I first discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done about a year ago through Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com. (Incidentally, Merlin has just put up the last in a great series of podcast interviews with Allen.) After years of failing to master time management and to-do lists and calendars, Allen’s approach to the concept of mastering productivity in the face of an increasing number of things to do in less and less time was not simply a breath of fresh air but felt almost life-saving.

From time to time I re-scan the book, a common action covered in the interview. It serves to gee me up when my practise of its philosophy may be at a low ebb and, as with all good systems of thought, there are more things to discover as you become more acquainted with its message. Yesterday I was flicking through Chapter 1 again and came across this:

I have discovered over the years the practical value of working on personal productivity improvement from the bottom up, starting with the most mundane, ground-floor level of current activity and commitments. Intellectually, the most appropriate way ought to be to work from the top down, first uncovering personal and corporate missions, then defining critical objectives, and finally focusing on the details of implementation. The trouble is, however, that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective.

This is to do with productivity as a whole, of course, but I’m sure a large number of sales people out there will feel some sense of recognition. If we think of the top-down approach as the methodologies and CRM systems imposed on us by companies and the bottom-up approach as the way we manage our own territory and pipeline, you can see that Allen is right: the top-down approach can actually cause sales prevention rather than increased productivity.

Our emphasis at First Border has always been on the individual sales person. Whether in terms of training, coaching, or creating tools, we believe that the top sales people - the Entrepreneurial Salesmen - are those who overcome the sales prevention zone created by their companies. They sell more and they make more money. Ironically, of course, this helps their companies, too, and is exactly what the companies believed they were trying to do when the imposed their monolithic systems. As Allen says above, it may seem that working from the top down should be the appropriate response but all good (i.e. successful) sales people know that this is not the case.

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