You Don’t Have Time Not To . . .

You may think that going faster speeds things up, compresses sales cycle times, and gets things done. When it comes to human relationships and complex decisions, going faster will mostly work against you, bringing the results you want to a screeching halt.

If you want to close deals faster, you need to do impeccably good work at every stage of the sales conversation, controlling the process, and delivering enough value to secure the next commitment. You are training value every step of the way. When you skip steps and fail to take care of your prospective client’s need in a race to the finish line, you disconnect from them and leave them behind.

Fast is slow.

You want your sales force to get better, but you don’t want to spend your time training, developing, and coaching them to their best performance. Instead, you tell them to go close deals, and you go and close their big deals for them. Actually, you are closing those deals for you. In doing so, you never develop your salespeople, they never improve, and you never make the difference you might have made.

Haste, meet waste.

You have time for whatever you believe is important. It is easy to believe that you don’t have time to do what is right and necessary, believing that you can bend the rules of the universe to your will, if you act with great urgency, and if you want something badly enough. This is to misunderstand nature, which has some fairly rigid rules. Reality is rather persistent, and your desire for fast results does not prevent the need to plant seeds in the Spring in order to produce a harvest in the Fall.

I once heard it said that “Nine pregnant women cannot produce a baby in one month.” Most of the results you need require an investment of time, and without that investment being paid in full, those results are not forthcoming. There is no substitute for doing the work necessary, and the truth of the matter is, you don’t have time not to.