Close your eyes and visualize this scenario (don’t close your eyes yet – you need to read the scenarioJ): You’re in your home office preparing a presentation for a very important customer. You have to get creative. You can win this business, which will pay you significant commissions and help your business get to the next level. However, you’ve got to knock it out of the ballpark with this presentation. Now, your kids keep interrupting you with topics that range from completely insignificant to things that could wait until tomorrow or next week. How do you handle that? (If you don’t have kids, imagine it’s someone else’s kids.) Do you stop building your presentation and pay total attention to all of their requests? Do you listen to them for a few minutes and then table the discussion for later? Most of you would probably explain to your kids that you need to focus on your presentation, and that they shouldn’t interrupt you unless they have an emergency.
If you ask your kids to give you time to focus, then why wouldn’t you do the same to your email?
Email is a helpful tool to a field salesperson and I’m not quite sure how we did it 20 years ago without it. However, the key word in this sentence is “tool”. Email should be used only as a tool. Salespeople check email too many times through the day. Besides endangering themselves and others while driving, they distract their meeting preparation, waste too much sales time returning notes, and simply lose energy from looking at mostly wasteful messages.
Back to my original question – when does email get in the way of sales? Pretty much all the time. Stop focusing on email and start focusing on your customers. If you do so, pretty soon you’ll afford a staff to check your emails for you.
