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Email is wonderful. Imagine going back to the C19th and having to write letters, or asking your butler to pop a calling card round to the local coffee house to secure your place for the afternoon business discussion and gambling party. Life was simple then. Today we have online connectivity and are in touch with the world at the push of a button.

The trouble is it’s difficult to escape from the rolling tide of messages and spam and invitations to send our details to a dubious bank, in order to claim our missing millions.

Contact is great and yet it can be stifling and we can forget that life is precious and our days short in number.

I’ve noticed that there is a tendency for me to keep checking my smart phone and reply to people instantly. If 24 hours lapses before a reply I feel a bit guilty that I’ve been sluggish and my fantasy is that they’re waiting for me, growing impatient at my sloth.

However, following a calm weekend of reading in the sunshine, I decided to free myself from the 24-hour email trap. I gave myself space to breathe and realised that what’s important is balancing my life with my business needs. Since then I’ve allowed myself to have whole weekends without replying to emails and I must be honest, it feels great!

If someone needs an instant reply then of course I remain responsive to their needs. And I’m also responsive to my needs too. So far business hasn’t suffered and nobody has complained, so I’m going to keep on with my freedom.

We can all put ourselves first and we can all free ourselves from the 24-hour email trap.

And if you want to email me to agree, then please don’t do so for at least three days. Avoid the trap!

Next week: Being important 

Generating sales is often technically very easy. The hard part is finding the energy to keep going. In my experience, when working as a business coach, organisations who continue to grow and develop seem to have three things in common, that all support their sales process. These tend to be:

1. Strength in Depth. They have more than one person involved in the sales process. If we are working for ourselves then we always have to dig deep to find the energy to keep going. My tip here is to find a friend, a coach, a colleague or a PA to work with. Two heads are always better than one and it’s ok for us to be the primary sales person and for our supporter to sort back office sales admin and so lighten the load.

2. A Clear Process. We need to log all of our sales leads and manage their progress through the sales pipeline. A good tip is to map our process so that we have discrete stages to look at, such as: Initial contact > 1st meeting > 2nd meeting > product demonstration > quote > negotiation > final quote > ask for the order. We can then see who needs to be nudged onto the next stage.

3. Proactive Marketing Effort. People need to know we exist and it might take 7 attempts for them to hear our message, so we need to network, blog, tweet, leaflet, email and so on to give ourselves the best chance of being noticed. These mythical 7 attempts might span a year or more and so we can never be sure which bit is working for us. We just need the confidence to continue and the tip here is – do something each week to get our message out.

Remember, for sales success: Proactive Effort + Good Process = Positive Outcomes.

These three key elements apply equally for any size of business, whether we are a sole trader or a large SME. We can all choose to be successful in sales. We don’t have to like having to sell, we don’t have to agree with all the options available to us (Twitter still baffles many people) …however, we can chose to understand what will help to make us successful.

Happy selling!

Next week: Beware The 24-Hour Email Trap