Research and surveys show some interesting statistics when it comes to how salespeople spend their time during the workday:
33% Talking to clients
21% Writing emails
17% Entering data
17% Prospecting and marketing
12% Conducting internal meetings
This is for salespeople in all industries and not just for financial salespeople, but you get the drift. Where should all your time be spent? 95% of your time should be spent in just two of the categories above… Talking to clients… and finding new ones, that is, marketing.
But Mike! I have to do all those other things to make my business run. YOU don’t have to do them. Train somebody to do them for you. When I was in personal production making $1.5 million a year… I spent exactly 2 hours a week creating proposals… the rest of the time I was meeting clients or finding new clients to bring on. I didn’t help clients fill out paperwork. I didn’t maintain compliance records. I didn’t write emails. Though, I did have a 10-minute daily internal meeting with my assistant… that meeting was specifically designed to offload all the other daily tasks to staff.
I had 2 wonderful staff that handled EVERYTHING else. I paid them well, but it was only because of them that I could make the money I did. How are you spending your day?
One of the most fruitful tasks I give to my coaching clients is to have them keep an hourly record of what they do each hour of the day… for an entire week. 100% of advisors that I have done this with are flabbergasted at how little “work” they actually do each week. The best of them, was only spending 50% of their time constructively… most were much lower than that.
Are you brave enough to try this exercise for a week? If you are, count on your income going up.