One of the most vexing issues for field sales professionals from somebody newly assigned to the field to the most seasoned veteran, is how do you stay on course? You have developed a route, a milk run if you will. You have a zone structure of places that you visit each and every day. And inevitably, not maybe, inevitably, that schedule is going to be disrupted. Either from an opportunity to attend a client conference, the national sales meeting of their company, a professional development opportunity, or perhaps an illness. The reasons are endless but it is inevitable that your structure, your route, will be disrupted. How do you get back on course? How do you make sure that you continue to see the areas that you must go to and determine which areas you may skip over?
Two strategies
The first strategy is to list your zones. Let’s presume you have 15 zones within your territory where you can travel to each and every day to have a productive day. I’ve yet to meet any sales professional who does not recognize that amongst those 15 zones, there are 2 or 3 that are simply less attractive for whatever reason than the majority of the zones that they have. For me these become a “skip over” or “triage” zone. They are the areas of the country or the areas of your territory that you literally skip over when there is an opportunity to attend a conference or a professional development opportunity or there is an illness. They are the zones that you may see 8 times a year versus 10 times a year. Or 12 times a year versus 16 times a year. So the first strategy is simply to identify the zones that you are willing to skip over.
The second strategy is to identify a “zone free day” or “flex day” on your calendar. It is applied when you meet with an advisor that is particularly interested in moving forward and ready to do so and you want to be able to double back with that advisor as soon as possible. The zone free day provides you with an opportunity to do so. Also consider your outlying zones – those three producers in hither and the two in yon that are very solid producers but are quite frankly geographically undesirable. The zone free day also gives you an opportunity to go see those individuals. So you have permission on your zone free day to be spectacularly inefficient. You want 9 hours of windshield time, have at it. But a zone free day allows you to be more efficient all the other days of the week and all the other days of the month.
So those two strategies, identifying your skip over or triage zones, and identifying a zone free or flex day in your calendar each and every month, will allow you to return to the schedule that you had established.
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