A common sales mistake to avoid at all costs is not investing enough time with prospects. According to research, the number 2 reason startups don’t generate enough revenue is not spending enough time selling.

How much time do you spend with prospects?

To help you spend more time with prospects, I’ll give you one hour of your time back.

1. OHIO

On average we waste 15 minutes a day opening and re-opening messages and not acting on them until later. 15 minutes isn’t much. But in a year that adds up to 3-weeks of working hours! Imagine if you could spend 3 weeks in front of potential customers? How many more sales could you make?

The solution: Only Handle It Once. When you open ANY correspondence, respond to it there and then. When you look at it and you sense it will take a while, don’t open it. Put time aside to deal with these emails. When you ONLY HANDLE IT ONCE, you will save 15 minutes a day

2. Disconnect

On average it takes us 20 minutes to get stuck into doing a task because we’re constantly distracted with social media and the internet. Let’s assume you’re doing 4 important tasks a day. Imagine, that adds up to over 1 hour of time wasted. Starting today, even if you do this once a day: turn off your wifi so you can’t get those tempting PINGs and messages, and just get stuck into one task at hand. Doing this once saves you 20 minutes a day.

3. On your marks, get set, GO!

Using your phone, set a countdown timer to 45 minutes before beginning a task. The time pressure makes us focus. I use this and it works. You will discover you can get stuff done in 3/4 of the time allocated. Let’s say this saves you 10 minutes.

4. Exercise for 20 minutes

You’re probably thinking, what? This is supposed to be a time saving tip, not adding more stuff to do. Well my entrepreneurial friend, when we feel lethargic it takes longer to get stuff done. So think of it this way, for every minute you exercise, you gain 3 to 5 minutes of higher productive time. Assuming you exercise 15 minutes daily, you’re swapping 15 minutes of unproductive time to at least 30 minutes of hyper productive time. Conservatively that’s 15 minutes gain.

If you’re not spending at least 3 hours a day on the phone or with prospects, you’ll never make the money you want.

With these tips you can instantly save 1 hour a day to invest with prospects.

Keep soaring!