In sales, yourcompetitors are not your enemy. Time is your enemy. Time is the most limitingaspect of your sales efforts. You need time to develop new prospects. You needto get time from your crazy busy prospects to sell to them. And you need timeto help your qualified prospects move through their buying process to adecision.

Customers today look tosellers to help them gather the data and information they need make sounddecisions quickly and at a low cost. The successful salesperson anticipates theinformation requirements of the customer and uses responsiveness to help thecustomer make an informed purchase decision with the least investment of timepossible. The faster and more completely you can be responsive to the customer,the less able your competitors will be to compete.

The way to stay ahead ofthe customer is to adopt the mindset that you will Do Everything Now: becomemore responsive and dramatically improve the service you provide yourcustomers, in order to win more orders in less time.

Don’t wait to getstarted. It’s not enough to say you want to Do Everything Now. You have to backup your talk with action. The way to do that is to set measurable targets(metrics) for all of your sales processes, and continually manage yourprocesses to outperform them.

Setting Your Speed Targets

Zero-Time Sellingrequires that your interactions with the customer have MILT—Maximum Impact inthe Least Time. Establish speed targets for core sales activities. It may takeyou months or more to reach these goals. That is perfectly fine, as long as youmake continuous progress. Here are some good starting speed targets to aim for.And what if you reach these goals? Keep going! Go even faster!

1. Logging and distributing an in-bound lead:

Within 30 minutes of thetime a lead is received, regardless of its source, it should be logged in yourCRM system and distributed to your salespeople. If they are leads that came inovernight, they should be logged and distributed within 30 minutes of the startof the business day.

2. Responding to a lead:

All leads should becalled within 30 minutes of being received by the salesperson.

3. Responding to questions:

Responding to a customerservice call and addressing a customer’s problem should happen in 30 minutes orless. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the customer’s problem is solved in 30minutes. It does mean that each customer receives a personal response in 30minutes, not an automated acknowledgment from a CRM system. All calls must beanswered by a live technical- or customer-support person. If a question cannotbe answered during the first call with a customer, then the follow-up responsewith complete information must be made to the customer within one hour of theend of the call.

4. Delivering a quote:

All quotes should bedelivered to the prospect/customer on the same day that they were requested.Use a proposal preparation app or re-use templates of previous quotes andproposals to prepare quotes rapidly.

5. Customer Documentation.

All required CRM documentationof customer interactions must be entered before the end of the business day.All account activity is entered, including emails, documentation of phone callsand sales calls, customer-support activity, quotes, and proposals. Havingimmediate access to the latest up-to-date information can accelerate youraccounting planning.

6. Clearing customer messages.

There are multipleavenues for hearing from your customers. Irrespective of the source, allmessages from customers must be cleared by the end of each business day.Emails, voicemails, phone messages, and text messages must all be cleared thesame day they are received. It’s not often that a customer sends an email justto say “Hi.” You have to assume that any customer who contacts you wants information.Provide the information they need right now. Don’t let it sit for a day ormore. Don’t inject unnecessary delay into the customer’s buying cycle.

Hitting Your Speed Targets

Once you've establishedspeed targets, how can you make sure you hit them? Here are six provenrecommendations:

1. Clearly communicate speed expectations to your team.

Make certain that allsales and service team member understand your expectations with regard toresponsiveness (content + speed) and MILT in all of their interactions withprospects and customers. This has to be done upfront. The commitment toresponsiveness and MILT, what I call Zero-Time Selling, starts at the top.

2. Frequently check individual progress against assigned target metrics.

Implementing routinechecks of key metrics in daily huddles or sales meetings will quickly revealwhether your “Do Everything Now” processes are on target, and if they’re not,will highlight the reasons they’re behind schedule.

Remember that this is aniterative process. Choose the processes you want to accelerate, establish yourspeed targets, measure the results, tweak the process, measure the resultsagain, and keep adjusting the process and measuring the results until youachieve your targets. Then, define a new, more aggressive target, and continuewith the process. You continually want to improve your processes as your salesresults improve. It’s work, but in the end you’ll find that it’s veryprofitable.

3. Manage your sales opportunities by focusing on responsiveness and MILT.

There are several thingsyou can do in this regard. Review every sales opportunity with the goal ofmaximizing responsiveness and MILT. When you review a salesperson’s pipeline ofsales opportunities, he or she should know the specific actions they are goingto take to provide maximum value to the customer on the next sales interaction.In addition, review the CRM records of prospects to review the actions thathave already been taken with a sales prospect to spot any requirements or opportunitiesthat may have been missed. Discuss what the salesperson could have done to bemore responsive and use those as teaching examples.

4. Monitor assigned follow-ups in your CRM system.

As a manager, you needto stay on top of the quantity and timing of each salesperson’s follow-ups andassigned tasks. If a quick check shows that Danni has a backlog of 50follow-ups that are overdue, then clearly she is struggling with herresponsiveness. Customers want information, and she isn’t getting them theanswers they need, which compromises your competitive position.

5. Coach salespeople to eliminate trivial and time-wasting sales calls.

The amount of time you insert unnecessarily between steps in the sales process with a prospect is destructive to your selling efforts. That time is called an “Indecent Interval”: injecting unnecessary delay into the customer’s buying cycle. Doing this opens the door for the competition to take the business away.

The “Wallet Pretext” isa venerable technique a salesperson uses to create an artificial reason tocontact the customer once more. Anyone who has ever dated has used the “WalletPretext.” You really enjoyed your blind date and hated to call it a night. Youcouldn’t wait to see her again, but you wanted to make sure to wait anappropriate amount of time before calling her, so you didn’t appear tooanxious. So you used the “Wallet Pretext”: “Hey, I am sorry for bothering you,but I can’t find my wallet today. I think I might have dropped it at yourapartment last night. Would you mind if I stopped by to look for it?”

In sales, the “WalletPretext” is used all the time by salespeople who don’t understand that part oftheir job is to create value for their customers. Too many salespeople are inthe habit of calling customers “just to touch base.” Customers hate these timewasters. If you aren’t responding to a specific request, think carefully beforecontacting a prospect. Will the call create value for the customer? If not,don’t pick up the phone.

The “Wallet Pretext” andthe “Indecent Interval” are often found together in the bag of techniquessalespeople incorporate into their daily routine. They are bad habits that needto be stamped out. The “Indecent Interval” especially is pervasive in selling.Even in this era of email, voicemail, smartphones, chat, and social media, theindecent interval exists. It is a creation of salespeople. It is not thecustomer who continues to use it, but the salesperson who lacks confidence inthe value he or she is providing to the customer.

6. Continually review and analyze how your sales process performance stacks up against your target metrics.

Review progress towardachieving your target metrics. Someone within your organization should beassigned to calculate performance against the target. An administrative staffmember can develop a spreadsheet or other reporting structure to trackperformance. Graph these for reporting purposes in meetings. Analyze metricsweekly. Reporting on your sales process statistics should be a part of everyweekly sales meeting. Performance against these metrics should also be reviewedby executive staff.

Remember: prospectsthese days are estimated to have moved 50%-75% through their buying processbefore they first contact you. At that point, they have fewer questions thatneed to be answered before they can make a decision and their timing is urgent(given that they started their buying process well before you first engagedwith them.) Make certain that your salespeople and sales processes are preparedto Do Everything Now and you will have the inside track on winning thatbusiness.