Time is our most valuable commodity: Virtually everyone if asked, would accept the offer of a few more hours each day.

So how can you really control the time available to you? How can you guard against the stress that arrives from not having enough time? Who or what is wasting your time – the time robbers? How can you gain an extra month – every year?

Friends and colleagues often remark that I always appear to have plenty of time to spare; that I am rarely flustered and that I nearly always come in on schedule. But it wasn’t always like that, and I have had to teach myself how to be in total control.

Within this FREE ebook, I share some thoughts, some tips and some experiences. Just click on the banner below.

Today’s News: A couple of great blog posts for you from fellow  members “So Now It’s Provocative Selling” from Dave Brock and from Niall Devitt, “Is Provocative Selling A New Kind Of Selling Eloquence Or Just The Same Old Blarney”

Tomorrow: On The JF Guest Author Spot - fellow  Paul Cherry – here is an extract:

“When I started out in sales, I worked for a manager I’ll call “Larry.” One of my goals at the time was to find a mentor, to learn from someone with experience in the industry. I thought I’d found that mentor in Larry, until I learned his goal was to retire in three years. Nothing wrong with that, except that Larry focused all his time and energy on his impending retirement in a nice house on a golf course, not on his job.”

When a colleague loaned me Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful People” many years ago, it took me about three months to get around to reading it – I now realise that I wasted those three months! In fact, I read it three times in order to ensure that I had fully digested the wisdom.

Whilst I cannot claim to have experienced an epiphany of “Damascus Highway” proportions, it did cause me to make fundamental changes to the way I conducted business. In reality, I was practising much of what Covey suggests, but I was doing so in a fairly unstructured and ill-disciplined way.

However, in what I now term my “Post Covey” period, I do ensure that I audit myself regularly and I would urge you to do the same.

Please download my full synopsis by simply clicking on the banner below.

Today’s News: My good friend Joanne Black has a Free webinar download available:

Get More Prospects and More New Clients in a Global Economic Slowdown

Why just survive when you can THRIVE? Download this FREE recorded Back in the Black Free Mini-Webinar session and learn how referrals can drive your business to thrive — even in a market downturn.

Leverage existing relationships to grow revenue
Accelerate the sales process to win more, faster
Convert more sales than ever before

Free download: audio & visuals
Download the FREE webinar video recording of Joanne’s Back in the Black Mini-Webinar: Listen, learn, and thrive! Create your own referral-selling plan and commit to thriving in ’09! Download Now Requires the free MWP Player or compatible player. Details here

Received a message from David Fife, Founder – ClientZing

“We just launched a new communication service for sales managers and sales people. Being a consultant to sales managers I thought you would be interested in a new, clever, effiecient way to contact prospects and customers that you could share with your clients.”

I did check it out and it looks good – you might want to do the same – Go to www.clientzing.com

Tomorrow: I am delighted to welcome Nancy D Solomon onto the JF Guest Author Spot

The JF Guest Author Spot

Paul McCord 

I received an interesting e-mail from Doris, a mortgage loan officer in New Mexico, who is facing a common problem: “Paul, I work for a small mortgage company that doesn’t provide us with any marketing materials. I spend a great deal of time creating stuff and end up not spending nearly as much time as I should actually be prospecting. I believe the quality of the materials I use reflects on me and the quality of work I do, so, I want to make sure they are the best I can do. But this is very time consuming. I know you used to be in the mortgage business, so I’m wondering if you know of any places on the internet where I can get flier and direct mail templates that will help me spend less time designing and more time prospecting?”

Doris is by no means the only salesperson who believes they face this dilemma. Many, many salespeople believe that they must have a ton of well-designed, high quality collateral material in order to successfully do their jobs. Consequently, like Doris, they spend hours and hours designing leave behind and direct mail material to the determent of their prospecting activity. Sooner or later–often sooner–they find that they are out of the business because they have no prospects.

There are several ways to successfully handle this situation. First and foremost, you must recognize that the activity of designing materials is nothing but an excuse to not prospect for many. They use the activity of creating collateral materials as a substitute for the hard work of finding prospects. It is mentally and emotionally easier to engage in the non-threatening activity of collateral material design than it is to face the very real prospect of rejection while prospecting.

Activity replaces accomplishment. If you’re busy, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re working hard. The “getting ready” becomes the objective. You go home “feeling” that you’ve put in a good day’s work. Yet, you’ve accomplished nothing that will put sales in your pipeline.

If you must make a decision between seeing people and creating leave behind material, the choice should be simple–see people. Collateral material doesn’t sell. You do. Collateral material doesn’t identify prospects. You do. Collateral material doesn’t put sales in your pipeline. You do. Collateral material doesn’t generate your commission check. You do. And you do these things by identify and seeing prospects.

