I’ve never seen a successful sales professional who procrastinated. Procrastination is the enemy of sales because it keeps you from doing work that is essential. Successful salespeople overcome the urge to procrastinate. Here’s what you can do.
Don’t make it harder for yourself.
I find that people procrastinate when they don’t want to do something or they didn’t plan to do the work. Think about proposals or other research that has a deadline. Who set the deadline? Did you offer the customer a fast turnaround? Or did your customer ask you to complete a task by a certain date?
You should have a basic idea of how long it takes to write proposals, do research or other repetitive task you offer your customers. It might take you two weeks (while making sales calls) to write a proposal. You should ask a customer giving you a week deadline if he can push it to two weeks. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Make tasks specific.
It’s easy to procrastinate when a task is nonspecific. Think about a clear proposal title if you’re having problems getting started writing one. Isn’t your objective to have the customer select you as his supplier? The title of your sales proposal could be “Benefits of Customer X Working with Your Company.” The outline of what you include will contain the benefits you offer. You could title the report from the customer’s point of view to be something he wants like “Reducing Maintenance Costs at Customer Name.”
Start with an outline of what you want to include. Fill in each area with your ideas. A mind map technique is a good way to capture your thoughts and organize them. It’s easier to write a specific proposal rather than an overly broad one. That way you get past procrastination.
Change your habits.
Do you think of yourself as a procrastinator? You know it if you are. One way to change that behavior is to adopt habits that make it easier for you to get down to work. Have a process to schedule every piece of work when you procrastinate. Block the time off on your schedule to write the proposal, make the cold calls, complete expense reports or whatever you need to do now.
I’ve known salespeople who compiled their expense reports every couple of months! You have to wonder about their organization skills even without considering the money they’re losing, Have a process to manage expenses daily. Software is the answer here. Don’t allow yourself to procrastinate on expenses.
Start the process of actually working on your task when you see it in your calendar. Another strategy to make time work for you is to schedule small chunks of time to work on the task. Sometimes a short amount of time is the push you need to start a project. Knowing you will only be committed to the task for 30 minutes or an hour might be the momentum you need to get going.
Notice what tasks can be automated or at least templated. Client research is part of selling. AI can help. Your introductory emails can be product specific or task specific and easily templated. Ask the salespeople you work with what they’re doing. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel.
Some salespeople make procrastination a habit. They rush through their work because they don’t have the time to do a thorough quality job. Their productivity suffers and so do their sales. It’s time to change your habits if that person is you.