Your most valuable asset, in terms of cash flow, is your earning ability. It is your ability to go out each day and apply your skills in your profession to earn an excellent income. The most successful salespeople, in every field, work on maximizing their earning ability every single day.
It has taken you an entire lifetime of education and experience to develop your earning ability to where it is today. You should never take it for granted.
By leveraging your earning ability, you can enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world by focusing your time and talents on selling more and more of your products or services in your marketplace.
Your most precious resource is your time – the minutes and hours of each day. It is all you really have to sell. In fact, your entire lifestyle today – your home, your car, your bank account, and so on – is the result of how you have traded your time up to now. If, for any reason, you are not completely happy with the results of the way you have traded your time in the past, you can begin right now to trade it better for the future.
One of the very best uses of your time is to increase your earning ability. One of the greatest timesavers of all is to get better at the most important things you do. Nothing else will give you a more rapid and predictable increase in your income and your standard of living. The more you invest your time and money back into yourself, into making yourself more capable and confident at the activities that pay you the most, the more you will earn and the happier you will be.
Resolve today to become an expert at time management. This one skill will make more things possible for you than perhaps any other, for without it, no other skills can be utilized to their fullest extent.
The core principle of time management is the ability to do first things first; to set priorities among competing demands on your time; and above all, to think, plan, decide, and then to take the appropriate action.
The most important word in setting priorities is “consequences.” An activity is valuable in direct proportion to the potential consequences of doing it or not. The task that represents the most serious potential consequences is almost always the one with the highest priority.
There are four questions that you can ask and answer continually to keep yourself focused on your highest priorities. First, ask yourself, “What are my highest value activities in terms of the potential consequences of doing them or not doing them?”
For you, a sales professional, they are (1) prospecting, (2) establishing rapport, (3) identifying needs, (4) making presentations, (5) answering objections, (6) closing the sale, and (7) getting referrals from customers. Your competence in each of these areas, and in all of them together, determines your sales and your income. What is the most important activity you need to be engaging in right now?
Second, ask yourself, “Why am I on the payroll?”
Every minute of every day, you should imagine that your boss were travelling along with you, observing your actions, and preparing your annual performance appraisal. Keep asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now leading to a sale?” This result is the sole reason you are on the payroll. If what you are doing is not leading to a sale, stop doing it and start doing something that is.
The third question you can ask and answer repeatedly is, “What can I, and only I, do that, if done well, will make a significant contribution to my company and myself?”
This is a task, such as prospecting or closing sales, that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it will not be done by someone else. The successful completion of this task, whatever it is, should be a major priority for you.
The fourth question for setting priorities, the best single question of all, is this: “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
There is only one answer to this question at any time. Your primary job is to identify the answer and then to work on this one task exclusively until it is complete.
Ask each of these questions of yourself continually. Hold you own feet to the fire. Discipline yourself to stay focused on those activities that can contribute the most to your success.
All highly effective people think clearly in two dimensions of time: long-term and short-term. First, they are very clear about their future goals and ambitions. Second, they are very focused in the moment in that they are always doing the one thing that can most contribute to achieving their most important goals. Your ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously is the key to high productivity.
(This article extracted from “Be a Sales Superstar 21 Great Ways to Sell More, Faster, Easier in Tough Markets” by Brian Tracy)
