What your sales staff do with their daily downtime will greatly determine their success or failure in sales.

Don’t allow them to make the mistake of waiting for something to happen each day – challenge them to take a pro-active, structured approach to their downtime and to adopt at least some of the following productive activities.

1. Role-play a script. Use an objection, closing, appointment- setting, or asking-for-referral technique.

2. Plan tomorrow or the rest of the week. Use a planner to schedule your priorities, to stay focused and to shape your day rather than reacting to circumstances.

3. Study a product. Divide the product into various buying motive categories and familiarise yourself with the features in each category. Study a competitor’s product and learn to present the strengths of your product against it.

4. Practise a presentation. The level of your practice determines your level of performance! Practise converting features and advantages into benefits.

5. Assemble or update your master list. This contains all working, sold and prospective customers. It’s a potential goldmine, but requires constant attention and focus. The payoff is it allows you to create a business within a business and to become less dependent on new customers each year.

6. Create a customer newsletter. Keep your name in front of your customers and prospects regularly, to maintain name recognition and earn future business. Keep it simple (one page front and back is plenty) and send it out to your master list every 45-60 days. Include specials, product updates, quotes, tips, etc.

7. Prospect! Stop waiting to be hunted and go hunting! Make something happen by deliberately letting more people know who you are, what you do and where you work. Start with the people you spend your own money with.

8. Go on a phone blitz. Call working deals, dead deals and current customers. Focus on appointments and on referrals. Set daily quotas for the number of contacts you make, and don’t stop until you hit them!

9. Write, review or update your goals and plans. Create a ‘goal’s notebook’ and review, tweak and update it as a regular discipline. List specific goals (business, financial, personal, etc), plans and deadlines. Mix short and long-term.

10. Familiarise yourself with the inventory. You can’t sell what you don’t know exists. Walking through the inventory and keeping your sales arsenal fresh should be a daily discipline.

By getting more pro-active about downtime, you focus on the areas of your job that you can control.

This in turn creates the personal momentum, morale and activity that create sales – and will separate your sales team from the majority, who sit back waiting for something to happen.

You can contact teh author Dave Anderson via his website, www.learntolead.com

Your action plan
• Focus your staff on what they do with their daily downtime
• Challenge them to take a pro-active, structured approach
• Discuss some examples with them at a daily sales meeting
• Get their commitment to adopting at least some of them