More than 100 years of research and countless millions of dollars have been invested in seeking the causes for success and failure in selling. At last, we have the answer.

It is simply this: People are highly paid because they spend more of their time doing things of higher value. People are underpaid because they spend more of their time doing things of lower value.

Salespeople who spend every minute of every day focusing on high-value activities eventually rise to the top of their fields and make both a lot of sales and a lot of money. Salespeople who waste their time in low-value activities seldom accomplish anything of importance, even if they represent the best companies with the best products in the best markets.

Your Job Description

The job description of a salesperson is the same as the purpose of a business. It is to create and keep customers. Your job is to go out into the marketplace and find customers initially, to sell to them and then to take such good care of them that they buy from you again and again—and bring their friends.

You should spend 80% of your time creating customers and only 20% of your time keeping them.

A study done at the University of Minneapolis some years ago examined the typical career path of most salespeople. The researchers observed that salespeople started off their careers slowly, begin to make sales, get better and better—and then plateau and decline in their sales results. The researchers found that when a salesperson had no customers, he or she spent all his time prospecting. But once he made a few sales, he found it easier to call back on previous customers, for various reasons, rather than bear the harsh winds of rejection involved in prospecting for new customers.

Whatever you do over and over eventually becomes a habit. If you develop the habit of continually making PR calls on your previous customers, you soon develop the habit of not developing new business. You become more and more comfortable calling back on old customers rather than risking rejection by calling on new ones.

Every minute of every day, you should counter this natural tendency by asking yourself, “Where is my next sale coming from?” That’s where you need to direct your efforts, and that’s what you should be doing all day long. Of course it is important to give good customer service, but only in between your new business development activities.

When Are You Working?

Sales and marketing managers have conducted surveys to find out how much salespeople actually work in a typical day. In one survey from 1928, after following salespeople around with stopwatches, managers concluded that the average salesperson works 90 minutes per day—approximately one and a half hours out of eight. The rest of the time was spent hanging around the office, chatting with coworkers, going for lunch and taking coffee breaks. Today, we’d have to add working on the computer, checking messages and traveling.

Over the years, despite the benefit of intensive time management courses, inspirational and motivational speeches and seminars, and instruction in the most advanced time management systems, the average salesperson still works only 90 minutes per day, according to more recent studies done at Columbia University.

Whenever I share this number with salespeople, they always protest and deny that it applies to them. So then I ask them: “When are you actually working in the course of the day?”

You are only working when you are face to face with a qualified prospect. We call this face time. Everything other than face-to-face, knee-to-knee, head-to-head and heart-to-heart work with a real live genuine prospect is not working. It is merely warming up and warming down, like an athlete before and after the actual competition.

The Minutes Principle

To be successful in sales, implement the “minutes principle” in your sales activities. This principle says that only face-to-face minutes with prospects and customers count as selling minutes. When you increase the number of minutes you are spending face to face, you will increase your sales and your income. Because selling is based very much on the law of probabilities, or the law of averages, if you simply increase the number of minutes, you will and must increase your level of sales.

You should also use a stopwatch to measure your current level of sales activity. A stopwatch will allow you to accumulate the time, because you can start it and stop it each time you go in to see a prospect or customer. At the end of a day or week, you will know how many minutes you were actually “working” during that time period. (The first time you take this measurement, it will come as a shock to you!)

Resolve immediately to increase the number of minutes you spend with customers by 10% a week, on average. If your average is 90 minutes per day right now, aim to spend 100 minutes next week. In the following week, increase your number of minutes to 110 minutes, and then 120, and then 135, and then 150, and then 165 and finally 180 minutes per week—double the average, within seven weeks.

By reorganizing their time immediately, many salespeople have been able to double the number of minutes they spend face to face with customers within a week. And their income doubles at the same time.

Stay on Track

Ask and answer these questions every day, all day long, to keep focused:

1. What are my highest value-added activities? This answer is easy. Your highest and most valuable activities are prospecting, presenting and then following up and closing the sale. You should be spending 80% of your time on these activities, every single day.
2. Why am I on the payroll? Imagine if your child were to ask you, “Mommy/Daddy, why do they pay you money where you work?” You would have to say, “They pay me for making sales. My income is determined by the number of sales I make, and the size of each sale.” Asking and answering this question for yourself will keep you focused and on track.
3. What is the most valuable use of my time right now? This is the granddaddy question of time management. All the time management books and studies in the world are aimed at one simple task: to help you first identify your most important task, and then get organized, get started and complete that task before you do anything else. Whatever your answer to this question, be sure that what you are doing at the moment has value and that you will do nothing else until it is complete.

Become a student of time management. The quality of your time management determines the quality of your life. Don’t waste time. Get away from people who are time-wasters. Get out of the office and stay out of the office.

From the time you start in the morning until the time you quit, resolve to work all the time you work. This decision alone will make you one of the most effective and highest-paid salespeople in your field in a very short period of time.

Brian Tracy is an internationally recognized sales and personal development trainer. This article is adapted from his new book, “Unlimited Sales Success,” ©2014, Michael Tracy, Brian Tracy. All rights reserved. Published by AMACOM Books.

SIDEBAR: Only You

What can I, and only I, do that, if done well, will make a real difference?

This is one of the very best questions for personal management. Every day, and every hour of every day, there are tasks that only you can do. If you don’t do them, no one else will. If you do these tasks well, they will make a real difference to yourself and your future.

Sometimes these tasks include prospecting and finding new people to talk to. They involve upgrading your knowledge and skills so that when you see the prospects you have uncovered, you are excellent in every part of the sales process. Sometimes these activities that only you can do involve planning your day and organizing your time for maximum output. —B.T.