By Todd Duncan

Most salespeople spend only 25 percent of their time selling because they spend 75 percent of their time managing the sales they’ve made. That’s because most salespeople don’t understand the value of quality.

Quality systems, quality clients, and quality sales produce a quality career. But the problem is that in most schools of sales thought, “quantity” is the highest standard of measurement. As a result, most sales careers are quantity-heavy—how many hours you work, how many units you sell, how many clients you have, and how many calls you make. And in the process, you end up with an un-balanced business practice in which you’re only spending 25 percent of your time, or less, actually selling. But the Law of the Broom teaches just the opposite.

The Law of the Broom says that to take your business up to higher and higher levels of trust and effectiveness, you must first clean it up. In essence, the result is taking the unbalanced equation and flipping it around so that you’re spending the majority of your time selling.

IF YOU AREN’T PROACTIVE, YOU’RE REACTIVE

You could spend more time doing the things that advance your career if you could get rid of the things that are holding you back.

When it comes to being reactive or proactive in your sales business, one trend tends to either solve or create the need for the other. In short, if you have not established clean systems and tight procedures to run your business effectively, then your business is being run by the people and activities of your days. Your sales business is reactive (not run by you) rather than proactive (run by you). And remember that high trust does not happen arbitrarily—it must be proactively earned.

On the other hand, when you take the time to clean up your business by establishing systems and procedures to effectively deal with the most common and most productive activities of your day, your business becomes proactive and is able to continually expand. More than that, when your business is cleaned up, your time is freed up to do what you do best and let others handle the rest. That’s the essence of following the Law of the Broom.

GREEN-LIGHTING YOUR SALES BUSINESS

Most new sales professionals are taught to sell with a full speed ahead—never mind the signs mentality. Quantity matters most— never mind quality.

The problem is, you’ll never be highly successful in the sales profession that way. That’s because there are standards in the selling profession that regulate the speed at which you can sell effectively. Traffic lights of selling, so to speak, that indicate when you should go, when you should stop, and when you should slow down if your goal is to earn loyal, lucrative clients. Sure, you can always ignore the traffic lights, and even get away with it for a while. But eventually you’ll get caught, and the results could be very destructive to your business.

Imagine what would happen to your sales business if you started to heed the traffic signals that lead to success. What would happen if your green-light activities—those that build high trust and earn you more money—increased? What would happen if you began to remove red-light activities—those that don’t build high trust or increase your profits—by strategically heeding yellow lights long enough to deter¬mine then hone your most productive activities? The fact is, your days should be ordered this way.

SLOWING DOWN AND CLEANING UP

To be successful at high trust selling you must do more than seek out the green lights and avoid the red lights; you must also heed the yellow lights. As your sales business shifts to higher speeds, it will become necessary for you to streamline some of your practices and processes. The more high trust relationships you build, the more efficient your business will need to become.

Successful salespeople understand that producing greater profits means giving more and more of their time and energy to green-light activities. By increasing the time you spend on green-light activities and reducing the time you spend on red-light activities, you know they will eventually maximize the value of your time. But to do so you must slow down enough now to evaluate what is—and what is not—helping your progress, then commit to slowing down later at strategic times regularly as you continually grow your sales business.

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