By Stephen Ashkin

Sales success has often been described as a “numbers game”. The thinking goes that the more calls we make the better our sales. And of course this is logical and when selling individual products, if you will forgive the pun – a tactic you can take to the bank.

So to increase our sales we can work longer hours. One strategy can be to identify the kinds of customers with whom we can make sales calls early in the morning, late at night, or on the weekends. Many sales people have profited handsomely by working an extra hour per day which adds up to more then 200 hours per year.

Another strategy offers an alternative to working harder, and encourages us to work smarter. Some specific working smarter strategies include better territory management to reduce the amount of time we spend in our cars driving between sales calls, putting off paper work and other non-essential activities until evenings to free up prime selling time, improving our prospecting, carefully managing interruptions such as personal calls on our cell phones or checking personal email, and the list can go on.

And for those of us who can realize benefits from improving our time management certainly should do so, and there are numerous books available to help.

But this article is intended to serve as a contrast to time management. And understand before you read any further that it is not my purpose to suggest that there is something wrong with time management, because it clearly is an important and perhaps even an essential strategy on the journey to sales success. I am frankly convinced that we cannot succeed in the cleaning industry, especially if we are just getting started or trying to do something new, if we aren’t prepared to work hard.

But the issue we want to convey in this article is that even when we are working hard and managing our time as efficiently as possible, unfortunately this does not directly translate into success. This is because Green Cleaning is a process that often has several distinct steps and unless we successfully complete each step, we can’t succeed.

Perhaps a suitable analogy would be going to school. Most college graduates have completed 16 years of school. But this does not mean that someone can be a college graduate by repeating the 1st Grade 16 times – no matter how hard they work at it. Rather, they completed elementary school before progressing to middle school. And once through middle school they continued to high school. And a student is only eligible to begin college after completing high school.

Thus the issue here isn’t just time management -- just working hard or efficiently, but recognizing that successful achievement has in this case more to do with project management.

Successful project management recognizes that most projects that surpass a minimal level of sophistication can be broken down into multiple steps. And of course we are recognizing that some projects really only have a limited number of very simple steps. However, some projects like implementing a Green Cleaning program in a school system, university, health care facility, large commercial office building, etc., can be extremely complex with numerous steps.

In the case of Green Cleaning there can be numerous steps due to all the building, custodial and product issues. Furthermore, not all steps are of equal importance, size or difficulty. And some steps can be grouped together and worked on simultaneously, while other steps must be arranged in a sequence with some steps needing to be accomplished before others can begin. Project management also realizes that while some steps are critical for success, other are less critical and are nice to have when time and resources permit.

Identifying, sequencing and prioritizing the steps in the process are critical in project management. And thus it is with Green Cleaning. This is what we have observed over the past 15 years trying to sell Green Cleaning programs and next in next month’s issue of DestinationGreen we will provide for you some of the key steps in the Green Cleaning project management.

While this may sound somewhat complicated, also know that it presents a barrier for your less skillful and committed competitor giving you a competitive advantage. Sure plenty of sales people will make money selling a case of glass cleaner here and a vacuum cleaner there.

But the better you get at managing Green Cleaning projects the more accounts you’ll sell and the bigger the bundle you’ll sell to each account. And since they have to buy these products from someone, we would prefer they buy them from you!