Tips from the Envelope Man — Harvey Mackay, Part I
Lesson 13 — Keep Your Eye on Your Time, Not On Your Watch
Knowing what to do isn’t enough if you haven’t developed the self-discipline to do it.I have known successful salespeople who were drunks, gamblers, liars, thieves…but I have never known a successful person who sat on his ass all day.With all of the Anonymous groups we have for dealing with human weakness, why is it we haven’t organized to combat the most dangerous, expensive, and self-destructive habit of all: wasting time? You can do all those other nasty things and still make a decent living. But if you blow off your nine to fives on useless, time-consuming behavior, you will fail….
It takes energy and self-discipline to sell. Your customer doesn’t care if you make the call. You, the salesperson, have to care. Despite all the psychological gimmicks designed to motivate salespeople to make calls, like bullpens, sales contests, sales meetings, and motivational training, salespeople still contrive to find 1,001 ways to avoid investing the one asset they have that will invariably bring results: their time.
Why?
I wish I knew.
But I do know that a salesperson doesn’t have to be a Lee Iacocca or an Elizabeth Dole to be successful. Just follow one simple rule: Set up a schedule with a fixed number of calls to be made every working day, and complete that schedule. If you make ten stops by only one eyeball-to-eyeball sales call, you’ve made only one call.
…It’s my experience that salespeople who do monitor themselves this way actually give themselves a tougher program to follow than their sales managers give them. That’s because we know ourselves well enough to know that our real capacity far exceeds the average expectations others have for us.
– Harvey Mackay in Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition.
I’ve read two of Mackay’s books that he wrote in ’88 and ’90, and I wish he were still writing today. He’s plenty smart and understands all the tiny, gritty, petty, rubber-meets-the-road, less-than-exemplary parts of an executive’s mind. While much of is wisdom applies as well in 2007 as it did in the late 80s, many examples have less force because they draw on business details (like secretaries who take messages) or political examples (Carter and Ford) that are 20+ years old.
That said, there’s plenty of Mackay advice on personal executive management that would be good for almost any ADDexec. For that matter, they’d be good for an executive, even without the attention deficit disorder. Pick up a used copy from Amazon. Dip in. Enjoy. Oh, and quit cringing when you read the references to Carter and Iacocca. You’re not so young you don’t remember them, are you?
