You snooze you lose! We all know its true, but how much do we lose exactly? At some point in our careers, lots of us tend to think we can afford to be five minutes, or even half an hour late every now and then. We make some excuse about traffic, or having to drop the kids off somewhere, to anyone who asks, but no one really cares, because we are the boss afterall. If this is you or if you recognise this behaviour in someone in your office, do you know what the real cost of being late is?
It sounds so basic, timekeeping. But so many people out there do not realise or appreciate the full importance of being consistently on time.
Lets have a quick look at the obvious reasons why you shouldn’t be late. First of all, being late means being stressed and losing time in your day. You lose productivity through loss of time and through being stressed. That’s a double loss!
Also, being late for an appointment doesn’t look very professional. Will your prospect trust you with his money if you treat him unprofessionally? Probably not. That’s a lot to lose already, but there is a whole lot more.
As a sales manager it is incredibly important that you set the right example to your team. If your five minutes late today, your team will start coming in late tomorrow and it will be more than five minutes. Don’t show them that it is ok to be late!
If you manage a team of twenty people and half of them are five minutes late every day, you miss out on fifty minutes of productivity! That’s £ 50 per day in my company, or £ 10,000 per year! How much does being late cost you?
Your sales team maybe copying your behaviour elsewhere as well. They may be showing up late for appointments with clients which means they could be losing sales because of the bad example you set for them.
Sales requires dicipline. The sales teams that operate with strict rules and dicipline are the ones that perform best. But in order for your sales team to be diciplined, you have to be diciplined yourself.
Your bad habits are a bad example for your sales team, and they have a cumulative effect. When you’re late in the morning, or when you’re having a long lunch, your showing your team that it’s ok to do this and they will start doing the same thing.
The worst thing about it is that you cannot tell your team off for being late, because you’re doing the same thing!
So how much does being late really cost you? Being 5 Minutes late costs me £ 50 everytime I do it. Work out how much it costs you, and the next time you snooze your alarm when you really shouldn’t, think about this figure and if those few more minutes are really worth it.
