Habit 44: How Much Should I Travel?

October 25, 2017 Selling Comments Off on Habit 44: How Much Should I Travel?

To continue with the “Account Development Habits”, let’s look at Habit 44: How Much Should I Travel?

Travel is a relative thing and I don’t think there’s any real benchmark that accurately predicts the perfect amount of travel. It’s not about how much you travel it’s about how much you sell.

If you are hitting your numbers, $2400.00 per hour for example, I think you are traveling just about right and more travel could be a waste of time and money.

There are some rules of thumb; to sell $6 million a year in a regional territory you should travel approximately 40 to 50% of the time. The balance of your time should be spent internally following up sold projects, producing quotations, doing follow-up or outstanding quotations and projects and duties as assigned by your management. Is this a hard and fast rule? No, it is not, but it is a rule of thumb.

In large territories it is difficult to be in front of the prospect/customer more than 40 to 50% of the time. In small, state size territories, you can easily be in front of customers/prospects 80% of the time. It really depends on the product, the market and the geography.

For capital projects, traveling large territories, travel of 40 for 50% of the time seems about right assuming the salesperson produces $3-$6 million a year and is continually converting new prospects from his “Target Account” list into customers.

Habit 44: Make in person sales calls 40% to 60% of the time.

“A Habit” is not work, but just a thing that is done every day and making in person sales calls 40% to 60% of the time is critical to your success in sales and can easily become a Habit.

TIME MANAGEMENT.  For Top Performers every task is planned and focused on the goals that earn the results.  Top Performers plan and then engage.  They act on their plans, they work hard and they get results.

Coaching these skills is a critical part of what we do.  We are here to help you develop and implement your Strategic Plan and coach and develop the skills to implement the plan successfully.

We are having great success coaching and implementing these methods and skills and our clients love it