Easy Business Success # 21

‘Gold Time’ can increase sales and profits

"Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am often asked by my clients how I find the time to get so many things done each day. My secret is a simple time management idea I learned over 20 years ago.

Let me explain what this is and how you can use it to increase your sales and profits quickly.

And that brings me to this issue of Easy Business Success...

I’ve learnt through personal experience that doing what I call ‘gold time activities’ in sales and marketing will create a champagne lifestyle for you.

So in this edition of Easy Business Success I want to share with you some of these gold time activities and how you can use them to radically increase your sales and profits.

Let’s get going.

How to use ‘Gold Time’ to increase your sales and your profits:

Here’s a very simple way to identify the ‘gold time’ activities that will improve your sales and your profits.

It’s called the four box concept, and I first saw it explained in the excellent book by Stephen Covey called ‘The seven habits of highly effective people.’

Here’s how the four box concept works:

Think about your typical work day. You will be able to put all the activities you do on this work day into one of the four boxes in this diagram.

Box 1:

These are the work activities you do that are both urgent and important. A common work activity in Box 1 is ‘problems’. Problems come in all shapes and sizes and they are something you can often spend time working on in a typical work day.

Example:

One of your biggest clients has contacted you and told you they are very unhappy about something. And unless you sort it out, they are going to take their business elsewhere. Because this client has a problem its something that is urgent. And because they are one of your biggest clients (and represent a large amount of business to you) it’s important you get the problem fixed. So obviously you will spend time on sorting out this problem.

Box 3:

These are the work activities you do that are urgent but are not important. A very common work activity in this box is ‘interruptions’. Interruptions can be on the phone, by email or in person, and they can often distract you from doing more valuable activities. Interruptions and distractions are surprisingly common for many people and they can use up large amounts of valuable time.

Example:

A good friend phones you during business hours and wants to tell you about their overseas holiday they have just come back from. Now their phone call is urgent because it has been put through to you and has interrupted what you are doing. However it’s not that important in terms of you making sales and increasing your income. (You could easily reschedule their call and talk to them after hours.)

Box 4:

These are the work activities you do that are not important and not urgent. A common work activity in this box is ‘time wasters’. And it’s remarkable how many time wasters there are in a typical work day.

Examples:

One common time waster is complaining about things we have no control over. If we spend ten minutes complaining to our workmate about how bad the weather has been, this is a total waste of ten minutes of our life.

Another very common time waster is having a messy or disorganised office. The Wall Street Journal once reported that white collar workers spend up to six weeks a year looking for things in the office. I can speak with great authority on this time waster because I’ve personally experienced it dozens of time. The time we spend looking for information or items we’ve misplaced is a real time waster and can really add up.

Box 2:

These are activities you do that are very important, but are usually not urgent. A common work activity in this box is doing what I call ‘gold time activities’. These are things you do that can have a huge impact on both your sales and your income. The gold time activities in Box 2 can be worth their weight in gold to you.

Example:

Working on your sales presentation so it is much more effective is incredibly important.

(You could do this by practising ‘expensive questions’ which we talked about in Easy Business Success # 9. Expensive Questions )

Just imagine if you could improve your sales presentation and you increase your sales 25% by still only talking to the same number of people.

That is definitely important.

The snag with taking time to improve your sales presentation is this.

For most people (and especially if your sales are going okay right now) it’s probably not urgent that you take time to practise and improve your sales presentation.

So it doesn’t get done.

Another example:

Getting more referrals can have a huge impact on your sales results.

It can be up to ten times easier to make a sale to a referral compared to making a cold call on someone you have never met before.

This is because with a referral you have a large amount of trust and credibility in the eyes of your prospect before you start.
With a cold call there is no trust and credibility to start with.

The problem with getting more referrals is that unless your sales results are terrible right now, it’s probably not urgent that you get more referrals.

So you don’t spend time learning how to do it.

Let’s quickly summarise what we’ve covered so far:

The work activities you do on a typical work day can be summarised into the four boxes in the following diagram.

Box 1 activities are urgent and important (and includes problems)

Box 2 activities are not urgent & important (and includes gold time activities)

Box 3 activities are urgent & not important (and includes interruptions)

Box 4 activities are not urgent & not important (and includes time wasters)

How to use the four boxes to increase your sales and profits:

The first thing I recommend you do is become aware of how you are spending your working time right now. (Many business people and sales professionals are quite unaware of how they spend their time during each work day.)

You can do this in a few seconds by asking a simple question several times each work day.

