Measure Your Productivity

Remember that selling is qualitative and quantitative. It requires superb communications skills, and you must have many customer interventions.

Now, after week one, tally your hours worked selling. Be honest. Remember that this is just you measuring yourself. Let’s say the total time for week one was 18 hours and 35 minutes. Pretty dismal, eh?

You challenge yourself to improve in week two, and you manage a blistering 23 hours and 25 minutes. You get the picture.

You will show more and more improvement as you cut out all the office kibitzing; wean yourself from all unnecessary e-mail, IMs and text messages; fooling around on the Internet; reading the newspaper; leering at Bass World; gorging yourself in the pages of Vanity Fair; or calling people to discuss men, women or your Fantasy League machinations.

As your time devoted to selling creeps up, I guarantee your sales will also creep up—but at a faster rate than your hours worked. Something magic happens, and the more time you spend selling, the luckier you get, and you start hitting home runs with new accounts and existing accounts becoming major accounts.

Johnathan Spira, head researcher at Basex, a leading research firm, observes, “For a society so obsessed with productivity, we’re pretty bad at actually being productive. Sure, services such as Google and Wikipedia have been described as being time hogs, but apparently the real killer is multi-tasking.”

Experts at Basex warn: “2008 is being dubbed the ‘year of information overload.’ The human brain is not hardwired for paying attention to several things at once or for handling constant interruptions. The pressure put on us by technology to respond immediately to e-mails, text messages and IMs cost the U.S. economy around $650 billion in 2006.”

I’m going to make this productivity thing irresistible. If you will send me your first week time log, I’ll send you an autographed photo of the Mãnana Man, suitable for framing and to sit on your desk or dashboard. That way, I’ll be watching you as you embark on this productivity adventure.