Best Practice in Time Management for Salespeople
One of the most difficult tasks for business owners and sales managers is to gauge whether employees are making the best use of their time. When it comes to salespeople, it’s even more difficult because they spend a significant portion of their time out of the office—and out of sight.
Nevertheless, since your salespeople are the lifeblood of your business, it’s imperative that you have a solid understanding of how they’re using their time, and coach and help them to be as efficient and productive with that time as possible. A salesperson’s time is literally money.
Stephen Covey introduced, in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the principle of differentiating between what is and isn’t important, and what is and isn’t urgent—and of focusing one’s time on tasks or projects that are either important and urgent or important but not a priority.
The average salesperson is notorious for violating this principle. Unless their first order of business of the day is a scheduled sales call, most salespeople will typically start their day fiddling around in the morning, checking email, chatting with colleagues, surfing the web—doing anything but making a sales call. Salespeople tend to procrastinate on or outright avoid starting unpleasant, difficult, or time-consuming (but important) tasks (researching prospects, keeping the CRM system up to date) and instead default to not unpleasant, yet also not important tasks.
Getting Started
Coach your salespeople to use their time intelligently and efficiently. Start out by introducing Covey’s principle and have them classify their tasks and projects into important and urgent or important but not urgent. Then review what they’ve put in each bucket. If you see items that you feel are misplaced, have them explain why they put each where they did. If you disagree on too many items, you need to make sure they understand what an urgent task is: one that takes priority over others and must be tackled–and completed–today.
Conversely, a task such as “prepare for next week’s presentation with big client” is certainly important, but because the presentation is not until next week, it’s not urgent. Setting a time limit of one day implies that urgent items should not be so numerous that a rep cannot reasonably expect to complete them. In sales forces where salespeople are responsible for both securing new business and retaining existing customers, they’ll also need guidelines on how you expect them to divide their time between the two.
Timing Is Everything
The best time to schedule tasks is at the end of the previous day, before leaving the office or heading home after that last prospect or client visit. Once your sales team has gotten the hang of this exercise, they can further prioritize tasks by ranking them A, B, and C based on the level of importance and the time they expect it will take to complete each. As they undertake these tasks, encourage them to review their progress at least twice a day—once midmorning, and half-way through the afternoon— to ensure they’re on track.
Encourage salespeople to start their day by tackling one unpleasant, important, nonurgent, task—in most cases, that’s making some prospecting calls; three at a minimum. It’s the sales equivalent of rousing yourself out of bed an hour earlier than normal to go for a swim: the getting out of bed part is unpleasant, but the swim is invigorating and good for your body and soul. To discourage unproductive, time-eating, not-important activities, point out how it negatively impacts their ability to reach their sales goal and to make the kind of money they want. Also, have them group like activities, such as writing email, checking voice mail, and thinking, together.
Minimize Travel Time
More than other employees, salespeople spend a significant portion of their time out of the office, engaged with prospects and clients. In their eagerness to go on any appointments they can get, and many often neglect to schedule meetings in a time-efficient manner. Teach—or remind—members of your sales team to minimize travel time between meetings by scheduling each in close physical proximity, whenever possible.
Utilize Resources
There may be tasks your salespeople are doing that could, or should, be done by others. Work with them to determine tasks they could—and should—delegate, and how they can best use the resources available to them. For example, could your marketing staff conduct that research on market trends you need for the next meeting? Think about what you can do to give them more face time with prospects.
Try performing lead-generation activities such as networking, running interference with upper management on their behalf, and offloading some of their administrative tasks on, surprise, your office administrative assistance. By implementing some or all of these recommendations, you will slowly, but surely, transform your sales staff into a highly-efficient, highly-productive one. So get started now; you haven’t a moment to spare.