This is not to say that good collateral materials shouldn’t exist or be used. It is simply to say that if you truly face a choice, choose accomplishment over activity. The activity being the busy work of creating leave behind material and the accomplishment being prospecting and putting real sales in your pipeline.

But you can have both–high quality collateral material and a great deal of prospecting time. Simply spend your prospecting hours prospecting and evenings and weekends when you aren’t prospecting creating the materials, you want. For many, this is an impossible solution. Not because they don’t have the time in the evening and on weekends, but because they will refuse to give up their “free time” to do these activities.

Sales isn’t a 40 hour per week occupation. To be a top producer, you’ve got to be willing to invest more time than just your typical 8-hour day. You’ve got to push the non-income activities into non-income producing hours–and that means those hours when you can’t be engaged in prospecting or selling.

You only have three activities that make you money–finding prospects (prospecting), turning prospects into clients (selling), meeting client needs (managing your client’s purchase). Anything that doesn’t fall into one of those categories should be done outside your prospecting and selling hours.

If you’re unwilling to spend the time outside of your selling hours, then your only real alternative is to hire a graphic designer. The problem is that if you’re spending your time designing collateral materials, you probably can’t afford to pay a graphic designer, because you probably aren’t making a great deal of money. Top producers don’t spend their time designing collateral material–they spend their time selling and managing their clients. So, if you’re in Doris’ situation, you aren’t, almost by definition, a strong producer.

Most leave behind material is really nothing but a crutch for the salesperson. If you must have the materials, spend some evenings and weekends designing a couple of decent pieces and then get to work. “Don’t,” as the great UCLA basketball Coach John Wooten used to say, “confuse activity with accomplishment.” Activity can be measured in how quickly it takes you to fail in sales; accomplishment can be measured by your pipeline and paycheck.

Paul McCord, president of McCord and Associates, a Houston,Texas based sales training, coaching and consulting company, is an internationally recognized authority on prospecting, referral selling, and personal marketing. His best-selling book on referral generation,Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals (John Wiley and Sons, 2007), is quickly becoming recognized as the authoritative work on referral selling. His next book, SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar will be released in February, 2008. He may be reached at pmccord@mccordandassociates.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or through his sales training website at www.powerreferralselling.com

Paul will also be a senior member of The Global Sales Council, which is now at a very advanced stage of formation – more soon. – Ed 

Today’s News: Don’t know if you have noticed but there is definitely a lot of PSCD (Post Seasonal Celebrations Depression) around right now – but not in my backyard; we are firing on all cylinders and we have hit the ground running this year. I have so much news to share with you shortly, just be patient “You are such a tease Mr Farrington”

Tomorrow: We launch “JF Reviews” – the long awaited JF book reviews and also your chance to download one of my ebooks from the JF Winning Series, sponsored by SalesNexus, for FREE

In the book Emerson’s Essays, there is a section on “Law of Compensation”, which can be summarised simply as “give more, get more.”

This is what most salespeople try to do, so they end up working harder when they could be working smarter.

This begs the question, are your sales activities deciding your strategy or is your strategy deciding your sales activities?

Developing A Consultative Sales Process:

From the Sales Director’s perspective, developing a consultative sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do. This is just as appropriate for internal and totally reactive sales teams as it is for external pro-active ones. This outline includes the activity and calls they must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the documentation they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

It’s only when such an outline is in place that sales management can be in a position to:

* Monitor the sales force’s activity, progress and results,

* Assess issues as they arise and take appropriate action,

* Redirect individual sales effort efficiently.

Although many organisations appreciate the importance of being customer-focused and talk in vague terms about their “consultative sales process”, surprisingly few sales leaders invest the time and energy required to develop a formal sales process – a process that is at once detailed and resilient enough to guide their salespeople and permit effective management of their efforts.

Overcoming Implementation Intertia:

Even when a consultative sales process has been developed, understood by sales managers, written down and circulated, it’s often not enough. No matter how brilliant, a sales process will only be effective to the extent it is followed and used by frontline sales staff. And this is where most organisations fall down: overcoming inertia – among managers and salespeople alike – and implementing the process.

The hurdles that must be cleared in order to get people throughout the organisation to actually implement it are enough to cause Sales Directors to tear their hair out. But a select few, of the very best, have found some innovative strategies that have enabled them to achieve the Holy Grail:

Sustained sales growth achieved efficiently, reliably and by design – is your organisation one of them?

Today’s News: At last!! My good friend and the author of the “2007 Top Sales Article Of The Year” Keith Rosen, is finally on the 2008 leader board - coming up on the rails again – you can catch his excellent piece here

We had some severe technical problems over the w/e: This site and JFC were taking up to two minutes to load, so we must have lost a lot of visitors – if you were one of them, please accept my sincere apologies, this is only the second time in three years that our ISP has let us down – oh, and the two JF Uncut posts were pretty good

Tomorrow: A very special guy, and possibly the most innovative member of the Top Sales Experts team