Self Leadership – Part 1 – How truly productive are you?
Let me begin by saying that this newsletter is not a time management lesson. This is a lesson focused on self leadership and your own individual productivity, which is a vital component to driving the sales revenue production of your sales team.
One of my first business teachers and mentors, Tom Hopkins of ‘How to master the art of selling” fame, would often quote the affirmation; Hopkins "I MUST DO THE MOST PRODUCTIVE THING POSSIBLE AT EVERY GIVEN MOMENT1". Meaning that if you want to start multiplying your business you must always do what you think is the most productive thing possible at every given moment.
Whilst I had connected with the quote when I first heard it, it has only been in the last 5 years since coaching sales mangers and business owners that I have taken this simple little line to a much deeper level of understanding and application.
When you look at this simple concept quote; "I MUST DO THE MOST PRODUCTIVE THING POSSIBLE AT EVERY GIVEN MOMENT1" it seems pretty obvious, right? Wrong!
The devil is always in the details and in this instance the detail is in the 2 key words MOST PRODUCTIVE!
What does most productive really mean?
In my experience working and coaching business owners and sales mangers, I believe that the majority of them don’t really practice this small but powerful slice of business wisdom. It is my contention that most would have a flawed understanding of THE MOST PRODUCTIVE THING.
One of the critical things that a sales leader or business owner must understand and practice daily is that, if you want to start multiplying your business you must always do what you think is the most productive thing possible at every given moment. This truly is difference between being really successful and failure – it is almost as simple and small as that. As a business leader you must be able to very clearly define what the MOST PRODUCTIVE thing is for you in your business.
Each one of you reading this right now most likely interpret the “The Most productive Thing,” very differently depending on your role, as some of you are sales mangers and some of you are business owners who are managing a sales team. I would contend differently!
In my view based on hundreds of interactions with both business owners and sales mangers alike, over the years, most haven’t in reality given too much thought as to what really is the MOST PRODUCTIVE thing. For those few who have, knowing what the most productive thing is and doing the most productive thing is two very different notions.
By the way, I have no doubt that your days are full. I have no doubt that you have a lot of things on your plate that need attention every day. I am in no doubt that many of you are over loaded and struggle to manage your workloads. Stay with me here because this module will be a terrific help. It will make all the difference to how your next 90 days turns out. This session will have a massive impact on how your year will unfold.
There is a wonderful quote from Dr Stephen R Covey which my youngest son somehow picked up as a three year old and would say it over and over again. He obviously liked how it rolled off his tongue and the reaction that it sparked from adults. He would often repeat “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!”
So to begin with, let’s first determine what the Main Thing really is, for you in your role as sales leader, and then we will take a look and see how your own personal productivity stacks up against it.
What is: “Most Productive Time” for a Sales Leader?
Before we can begin our journey to discover what the most productive thing is that you can do with your time, as a sales leader, we must first determine how you currently value your time.
What is the dollar amount that you place on every hour, every minute you invest in your business?
I’m always shocked at how many sales leaders don’t have any idea what the value of their time is, or how to increase the value of their time. So, the question is, “what is your time worth?” Do you know what your time is worth? Do you know what your time needs to be worth to achieve your income goals? If you don’t know what your time is worth and what it needs to be worth, then you cannot make effective decisions on what activities you should be spending your time on and what activities you should have others do for you.
So that being said, complete the following exercise with hand over the heart honesty:
Part 1
How much do you currently earn per annum (taking all bonuses, etc into account)______
Divide the figure above by the number of weeks you currently work per year ____
Divide the figure above by the number of days per week do you currently work____
Divide the figure above by the number of hrs per day do you currently work____
How much do you currently earn per hour ______
Part 2
Amount you wish to earn in the next 12 months(taking all bonuses, etc into account) _____
Divide the figure above by the number of weeks you currently work per year ____
Divide the figure above by the number of days per week do you currently work____
Divide the figure above by the number of hrs per day do you currently work____
How much do you need to earn per hour to achieve your desired income goal ______
How much is the dollar per hour gap between what you are currently earning and your desired earnings goal ________
So now we have determined the gap between how much you value your time and how much you are truly delivering.
Let’s be very clear here: The gap between where your current earnings per hour and desired earnings per hour is not a function of effort, rather it’s a function of productive effort. I am not questioning the amount of hours you devote to your role. I am putting the blow torch on what you do with those hours! How many truly productive hours do you really work a day?
So what really is productive time?
Let me share a powerful lesson I received from my own business coach 4 years ago with regards this question of “productive time”. I was in his office during one of his coaching sessions one morning and I asked my business coach how he managed to get so much done. Rather than simply come out and tell me, like any good coach, he gave me some homework to do before our next session together. He told me to set the alarm on my mobile phone for one hour. Then he told me to only work on building profit during those 60 minutes – nothing else!!!
