Allocating Time

Time allocation? This is sales 101 stuff — everybody does it. We spend most of our time with our best customers and the rest trying to get new ones. And, of course, chasing opportunities. And putting out fires. And endless meetings and reports. Not to forget training.

Does this sound like you or your salespeople? Probably.

Best Customers Get Most Attention

Assuming that sales growth is one of your primary objectives, you should be dedicating a fair amount of time (and other sales resources) to accounts with the greatest growth potential relative to effort. Are these your best customers?

If not, then you are pretty much typical. We have found time and again that best customers are among the lowest growth potential accounts. You have tapped them out. There is very little growth left for you to get.

Best customers with low growth potential should be carefully maintained, but not lavished with time and attention. They should get enough to feel loved but no more.

What if you took a fraction of the time you now dedicate to your best customers and focused it instead on highest growth potential prospects? This is the essence of strategic time allocation.

Strategic Time Allocation

Aligning unrealized account potential (effort adjusted¹) with your time and resources allocation provides the foundation for strategic account management.

Top priority goes to your best customers but the strategy is retention and satisfaction. How much time is enough for each of these? It varies but you probably want to test each account by gradually changing the allocation until the impact becomes noticeable. Different types of attention may also be a substitute for some of your face-time.

Next in line should be high potential accounts that appear most likely to respond within a reasonable time frame. Figuring out most likely and reasonable here can be tricky. In some cases, you will already have a good contact or two to move things along, or you may be well-established in the account but just not getting your share of available business. These will probably fit the most likely requirement for your tier two accounts.

Finally, a third strategic tier might be high potential accounts who give you no, or almost no, business. Note that "high potential" is common to all three strategic tiers but high unrealized potential appears only in tiers two and three.

Account Potential

We next look at account potential determination. It is based on a fairly standard analytical approach but goes beyond to provide a foundation for strategic time allocation.  ...More...

¹ We will explain effort adjusted when we look at Account Potential but its meaning should be clear to anyone in sales.

 

Too Little Selling Time

There are probably few sales people who have enough selling time. So much of their time is consumed by meetings, reports, training, fire-fighting, travel, and the like. Selling time often barely makes up 50% of working time.

Company culture is a major obstacle to reducing this unproductive use of time. Some companies are very bureaucratic and not flexible.

If you are fortunate enough to work in a company that has at least some flexibility on time use, perhaps you can reduce this non-selling time by some amount and shift it to selling.

Think of what you could do with an additional eight hours a week of real selling time. That's a 10% to 20% increase in selling time.

The first step in this direction is to have some real data on where you spend your time today. Try tracking your non-selling activities for a month.

Activity tracking apps are available for most smart phones. Get one that allows you to describe the activity in enough detail to indicate its value and necessity.