Time Management for Sales People
Time management
You would be hard pressed to find a really star performer at any level of business or life who was not an effective manager of their time or who was not aware at any point in time of what she was looking to achieve next and why.
Key features of effective time management for sales managers
Stay focused on your broader goals.
When planning your week’s activities, review the activity and financial goals on your current project(s). Ask yourself if the activities you have planned for the coming week really feed into those original goals. Are they focused on getting us where we want to be or not?
Plan your next day’s calls
The last thing you do each day should be to plan your calls for the following day. Call planners are used by the most experienced and the most effective sales people around – and for good reason. They mean you can start your day with a clear view of who you’re going to contact and you can get up to speed much more effectively. Identify the next 30 companies you want to call – it might be all new business, or a mix of ongoing and fresh conversations.
Eat that frog!
It’s a long standing principle of effective time management that you should focus on doing the single most significant and difficult task first. Stay focused on it until it’s completed. No matter how unpleasant! Procrastinating and avoiding difficult and important tasks in favour of low value, easy or pleasant ones is a quick and simple way to reduce effectiveness
Work in chunks of time
Maximise your effective time on the phone by taking good notes and writing them up at the end of an hour or a morning. The same goes for sending emails – even to clients. Flickering between different activities (calling, writing up notes on your computer, sending and checking emails, talking to a colleague internally) is a great way to diminish focus, energy and effectiveness.
Ditch that Outlook!
Turning off your outlook for 55 minutes an hour is probably the single biggest step you can take to effective time management. Send proposals, information and other emails in one go at the end of a certain period when you’ve been on the phone or focused on other productive tasks. Heavy email use has been proven to have a serious negative impact on cognitive function and productivity! Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that a day spent opening and responding to dozens of emails is a day where you’ve accomplished a great deal. Save that feeling for those days where you have ticked off a number of meaningful high value tasks that will get you closer to your ultimate goals!