If you’re smart, you learned an important lesson early in your sales career – time is money. As a result you leverage your time by paying someone else to do work, which they enjoy but you don’t. If you pay them a fair wage that is less than you make when you are focused on sales meetings, then you have achieved win-win.
Do the arithmetic:
- Calculate the number of hours you are face-to-face with customers or prospective customers.
- Divide your annual income by that number. This reveals what your time is actually worth when you are with clients.
If your annual income is $100,000 per year and your face-to-face time is 10 hours/week or 500 hours per year, your pure selling time is worth $200 per hour.
The other activities required to get you in front of your customers and maximize the value of that time include making telephone calls, scheduling appointments, bookkeeping, transcribing notes into the CRM, and outreach via social media. These are essential activities, but you can pay someone a lot less than $200/hour to complete them and if you get the right person, they will do them better than you.
I know salespeople who make over $1 million a year in commissions. Do you suppose they make all their own appointments and do their own bookkeeping? Do you think they begrudge paying $35 an hour for help? Do you think they got to that point without a vision and plan for how to make it happen?
If you do not wish to delegate because you like doing everything and you’re happy with your income and career, that’s great. However, it is beneficial to intensify your focus on activities that you both like and are good at – helping customers make good decisions. When you delegate some of the other activities, you free up time to tap into your unique strengths. As a bonus, when you are focused on doing what you do best and enjoy doing the most you will earn more money.
The math is clear – if you hire someone part-time to free up 10 hours a week so you can have additional time with your customers, you can double your income, help more people and have more fun in the process. If you need a lesson on Effective Delegation, let us know. We can help you with that.