Three Reasons to Plan a Sales Itinerary
Sellers with smaller geographic areas may tend to dismiss the importance of planning weeks ahead. Here are three reasons to organize your prospects and clients into a consistent workflow.
First, by assigning prospects and customers into a four-week geographic or zip code rotation, stress is reduced, daily, and weekly goals and priorities become clear.
Second, you will reduce the length of your sales cycle. If it takes three calls on average to close a sale, theoretically seeing someone once a week means a three-week sales cycle. However factor in meetings, conflicts, vacations, and other interruptions and three weeks becomes three months. Without a consistent rotation or call cycle three months can become six or eight months, assuming you remember to follow up.
Third, you will be more productive. You cannot manage time, but you can learn to manage the events the come in and out of your daily activities. Without a plan, someone else will engage you and you will be working on his or her goals instead of your own. It makes it easier to say, “I can’t today, but I can help you tomorrow (or next week).”
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra