Sales Organizational Skills

January 26, 2015

Mark Jamnik

Agency owners face more and more demands each day. Developing the right sales organizational skills will help you and your team be more productive, create less stressful work days, and make your days more fulfilling. These types of skills are picked up through habits throughout our lives, and they need to be evaluated and updated to align with your goals.

Set of Sales Organizational Skills

According to a Wall Street Journal Report, Office workers waste an average of 40% of their workday. Not because they aren’t smart, but because they were never taught organizing skills to cope with the increasing workloads and demands.

That equates to over four weeks a year looking for stuff! Spending your time looking for things is obviously not an efficient use of your day. Sales organizing habits takes an approach for your sales efforts so you can streamline the daily operations when reaching out to clients by helping you develop systems to handle ongoing follow up and other details to close a deal.

There are countless ways to use your sales organizational skills for optimal efficiency in communications, meetings and proposals to turn more opportunities into closes.

Recognizing how you spend your sles time on each of those activities will highlight how you actually spend your time. Assessing time in each of these areas will help, even if you are already proficient in organization or just need a more clear understanding. Here is a direct link to a Google sheet so you can time track and evaluate where you are spending your time and see how much (or little) you are doing in sales. Do this for 2 days over the course of a week that are non-consecutive days.

Sales Process Strategies

Setting up your sales process and system (templates/strategies) takes time to set up, and once these systems are in place, they make your sales job much easier. One way to start this is to begin with a sales checklist. Create a sales checklist of items essential for handling your clients. This should include email templates, meeting templates, presentation templates, and schedule templates. The sales checklist allows for customization but encourages you to think through all the essentials. Essentials offer you a menu of what you could take to meetings. Depending on the client, the sales checklist helps you determine what you should take. Today, email management and communication could be a full-time job. Identify your consistent email activities and make email templates to new prospects and/or existing clients to save time. If you feel like you are working twice as hard, this exercise should help you to slow down so you can speed up later. Investing time on sales process strategies pay dividends down the line and also identify the areas where you need improvement.

Identify the (Lack of) Sales Organizational Skills

Recognize yourself in any of the following list:

You spend time searching for an email that you sent.
You send the same email over and over again and keep retyping it each time. You sift through countless revisions of proposals to find the latest. You keep recreating the wheel for each proposal.

Start Soon

Invest a day to optimize your sales organizational skills to eliminate the most popular duplication items. Spend time getting rid of old prospects that don’t fit your agency. Create a new file on your computer and in your inbox as a collection bucket to build up more of your sales process.

Take an inventory of the many different things that you do each day. Assemble those activities into the following categories:

Communication (phone calls, email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)
Paperwork (pending, projections)
Prospecting and presentations (both internal and external meetings)

Focus on one area at a time.

For communication, you must be able to easily find emails so you can create folders like Clients, Prospects, Business Articles, Internal Information, and Templates. Create a folder for Clients, Prospects, Articles to Read, Traffic, Proposals, Follow Ups, Hear Back From, etc. When you categorize your email into consistent activities, you begin to see ongoing emails that you have been recreating. You have already done the work creating the original email, spend a little more time assigning the most common emails into templates

Start Now

To get questions on how and where to begin to create sales organizational skills, download the 5 Must Knows for Growing Your Agency Easier and learn how to save time on sales, close bigger and bigger deals, prioritize your day and identify gaps in your sales process.