Is Your Sales Director Worth £10,000 Per Hour?

If you’re a fairly successful manager, I’m willing to bet that there are specific times throughout the year when you deliver thousands of pounds worth of profit back into your business.

Management hour clock quality

But I’d also put good money on the fact that there are many, many more hours where the value you deliver back to your employers drops to nothing more than small change.

There’s an interesting section in Perry Marshall’s excellent book 80/20 Sales & Marketing where he points out how some managers and business owners waste their valuable time, often without even realising it – and I have to say, it was a revelation to me when it was pointed out.

Here’s the thing – if you understand your 80/20 value curve – then you’ll realise that even though you may be paid a set rate per year – that there is a ratio between the hours in your working day when you have the ability to create hundreds of thousands of pounds for your business – and those where it just wasn’t worth paying for the fuel for you to show up.

The magic of the 80/20 principle here – when mixed with another management model – makes perfectly clear which jobs and activities return thousands (enabling you to do those more often) and which tasks drain you time-bank and only deposit coppers (so that you can stop doing them altogether)

There are 4 pieces of the management jigsaw that come together to create what I like to call the FAME Effect;

Focus; Accountability; Motivation and Education

The 80/20 curve challenges us to examine the first two;

FOCUS (makes us ask – WHAT – as in “What jobs need doing?” ) and ACCOUNTABILITY (makes us ask – WHO – as in “Whose job is it?”)

So what does an 80/20 curve expose with regards to management time?

Well, have a think about some of the jobs that pay between £7.50 and £12.50 an hour in your business.

Think about the tasks that those people are expected to do – and the expectations of the business expressed as their target (if they have a target).

Now let’s go to the other end of the spectrum.

Think about that £1 million four-year contract you helped put together, or that £100K customer you nurtured from scratch, or the team that you managed who delivered £5 million over target, or the salesperson you recruited who brought in that elusive client.

Days and weeks and years that eventually produced £100K, £1 million and £5 million.

So, which of your days – working flat out on those little beauties – could have been valued at £100 per day?

I’ll tell you – Not A Single One!

You see, it’s just not mathematically possible (even if you work every single day for an entire year) to deliver any more than £37K if you only deliver £100 worth of value every day!

So, your mission this week, is to discover which hours in the last six months created:

  • £10
  • £100
  • £1,000
  • £10,000
  • £100,000

Can you really become worth £10,000 an hour?

Well, how about if you coach a member of your team and – and due to the quality of your time together – they sign up a customer the next day who delivers £200 profit every week.

Result £10K return in the first year! So that just became one of your £10K hours!

So how do you generate a £100,000 hour?

Well, maybe you could spend an eight-hour day designing a sales plan that delivers a further £800K next year – £800K divided by 8 hours – yeah, that would probably do it.

So listen – if you’d planned to spend 2 hours doing your expenses this afternoon – crack on, I’m sure they need doing.

Or maybe you’ve organised a 3 hour drive for an afternoon team meeting in order to have a vote on the colour of this year’s Christmas promotional posters – that seems sensible.

I’m not saying that the outcomes of those jobs aren’t important or that they don’t need doing – I’m just questioning whether they genuinely deserve YOUR HOURS!

Have a think about this;

Let’s say you have a team of five people who all report directly to you.

How could you make the value of every one of your hours become worth at least the cost of 5 of theirs?

Better than that – how could you make the value of one of your hours become worth 5o of one of theirs?

If you could achieve that – what projects would you have to start to FOCUS on and what results would those numbers make you solely ACCOUNTABLE for?

And for all those of you about to tell me you haven’t got the time to stop and become worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour – let’s try and lighten your load a little with these three questions;

  1. Work out how much you earn per hour and then ask yourself this – which of your current tasks would seem grossly over-paid if a part-time employee did them for the same hourly amount as they pay you?
  2. Based on that list, what jobs are you currently doing that should become somebody else’s focus and accountability?
  3. What jobs are you currently doing that could very easily become somebody else’s focus and accountability?
  4. How many tasks that are at your team’s pay scale need taking off your plate and dividing between the team?

And here’s a final thought to leave you with;

This article probably took you around five minutes or so to read. Maybe the light bulb moment produced in those 5 minutes has started to illuminate a path that will help you earn ten of thousands of dollars more than if you hadn’t read it.

Multiply the value of those 5 minutes by a 12 – and the entire hour just became worth a fortune.

****************************************************

UK Sales Management Workshops

LONDON      BIRMINGHAM     MANCHESTER       GLASGOW

(click on preferred city for full details)

Our Sales Management Open Workshops show you how to piece together the four main elements of successfully managing a team – Focus; Accountability; Motivation; Education – and show you how to get the best out of everyone involved.

At the end of this workshop delegates will be able to:

  • Work out how to focus on the real tasks that need to be achieved – and find a way to ensure every member of their team is doing that too.
  • Create a culture where every member of the team understands that they are accountable and responsible for their own success – and recognise exactly what that makes them accountable for.
  • Genuinely motivate people to over deliver -and even more importantly – learn how to make sure you don’t demotivate them.
  • Coach the entire team to greater things – learn how to give them a net of their own rather than continuously feeding them individual fish.
  • Feel competent and confident enough to conduct staff discipline in a professional (and legal) manner.

LONDON      BIRMINGHAM      MANCHESTER     GLASGOW

(click on preferred city name for full details)