I know we’ve said it time and time again, and it sounds trite, but there is a lot of truth in the old mantra that, if you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t know how to get there. Here are some helpful links to inspire your planning of sales and personal success for 2010 and some advice on how to make the most from high-impact New Year’s resolutions.

• Are you motivated to get the best from next year?  A Productive Seller favourite, ZenHabits answers your top 20 questions on getting motivated and overcoming bad habits.
• Are the people around you helping or hindering your success? Now is the time to decide.
• Think about changing your working processes (trust me, process is a critical success factor, the other is activity) and becoming a more productive seller.
• Take an opportunity to think about your brand and how it is affecting your success.
• Explore ways to improve your sales effectiveness that you may have overlooked in the past.
• Get above the clutter.

High-impact New Years Resolutions

What you are looking to create for your New Years resolution is a list of top level projects (like “expand into European market”) that are underpinned by actionable items (like “write advert for French speaking telemarketer”). If you can’t sit down and do it, it isn’t an actionable item. e.g. “Write Novel” is not an actionable item, it is a project. “Research Babynames.com for main character first name” is an actionable item: providing you have the time, energy and resources available, you can begin an actionable item immediately.

The reason I mention this and underpin it with repeated examples, is that so many resolutions are broken because they contain no substance, hence are not actionable. “Get Fit” is far easier a resolution to break than “Attend gym on Monday and Thursday evenings for 1 hour workout”, providing you have – of course – defined the items that will make up your workout!

Essentially, start broad and then focus on details.  Keep the above at the front of your mind and you can’t go wrong.

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you.

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If you’re not at one with GTD, I suggest that you check it out forthwith. Sample these excerpts from David’s newest book, ‘Making it all Work’ as a free taster.

And if that’s whet your whistle, here is a video of David talking to the boffins at Google. It’s quite long, but very informative, and of great use to us Productive Sellers.

I’ve used GTD principles as part of my personal productivity system for years. Where the challenge comes is in adapting the framework of GTD to meet your individual needs and to work with the technology that you have available. I’ll post shortly with some free on-line resources to help you manage everything, but for now here is a technologically agnostic tutorial from GTD Times to get you started on GTD for salespeople.

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Let’s talk about goals for a moment. What are your goals for today, for this week, even for this year?

You probably have a loose idea of what you want to achieve in the short term. If you take the time to examine it, you’ll

find that most of it is reactionary; that is it is determined by what is going on right now – deals, meetings, sales targets, household chores – you get the picture.

That’s fine. These things have to be done. They represent what we are going to call the operational level of your life.

Now we know that, we are going to forget it…for now.

Above the operational level, we have the planning level. This is comprised of the operational things that need to be achieved, but they are not happening right now. For instance, you know that you are going to have to replace your car this year; the mileage is high and the maintenance costs are going to outweigh its value. You can’t afford to do it now, but you plan to do it this year.

Or let’s take a sales example, as this is a sales productivity blog. You know that your company has a new product coming out in quarter three. You know that, to get ahead of the game, you need to start learning about the market for that product, but you don’t have the time right now. You think that you will probably look at it closer to the time – if the opportunity arises!

They are still tasks that are dictated by the daily machinations of your life; they are just a bit further out. This is the planning level.

Then we come to the exciting stuff! What do you want to do with your life? Whoa, steady on there for a minute. That’s a big question. Do I even know that? My bet is that you do. You might not have your entire future mapped out, but I know that you have ambitions and dreams for at least some areas of your life. That seat on the board, or moving from the telesales team to major accounts, becoming team leader – anything.

And what about your life outside work, because to be a productive seller, we need to live our lives outside work just as effectively. Everything has a balance and if all you do is work, you will burn out.

This is the strategic level, and it’s where all of our work will start.

So, your task for the week is to take a few sheets of paper and a pencil and start to write out your long term objectives for your life. Don’t worry about when you are going to do what: one year, five years, twenty years; it doesn’t matter at this stage. Write each one at the top of a sheet of paper. That’s it. That is the basis of the strategic level and it’s where your journey into sales productivity will start.

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I am going to assume that you are in, or moving into sales and that, like all salespeople you want to have as much success as possible with the least amount of stress.

It doesn’t matter how you measure that success; whether you want a seat on the board, or you just want to be rich. What matters is how you lift yourself above the next salesperson, in terms of that success, without losing all your hair (assuming you still have some!).

How to do this – simple – control the things you can and develop a strong mindset and great systems to trap, track and manage the things you can’t, leaving your sales day clutter free. You will have more time to focus on new opportunities and your existing customers will applaud your service for its efficiency and attention to detail.

Who am I, you may be asking yourself. Well, I was a salesperson who found himself in the position of consultant, advising technology companies on taking products to market, combined with undertaking sales directorships in other businesses.

This left me with a huge number of conflicting responsibilities. I had to come up with a way, not just to survive, but to thrive, and quickly! One of my great strengths has always been quickly digesting the complex and distilling it down to a simple set of actions. It was time to focus the approach that I sell to companies, to my own life and work.

This blog is about what I did (how it has been and is developing) in order to achieve a Zen state of productivity that is focussed on allowing me to drive my sales and my business interests forwards and delight my customers. More importantly, it is about how you can achieve this state, without compromising on the service of existing customers, your other business commitments and, importantly, your personal life.

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