Working the hourglass

Time management for salespeople

By Jeffrey Hansler Oxford Co.

As a salesperson, you sell your time to companies to make money for them and for yourself. Time is your most important asset. Your time utilization along with your selling skills determines your income.

You use the element of time to make sales. You create immediacy and deadlines to sell your wares today rather than tomorrow.

jects to replace completed ones. Break up active projects into steps.

Workable steps allow you to feel the satisfaction of accomplishing a portion of the project. The size or estimated amount of time for these steps should be based on your available time and current schedule. Adjustments may be necessary as you experiment with scheduling.

rnHE hourglass of time is both I friend and foe to the salesperson. Success and successful time management begin with training your mind to utilize every moment to the best of your ability.

As a salesperson you experience. sell, and use time. As a result, you must take a holistic approach to improve time management. A moment wasted to anxiety or procrastination is gone forever.

You may have a tendency to thrive on urgency because you sell urgency. As a salesperson, you want the prospect to make a decision in this moment. You successfully use time pressure to gain a decision. Often, procrastination creates this pressure.

Procrastination may seem to lead to last minute insights, dramatic adaptations in presentations, and spectacular and exciting sales. For many, procrastination and a failure to plan have become friends not easily abandoned.

A fear may be that if you begin to plan for the future, you will lose sight of the importance and the urgency of the "now." It is true, if you remove the urgency, without retaining the excitement and enthusiasm of the sale, it can cost you money.

The key to implementing successful time management is to become conscious of your thought process. Realize that excitement. not procrastination, is your friend. Separate the two. Deliver excitement and you will have the ingredients of success without the weight of procrastination to slow you down.

Realizing that your decisions affect not only how you work, but how you sell should be your primary motivator to successfully manage time. To create a successful program, devise a time management system that benefits you and your mind-frame when selling.

The following are key elements of time management for a salesperson:

Turn goals into projects, Free-flow your thoughts, dreams, and ideas to paper. From these, determine the sales goals that excite you most and set time frames for goal accomplishment. Retain (or document) all the excitement and rewards that reaching those goals will deliver.

Set priorities for those steps and schedule them on your calendar system. As you complete the steps, be sure to reward yourself.

Group activities to gain momentum.

Organize your daily and weekly activities into time blocks of congruent activities. For example, prospecting and closing have different tempos. You can maximize results by working with this reality instead of against it. As a telemarketer, much success will come from prospecting for four hours straight each Monday through Thursday, taking care of paperwork and mailings at the end of each day, and completing your call-back closings on Friday.

Work the plan.

You may have a tendency to thrive on urgency because you sell urgency.

Turn each sales goal into a project by listing all the tools necessary: people and places involved, investment, time, equipment required, and returnon-investment ( monetary. recognition. or personal satisfaction, etc.).

If you have more than five projects, prioritize them by a criteria that fits your needs. Choose at most four or five to work on now. Save other pro-

Do what you have outlined and monitor your behavior when executing the plan. Watch for procrastination, resistance to execution. and a failure to continue planning ahead. Delegate everything not directly involving selling skills, commit to follow-up on yourself and your goal completion dates. and control distractions.

Control the timing of your thoughts. There is the selling time and the planning time. Group not only your activities, but your thoughts.

Start and end your day with planning. Use this planning time to build your desire and appetite for the day's activities.