Where Does the Time Go When Selling?

Have you ever reached the end of a workday and thought:

“I was SO busy today…but what the heck did I actually accomplish?”

If you sell for a living, that’s a dangerous question.

Because there’s a huge difference between spending time and investing time.

Too many sellers spend their days doing things that feel productive.

Checking email.
Organizing the CRM.
Researching prospects for 45 minutes before making a call.
Tweaking a proposal that was already good.
Scrolling through LinkedIn under the guise of “prospecting.”
Sitting in meetings that should have been emails.
Creating the perfect spreadsheet to track the selling activities they aren’t actually doing.

Busy? Absolutely.

Productive? Not really.

Here’s the question I want you to start asking:

How much of your day is spent on Revenue Generating Activities (RGAs)?

RGAs are the activities that create, advance, or close opportunities.

Calling prospects.

Following up with people who have expressed interest.

Asking existing clients for referrals and introductions.

Networking and developing referral partners.

Starting conversations on LinkedIn.

Reactivating old prospects and dormant accounts.

Having discovery conversations.

Asking for the business.

Those are the activities that eventually allow you to serve people/companies and put money in the bank.

And yet, strangely enough, they’re often the activities sellers avoid.

Why?

Because organizing your CRM can’t reject you.

Your inbox won’t say, “We’re happy with our current vendor.”

A spreadsheet has never told anyone, “Your price is too high.”

RGAs require us to put ourselves out there.

That’s why sellers frequently substitute comfortable activity for productive activity.

Here’s an experiment.

For the next five selling days, track your time. EVERYTHING you do and how long it took you. Be brutally accurate. At the end of each day, divide your activities into two categories:

RGAs – Revenue Generating Activities

and

Everything Else

You might be shocked by what you discover.

I’m not suggesting that every minute of every day needs to be spent selling. There’s administrative work that has to get done.

But your calendar should reflect your priorities.

If generating revenue is one of your primary responsibilities, then RGAs need to have a protected place on your calendar…every single day.

Block the time.

Protect the time.

Do the work.

Because when someone tells me, “I just don’t have enough time to prospect,” I usually don’t believe them. Years ago I heard an interview with a President of the United States in which he said he gets up and exercises 6 days a week for 45-60 minutes per day. I realized, “If the POTUS can find time to exercise, I can find time to prospect.”

You HAVE the time.

The question is:

What are you doing with it?

Stop spending your selling time foolishly.

Start investing it wisely.

And make sure a significant portion of that investment goes into the activities that actually create revenue.

Hope is not a prospecting strategy.

Neither is being busy.