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Fast Tip Friday: Productivity Trumps Busyness

Jun 17, 2022 7:00:00 AM

 


Hey, welcome back. Here's another one, Friday fast tip. I know everybody, everybody seems to be really busy lately. I know I'm busy. I know Sarah's busy here in the office. I know Matt, who does our IT and social media stuff, I know he's busy. And I'll bet you're busy too.

And if you look around your office, there are a lot of people that are really busy. But I want to ask you this simple question. Are you as productive as you are busy? Or are you fooling yourself about how productive you really are? Because you think you're really busy?

I know, that's a tough question. There's all kinds of stuff we have to do. And that stuff, when it all piles up, we're really busy. And sometimes it's unavoidable. And I'm cool with that. What I'm not cool with is people making work when there isn't work that needs to be done. And frankly, in sales, that's what a lot of salespeople do. They find ways to be too busy to do the things that are actually productive. What are those things? Well, let's talk about the first thing most salespeople tend to avoid, when they can look at their calendar and feel like they're too busy. And that's prospecting.

If you're too busy to prospect, you're never going to be as prosperous, as productive as you'd like to be. If you're too busy, to make the calls, make the contacts, ask for referrals, turn those referrals and, and other contacts into business conversations, you've got the wrong idea of the value of being busy versus productive. So when I talk to a lot of business development people and they tell me how busy they are and then they tell me that they didn't have time to go out and do any prospecting last week, I've got to really slow them down and ask them to tell me what's most important in their world. And frankly, a lot of the work that salespeople use as excuses for how busy they are, is work that's created because they don't sell effectively and efficiently. So when you look at your calendar, and what's lying ahead of you next week, tell yourself the truth. Is this really high value work that makes me productive? And pays me for the effort and energy I'm going to expend? Or are you just fooling yourself with a lot of things that you can justify for no real good reason other than you didn't do your sales work right.

So let's get our systems and processes and disciplines focused on making sure that we keep busyness and productivity in balance. Because if you don't, you can be so busy that you're going to go out of business as a professional business development person. And you never want to get yourself at that point. Because at that point, you become desperate. And when you're desperate, frankly, you're at the mercy of the prospects you need to do business with. So get it right, productivity should always trumps busyness.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Have a great weekend. Go make money next week.