“What box am I working on right now, and is it the best use of my time?”

When you begin to regularly ask yourself this question, you may notice to your surprise that you are spending a lot of time on boxes 1, 3 and 4.

And only a very small amount of time on box 2.

This is quite normal to start with.

The more times you ask this question, the clearer you get about how you are spending your work time right now.

And often you will notice it is not the best use of your time.

Example:

You notice that a common time waster you have during your work day is to read the sports pages of the local paper for 15 minutes during working hours. You decide to stop doing this. Instead you decide to use these 15 minutes to start doing simple activities that will turn many of your clients and customers into delighted raving fans. (I’ll show you how to do this in session 8.)

You notice that as you do these activities you have less customer complaints and your business life seems to go far smoother.

Action Exercise One:

During each work day ask yourself this question at least twice:

“What box am I working on right now, and is it the best use of my time?”

What did you notice and observe and as result of asking this question?

1:
2:
3:
4:
5:

What are gold time activities?

Gold time activities are things you can do that are usually not urgent. In other words there is no pressing need to go and do them right now. However they are usually very important in terms of increasing your sales and income.

Here are just a few gold time activities you could do on a work day:

• Making a personal sales presentation to a potential customer
• Sending an added value communication to an existing client
• Practising your sales presentation so it is more effective
• Practising asking for referrals so you get better at it
• Sending a client feedback form to collect positive testimonial comments
• Doing something simple that will position you as an expert in your field.
• Practising the ‘expensive questions’ you will ask in a sales presentation
• Sending a thank you note to a client or prospect
• Ringing up an existing client and thanking them for their business

These gold time activities all have two things in common:

1: They are all very important in terms of potentially increasing your sales and income. And in almost every case they are seldom urgent things you have to go and do right now.

Here’s another key question to ask yourself each work day:

If you are serious about improving your sales and profits, another useful question to ask yourself each work day is this one:

“What gold time activities can I do more of today and when am I going to do them?”

In my humble opinion, the more gold time activities you do the more sales you will make and the more money you will earn. This also means that the less gold time activities you do, the lower your sales and the less money you will earn.

Action Exercise Two:

Ask this question several times each work day this week.

“What gold time activities can I do more of today and when am I going to do them?”

What did you notice and observe and as result of asking this question?

1:
2:
3:
4:
5:

Focussing on gold time activities is not easy or simple to do:

The temptation is always to focus on other things like problems, interruptions and time wasters and other lower value activities.

I still personally struggle with this on a daily basis. It’s the challenge between focusing on the vital few things that make a real difference compared to the trivial many things that do not.

Example:

One of my important goals each year is to write and publish a number of articles and reports on business success. So on most days I’m at my computer shortly after I get up. I then commit to writing at least two pages before I do anything else. Some days I end up writing a lot more than two pages. Other days I only get my two pages done. Over a period of time I’ve amazed myself at how many articles, reports and other material I have actually been able to write and publish with my ‘two page a day’ action step.

Are gold time activities the only things you should do each work day?

Certainly not.

There are many things you need to do in a typical work day and a lot of them will not be gold time activities. The purpose of this session is to highlight that gold time activities are very easy to not do at all because they are usually not urgent.

So gold time activities may never get done:

• The added value communication to your client or prospect does not get sent.
• The improved sales presentation never gets created.
• The wonderful system to get referrals never gets tested
• And so on.

I believe strongly that improving your skills is a key gold time activity. And so is doing anything that gets you better results in the key areas of lead generation, sales conversion and repeat and referral sales.

The time you invest doing both of these will pay you huge rewards.

However, you need to invest the time and do these activities.

The good news:

In my experience in a typical work day, most of us waste a lot of time doing lower value activities. So it is not that difficult to find a small amount of time and use this time to do a few more gold time activities if we make it a goal.

Example:

I am often a few minutes early to some of my meetings. I try and have something useful I can do to use these few minutes more productively. I am a big fan of writing thank you notes and cards to clients and prospects. So I usually have a few cards and envelopes in my Day Timer folder. If I have a few minutes free I can use this time to write a quick personal thank you note. I am always surprised how many thank you notes I can write just by being prepared and using the odd free minute I have.

Action Exercise Three:

What gold time activity will you spend at least five minutes doing each work day this week?
What lower value activity will you spend five minutes less time doing each work day this week? (This will automatically free up time to use to do your gold time activity)

Copyright © 2011 by Graham McGregor All Rights Reserved

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