Sales and Procrastination
By: Mujtaba Qadri
Tags: Sales, Productivity, Salesforce Productivity, Procrastination, Salesforce

Sales lies in the core foundation of modern-day society. Every person is engaged in sales one way or other. Professionals are selling their skills, companies selling their products, labors selling their services and so on. It may be applicable to some cases of relationship where one sells his/her personality to get desired affection. These traits of sales tell us how selling is directly related to human behavior. Human behavior tends to be different from culture to culture, region to region, nation to nation etc. However, among the behaviors that remain common in whole humanity, PROCRASTINATION is the most found.

Leaders, managers, employees, husbands, wives, in fact all the human roles procrastinate. Similarly, salespersons tend to be procrastinator, but this is something that no management wants to hear or deal about. Sales is the fastest paced profession of all and required continuous focus, presence of mind and customer proximity at all times.

Being a salesperson, I experience procrastination at every sales stage like:

· Cold Calling, it feel like maybe I can make this call later, what I will talk about, maybe the prospect would be busy at this moment, may be its not the lucky hour to call..

· Introductory E-mail, I cannot create right content, I don’t know about the context of customer requirements, who read marketing email these days

· Offer Preparation, calculation tool is not working right now maybe I should work sometime later, maybe I need to consult boss before setting up prices, I don’t need to bear the painful offer approval cycle from management today

· Follow-up call, let’s do this sometime later after all customer already has my offer

… and the list goes on..

Sales is as demanding as love relationship. You need to spend right time and quality time with your partner to make it successful. Same goes in sales cycle, if we miss the right moment of contacting the customer or we lack the effort to spend the quality time, the customer has high probability to break up and move on and its high probability customer finds the right mate within due time before you make any compensatory mood.

We are all bombarded by time management stuff and productivity booster techniques. With digital age now the managers are coming up with new tech solutions to make your every second count. However, being the most intelligent kind of specie, salespersons are still successful in finding the loopholes in technology which they can easily exploit to gain some more time for procrastination.

Myself used to make a dummy skype call while being away from the desk or chit chatting with colleagues, this bluffed the software to rank me the most productive employee of the day on floor and I used to end up among top 10 productive employees on daily scoreboard out of 200 employees working on the floor.

Having said and done all.. I can say with my experience of 7 years in inside and outside sales, if anything which I compete the most is my procrastination. Describing the above scenarios, it’s not at all that only Salespeople need to be blamed. Organizational culture is of high importance as if salespeople have the right environment to be productive. Most often we are bombarded by new spread sheets to fill in the data of Sales pipeline, factory forecasting, strategic measure, most of the time repetitive tasks are required each time with new template. Further, sales involve efforts from cross functional team including product expert, legal, commercial, logistics etc. In most cases these departments are hard to get on board with the sales objectives, resulting in barrier for salespeople to work which further results in their lack of confidence on team and processes which further results in PROCRASTINATION.

I would write some other day on short-term tactics and long terms strategies to overcome procrastination and make more time available for us to utilize in increased sales, family time and self-growth. Honestly speaking there is no silver bullet to fix this issue, many thinkers and gurus have already come up with their strategies and framework, yet still a wide and complex topic to cover. We will also try to explore in another piece to share with you.

At the end the message is just that Salespeople are the front-line forces of organizations be it be small or large, being the most vulnerable who bear so much responsibility of growth and success they tend to have very different emotional or development expertise which need to be taken care of.