Visiting a top salesperson recently, he assured me that his desk only looks disorganised, and that in fact, he knows where everything is. So I bet him that he couldn’t find a hard-copy document I sent him two or three weeks earlier. Lunch was on him that day.

At the end of the same day, I sat with the owner of the company in his own office, which was also fairly messy. On his wall he has a poster which states that ‘A Clean Desk Is The Sign Of A Dirty Mind.’ I pointed at his desk, and at the poster, and said, “I’m not sure you’re setting a really good example for your employees, especially Carl (the top salesperson).”

“I don’t care about neatness,” he said, “I care about results, and Carl brings in a lot of business.”
The question, of course, is whether he could be bringing in even more if he was better organised.

What do you think?

Everything in its place

The secret to organisation is simply to put everything in its place. If that place really is on the top of your desk — or on top of your chair — then that is where whatever we are talking about should be.

But if it’s not, it should be somewhere else. That might be in a file folder, in a filing cabinet, in a file room. It might be in a digital folder, on a computer desktop, or somewhere deeper inside the file structure. It might be in the trash.

I’m not saying that your desktop, physical or digital, must be perfectly neat and organised at all times, but here is what I want you to ask yourself: is there any upside to this mess?

Now ask yourself this: what would Carl likely find if he took the time to look through every piece of paper in his workspace? I think he would find that most of the documents are no longer current to his workflow. I think he would also find some lost opportunity.

Lost opportunity

This is really the critical issue. I’ve been saying for a long time that selling is mostly about follow-up. And please understand, I’m not just talking about persistence. I’m talking about follow-up that is appropriate to the situation at hand. I have seen far too many printing salespeople miss out on opportunities because they were blindly persistent when they should have employed something more creative in terms of follow-up, but that is a topic I will discuss on another day.

For today, it is pretty simple. If you miss an opportunity because you didn’t follow up on time because it was hidden under the clutter in your workspace, that is an indefensible loss.
I actually forced Carl to dig though his clutter as part of the follow-up to my onsite visit. He found five quotes that he had never followed up. He also found 23 leads that he had never followed up on. He even found a job jacket for an order that had never been put into production. He swears that he has seen the light, and that he is going to get and keep himself better organised. I’m confident that if he does that, he will bring in even more business and make more money.

Content management

I use a software product called ACT to keep myself organised. It is in a category of software referred to as CM (Contact Management) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I prefer the term Contact Management, because a typical printing salesperson’s database will be made up of suspects, prospects and customers, but no matter what you call it,
I think every salesperson should be using this kind of tool. The category also includes products like Outlook, SalesNet and salesforce.com

In ACT I have set up a database record for everyone I do business with or hope to do business with. In that record I can store everything from names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, to the notes I take during every call or contact. I can send e-mails from ACT and store them in the database record. I can attach quotes, artwork, or any other digital file. I can also schedule my follow-up activity after each contact. In other words, ACT gives me a place to put everything in its place.
Next month, I’ll write more on how I use ACT every day, and how it is also my primary time management tool.
 

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