To-Do List Everything Dry Erase Board Overworked StressSelling remodeling jobs and kitchen and bath projects is not easy work. It demands all of a salespersons time since there are too many ways to make a mistake.

Yet, many remodeling companies ask their salespeople or designers to wear multiple hats, dividing their time and, ultimately, their attention. Here are three places where a salesperson should not toil in a healthy shop:

Time Suck # 1: Generating their own leads.

Let’s face it, a good salesperson sells. Unless they sell to builders at new developments, they shouldn’t be out tracking down the next warm body. Lead generation is a marketing function, although our industry confuses sales and marketing often.

If you have a healthy marketing funnel, a lead should be passed to a salesperson for handoff once it has been qualified. Attract prospects through a well-thought-out lead generation process and free up your team to sell.

Time Suck # 2: Processing their own orders.

A salesperson who handles a job from cradle to grave is a project manager. The two skill sets are entirely different. In healthy sales-driven shops, the ordering, or project side of a job, should be handed off.

We’ve been witness to many a shop where the downstream process is so difficult or time consuming that they avoid certain sales. Face it, if you’re a commission driven sales person, you don’t want a small ticket job that’s going to force hours of order entry processes on your plate.

A healthy shop has electronic processes that streamline quoting, ordering and service work, and that encourage sales people to focus on their core competency – selling.

Time Suck # 3: System dips and rekeying.

System dips are the process of assembling information from multiple places or systems. This can be from spec books, excel spreadsheets, accounting systems and the like.

Rekeying happens when information from one system needs to be entered into another. Usually related only to order processing, rekeying can happen anywhere in the sales process as well. The long and short is that if you have to touch something more than once; it’s one time too many.

Avoid these three sales prevention techniques and your business will emerge as a sales leader in your market.