At first I really struggled. I needed to go to the bathroom, I needed a hot drink, I had the urge to go online and check my blog, I felt the need to check my emails, I had a newsletter that was halfway completed that I wanted to do, etc.etc. There were all these little distractions which kept getting in the way of me working one full hour, firing on all cylinders, working on nothing else other than profit building activities. And that dear listener is what productive time is all about! Productive time is time that is focused directly on generating income. So what percentage of the time are you productive?
It is fascinating to note that a in a recent study of Fortune 500 CEOs, they estimated that they only had 28 and 38 productive minutes a day. In other word these very busy executives only invested around half an hour a day on profit building activity, pretty incredible isn’t it? When you consider your role and what you are paid to do, how much productive time do you really invest in income generation?
Productive time doesn’t simply magically happen; you have to be focused and disciplined and consciously create it!
How much of your week last week was spent on maintenance rather than on generating profitable income?
As the individual charged with the responsibility for generating sales revenue, the most productive thing that you can do at any one time is: Increase the profitable sales revenue generation of the sales team. You may well be a critical component of the team, but as sales leader the most productive thing that you should be doing with your time is to: Increase the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team.
So let’s discuss you and the number of truly productive hours you put into a day. Do you have an hour of productive time a day? 2 hours? What’s your most conservative estimate at this point? Unless you have really focused on maximizing your productive time before, my best guess would be that you currently work no more than 2 hours of productive time a day. Remember, we are talking about time invested to Increase the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team only!
So we are not talking here about writing a report that your boss needs for his executive meeting, nor are we talking about meeting with the Logistics Manager to discuss merchandise delivery issues, we are not discussing customer complaints, nor are we talking about fielding general Rep queries from the field. We are talking only about activities that increase the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team
So as an exercise let’s review all that you do through this window of MOST PRODUCTIVE THING time.
Take a look at your to-do list from the last 3 days. Looking at all the time you spent working, how much real time was invested in doing the MOST PRODUCTIVE THING; Increasing the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team? I want you to be really self-critical in your estimate. Imagine that I was there with you questioning every little detail. Imagine that I was scrutinizing everything that you did, through the window of MOST PRODUCTIVE THING! Imagine that whatever you presented to me I peeled it back, I dug down deep asking you the tough and searching questions all with a view to checking what you did against the productive measure of “Increasing the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team” So be tough on yourself. Stop what you are doing right now and do this exercise. Let’s see how many truly productive hours you have worked in the last 3 days!
Remember I am not suggesting all the other things that you had on your plate are not important and shouldn’t be done. That’s not what we are looking at here. We are simply looking at your last 3 days of work, as an average, and the amount of time you actually invest in doing the Most Productive thing possible!
By the way the small number of productive hours that you have come up with is more than likely very indicative of the way you operate most of the time. So if you have been super critical about where you currently invest your time, you have more than likely concluded that your productive time score is far too low. So looking at that number is it any wonder that you are behind on your financial goals, when most of your time is spent working on things other than Increasing the Profitable Sales Revenue Generation of the Sales Team?
So, my dear student, the chances are great that if your current Main Thing score is anything like the average, then you are most likely thinking to yourself, well that’s all very well Ian, but with everything I have to do in a day, just how am I possibly expected to work on my main thing? There are only so many hours in a day and how am I supposed to get it all done? I am time poor as it is.
The answer lies in Self leadership
Self leadership
Self Leadership can be viewed as the ability to lead yourself by clearly defining what you want from life (Your vision of what success looks like for you) and how you intend to get it. This means that for you to accomplish your goals you must mobilise all the resources that you have at your disposal. Your resources include your time, people, budget, talents etc. All of your resources must be put to use PRODUCTIVELY to ensure you best chance of successfully achieving your vision. Whilst the rest of this online course deals with maximizing the output from your people, this module is all about maximising your own output!
Recognizing that for the majority of us, it is very difficult to go from “Saul to Paul” over-night, how do you suddenly change your work life to reflect the call to do the most productive thing? How do you abruptly go from averaging 1 or 2 hours of “main thing- productive time” to 3 or 4 or 5 when you consider all you currently have on your plate?
It’s all very easy to say that you need to invest your time keeping the main thing the main thing, but how does one actually move from where one is right now to where it is that you want to be?
How do you move your sales team from where they are right now to where you want them to be?
How do you move your current income state to earning the kind of income you really want?
How do you move your career from where it is now to where you want it to be?
This is a challenging one! In the next lesson I will share an analogy that I have shared with dozens of my clients and it has made a massive difference as to how they now see their “journey into the productive”
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