Minimizing Distractions and Social Selling with Jill Konrath – Ep. 108 - The Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales

Crazy busy does not mean highly productive and Jill Konrath provides tips on how to minimize distractions in our social selling lives on this show. Martin Brossman and Elyse Archer interview Jill, a powerhouse sales speaker and trainer, about her new book “More Sales, Less Time: Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Today’s Crazy-Busy Sellers”.  Jill shares her own experiences of successfully transitioning from being crazy busy to being more productive while working fewer hours.

A number of the topics covered on this show included:

The importance of setting yourself up to win by using tools and structure to be more focused on your highest priority prospecting items. Creating your own “distraction firewall”.

How multi-tasking just makes us multi-scattered, leaving us with the false impression that we are being productive while actually producing lower quality work.

The importance of leveraging trigger events in social selling, and how to do so.

How to successfully make your own transition from being crazy busy to feeling on top of your day and your tasks.

Why doing nothing is actually one of the best keys to productivity

An overview of her own approach to social selling that has allowed her to work fewer hours while increasing her business growth

How to use multimedia to build value with a prospect.

A few of the questions explored were:  

Why don’t traditional time management strategies work for salespeople?  Jill shares that traditional time management strategies don’t take into account all of the distractions that sellers face throughout their day such as email alerts, social media pints and customer calls. She personally was struggling so much with these issues that she felt compelled to write her new book.

What is idleness aversion and how do we conquer it? Idleness aversion is a description of the urge we often get to check email, Facebook or our distraction of choice when we sit down to do hard work.  Our brains get a shot of dopamine every time we do that, and so we can literally get addicted to distraction.  Jill’s best remedy for conquering idleness aversion is to control her environment – eliminate the distractions that we know to be temptations.

How to set up a prospecting strategy that maximizes effectiveness and minimizes time involvement.  One of the things that can take up so much of our time as sellers is recreating the wheel every time we want to reach out to a new prospect.  Not having an organized prospecting strategy complete with templated messages and pre-selected channels can be a huge time drain.  Jill shares her recommended 8 point prospecting sequence, which is explained in greater detail in her book.

Recommended steps form Jill to be more effective.

Turn off notifications including email

Analyze how you are being distracted. Use software tools like https://rescuretime.com to discover how you are being distracted

Setup up your distraction firewalls to support your ability to focus.  Use software like https://freedome.to to help you.

Take intentional breaks and reward yourself for success.

Two of the main apps Jill Konrath mentioned that were Freedome To – https://freedome.to and Rescue Time – https://rescuretime.com

Learn more about Jill Konrath online at https://www.