We have been trained at a very young age not to ask this question to anyone because I guess it is rude. I do not want you to violate any rules that your mother gave you, but maybe we would be okay if we asked this question to ourselves. Nobody has to know you asked and nobody has to know what that answer is. I think we will be okay here. So, go ahead. Ask yourself “How much am I worth?” Yes of course in the scheme of Creation, you are priceless and there is no dollar value high enough that would equate to the value you bring to the world. I get that. What I am after with this question is what is your hourly rate, or dollars per hour, which you take home for each and every hour you work at your career. For sales people, this question is extremely important because our income is dependent on what we do to make sales. Starting right now, you should consider yourself an hourly employee rather than a commissioned salesperson except you control what your hourly rate is hour to hour by what you do every day.

If you were to look at a typical work day/week and write down all the activities and behaviors you did you should be able to categorize them as high payoff or low payoff tasks. (By the way, this is a great self-analysis activity for you to better understand what you do to earn the wage you earn. With this information, you can make better decisions on how to spend your work week.) Here is an example of tasks that a salesperson might do over the course of a week and how they might be categorized:

High Payoff     
Prospecting Calls
Networking
Getting Referrals
Sales Appointments
Giving Free Talks
Walk-In Cold Calls

Low Payoff
Email
Meetings
Entering Orders
Dealing with Operational Issues
Writing Proposals
Administrative Work

Maybe some of the items I put on the low-payoff list surprise you. Here are the rules I used to sort activities and behaviors: If I am selling, I am increasing my hourly rate. If I am not selling, I am decreasing my hourly rate. That’s it. I am not suggesting that the items in the right column are not important. They just pay less than those behaviors in the left column. I know there are a lot of sales people that will spend a good chunk of their day doing low-payoff stuff, and why not? It is easier work, with less opportunity for rejection, less risky, and usually well within the salesperson’s comfort zone. It’s the stuff on the left that is tough, hard work, full of risk and failure. Why would anyone want to spend their day doing those things?

There are also certain times of the day that pay more than other times of the day. We can call the hours from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM the Pay-Time hours because it is during this time that our customers are available to us. The hours before 8:00 AM and after 5:00 PM would then be called the Non-Pay-Time hours because our customers are not available to us.

If you are a commissioned salesperson and you want to make more money, then you need to plan your days and weeks out so that you are doing the things that are listed as high-payoff during the Pay-Time part of the day. The low-payoff items also need to get done but ideally you would delegate those tasks or work on them during the Non-Pay-Time hours of the day.

Therefore, if you are not satisfied with your current hourly rate, then simply modify your work activity so that you spend more time doing high-payoff tasks. Be disciplined and patient in this so that the low-payoff stuff doesn’t creep back in to your work schedule (because it will if you let it), and watch your hourly rate climb to new levels. At the end of the day, it is you that determines how much you are worth.

By Karl Schaphorst, President

402-403-4334

www.karlschaphorst.sandler.com

Sandler Training is a global training organization with over three decades of experience and proven results. Sandler provides sales and management training and consulting services for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as corporate training for Fortune 1000 companies.  For more information, please contact Karl Schaphorst at (402) 403-4334 or by email at kschaphorst@sandler.com.  You can also follow his blog at karlschaphorst.sandler.com