Almost all email is a distraction.

• Emails from people wanting to sell you stuff.
• Emails from people anting to tell you stuff that you are only a small bit interested in.
• Emails from people wanting to share the latest humour/atrocity/scandal.
• Emails with updates from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a host of other social media.

So switch email off for the first few hours of your day. Do not switch it on until you have finished the key work of your day. (Just one “bad” email and your creativity, your joie de vivre, has dissolved into a pool of darkness. It can wait until the real work is done.)

I know, I know! What if a sales related email comes in? Set a filter (also known as a rule or wizard) on your email program so that anything sales related goes to another email account (which nobody on earth knows about except you). Or send it to someone who can make the call, or who can call you to make the call. This is usually very easy to do.

That way you can get some real work done, sales work that will pay the bills, before you start losing your day to the nonsense your friends have been up to last night.

4. Coming Monday

5. Coming Tuesday

About these Free Daily Sales Ideas

You will be able to read each within a few minutes. Each will have a simple message as well as some simple thing to do. You won’t have to think about what to do next.

Most will work for you. Some will not because they don’t apply to your line of work. Feel free, on one of those days, to to put your feet on your desk just before phoning an existing client to say Thank You. I’m not going to follow any “themes” because that’s the fastest way to fall behind and start feeling guilty. Each one of these ideas will be worth doing alone.

In Business Warriors we call these “selling salts”. “Smelling salts” are usually made of ammonium carbonate. When wafted under your nose, you get focused fast. That’s the whole point. To get you focused on selling for a short while each day.

I have invested 30 years in training people to be more efficient so that they might have some time left over to sell stuff. But I have realised that the only way to sell is to ignore all the other turds on your desk for a few minutes each day. (A few hours is better, but let’s take baby steps.)

No matter how efficient you are, it’s impossible to get through all the turds first. Yet, working through them seems like work. It feels good to complete a task. Even better to complete a pile of tasks. And at the end of day, when we each look at our clean desk, we feel good about ourselves. “Job done,” we think, just before forgetting to sell something today.

But, in going through the daily pile, how much money did you make?

Our mission, together, will be to keep you focused on the single key metric that determines your future: ONE MORE SALE. If you make enough sales, you can buy somebody’s time to pick up those turds.