Sales expert Jill Konrath did not mince words when she spoke to Naveen Jindal School of Management students and guests earlier this month about being at the top of their game. In her “Competitive Edge: Fresh Strategies for Winning More Sales in Less Time,” she took aim at the tools sales pros rely on — social media, their laptops and their phones.
Her blunt advice: Put them down.
As in, quit checking email, messages, and Twitter to see if you have gotten a nibble, bite or lead. It is draining your brain of the energy it needs to be productive.
“We have to do something differently if we are dealing with really smart [customers] who really know their stuff,” Konrath, author of Agile Selling, SNAP Selling and Selling to BIG Companies, told her audience. “[Potential clients] have zero tolerance for someone who is just going to dump a spiel on them.” Feeling “overwhelmed” — among clients, co-workers and sales pros — is the new norm. One way to feel less overwhelmed is to stop checking each time something new hits your inbox.
Konrath spoke twice at Jindal School — first in a free 90-minute lecture and then the following day to about a dozen corporate sponsors, including representatives from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lennox International and Liberty Mutual Insurance. This select group of corporate sponsors got time with Konrath, a nationally recognized thought leader in sales. Their financial support ensured students in JSOM’s Professional Sales concentration, headed by Dr. Howard Dover, benefited from her expertise as well.
Dover, who sat in on Konrath’s meeting with sales executives, said she talked about ways to improve productivity and ramp up the performance of new sales-team members. “Jill asked our corporate partners to rank their biggest challenges in sales performance. She then facilitated valuable discussions with the executives to discuss accelerating sales performance and on-boarding. It was a very informal but valuable session for everyone involved,” Dover said.
A similar event will take place Oct. 13 when Jason Jordan, author of Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Performance, will speak with students and the public at a free event. Jordan researches metrics to determine the best method to measure sales teams’ performance. To get a parking pass for this event, RSVP here.
For Konrath, part of the cure for working smarter is just working. She relies on several apps, including Pomodoro, which breaks tasks into 25-minute time chunks. “We’ve got to control our habits, but it’s so frickin’ hard,” she said, citing research that shows constant multitasking lowers women’s IQ by five points, and men’s by an astonishing 15 points. Other apps she uses to offload some of her email crush include SaneBox and unroll.me. “You need to really think about protecting your time,” she told the audience (many of whom were checking emails and Facebook posts as she spoke). “It’s your most valuable asset.”
