The Best Time Management Techniques for Salespeople or
How Time Management Can Make You a Better Salesperson
Time management is a key measure of productivity for all professionals. It is especially critical for salespeople as they chase revenue targets and multiple deals. Running after the wrong lead could be the difference in meeting your target, multimillion dollar deals and heft bonuses - or staring down at the abyss of unmet goals. To complicate matters, time management is particularly challenging for salespeople with multiple important tasks vying for their attention.
As per studies conducted on sales productivity, only one-third of a sales person's time is actually spent selling. Rest of the day is spent on activities such as administrative tasks, meetings, training, and creating or looking for content. Clearly, there is a need for a greater sense of urgency in improving sales productivity.
Time Wasting Traps Before we begin laying out techniques for better time management, it is useful to identify the common time wasters in a sales person's day. Meetings How can meetings be a time waster if you cannot close sales without meeting with clients? Moreover, aren't they essential to understand the buyer and their pain points? However unconfirmed meetings are one of the biggest time wasters and calendar hurdles for salespeople. Often, salespeople are afraid that the prospect will cancel on them if they check the day before or the morning of the meeting. However, letting a prospect know that you've worked hard to prepare for the meeting and how it will help the prospect's goals will work to your advantage in ensuring that you are not cancelled upon. Internal meetings can also be a big time waster, specially if they are poorly planned and executed. It takes precious time away from selling or prospecting with little to show for it. Calendar Mismanagement Often, a lot of time is wasted when your calendar is not managed well. When you haven't put thought into how to organize your calendar, your day ends up being reactive instead of productive. This means you are responding to emails immediately or taking every phone call as it comes in, making it hard to focus. You may also not be using all the technological tools available to manage your calendar, thus leading to reduced productivity. Spending time on wrong accounts Spending time on low revenue producing accounts or those that have very low probability of closing is a mistake as it takes time away from more important and high revenue generating clients and prospects. There are only so many calls and meetings you can do in a day - make sure they are the right ones.
Failure to plan A disorganized salesperson who fails to plan effectively ends up wasting more time. What is the goal of each call? What exactly is the pitch? What are the resources you need to bring for the meeting? What will be the travel time? Where will you find the content you need to share? Having ready answers for questions you face and situations you commonly handle goes a long way in enhancing your productivity. Now that we have identified the top time wasters, let us take a detailed look at how salespeople can manage their time better
Time Management Techniques 1) Set clear goals and make them modular Managing time effectively begins with setting clear goals. These could be revenue related (specific targets, cross-selling, upselling) as well as non-revenue related such as better account management. Break these goals down to every week and every day, making the tracking of the goal easier. Organize your day by looking at your top goals and focusing on activities that help meet those goals. There are many CRM software available in the market that will help you in this. Ambition Sales, Salesforce, OnContact CRM 7 and Tactile all have features to measure sales performance, sales dashboards to monitor activities and methods to track conversations, calls and store all relevant information about an account. 2) Do not multi-task While multitasking has been much celebrated as a concept, in reality studies have shown that people cannot focus on multiple things simultaneously without dropping their focus and efficiency. For a salesperson, giving a demo requires a different set of skills and mindset than making a cold call. By grouping together similar activities throughout the day, you will manage your time more productively and get better results. 3) Tackle what you don't like head-on We all have things to do during the day that we dislike or downright dread going. It could be prospecting or writing a follow-up email or updating the CRM. While our natural instinct is to avoid doing the tasks we don't like, we can often overinvest time in other activities thus leading to poor time management. Do the thing you have to do, and get it over with quickly. You could even try doing it first thing in your day so that the rest of the day is available to spend on tasks you enjoy.
4) Structure your day around your clients/prospects Plan your calendar in a way that you connect with prospects at the time they are most likely to be available. This depends on your industry, geography and the decision-maker's role. By structuring your day around your clients, you will save a lot of time making unanswered calls. 5) Block time for meetings A lot of sales meetings now take place through webinars or video conferencing, yet physical meetings are still an important part of a salesperson's calendar. To manage your time effectively, block 2-3 days in your calendar for external meetings and schedule them only in those days. Extend this to internal meetings as well. This will make your work week more efficient and organized. If you want to be even more efficient, categorize your meetings – team catchup, demo calls, introductory calls etc. and define how long you want to allocate for each meeting type. This will provide an easily repeatable structure. Tools like WizCal make meeting planning and scheduling quick, easy and hassle-free. 6) Schedule travel time Sales people often have unrealistic jam-packed schedules that do not allow for travel time and delays. This can lead to being late for client meetings, making you look tardy. Schedule time for travel in your calendar – not just planes and trains but also local commute, particularly during rush hour. 7) Build a great value proposition The idea of a sales script elicits a mixed response from salespeople. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to have ready a set of answers for the core questions you get asked regularly. This will save time looking for those answers and will also present you as being prepared. This idea can be extended into creating a template for researching a prospect and gathering information on an account. 8) Good email habits Checking your phone constantly for emails or responding to every email immediately can disrupt your rhythm, make you lose focus and hinder productivity. Schedule an hour in the morning to check and respond to emails and another hour later in the day to manage follow-ups. Create a labeling system to categorize your emails into high priority, quick, less important and garbage. Devise a system for managing each of these categories so you know immediately what
to do with a given email. Install Gmail Inbox Pause, an extension that pauses your email activity until you hit the button to unpause, allowing you to control the flow of emails.
9) Schedule time for building sales skills Make sure you allocate time for regularly updating your skills so you can be an effective salesperson. These could include soft skills as well as product-related skills. Do not miss important training sessions and practice with your colleagues to ensure you have a thorough understanding of your industry and products. About WizCal WizCal’s mission is to improve individual and organizational efficiency through AI Orchestration of Calendars. Current scheduling tools use the free/busy information to find time. These tools start to fail as the complexity of scheduling increases due to factors like busy calendars, participants external to your organization, multiple time zones, finding a meeting location etc. The result is that it takes away precious time and focus away from core work and leads to lost opportunities by not making a timely connect with your partners, customers or team. WizCal is an AI-powered meeting scheduling assistant that addresses these problems. WizCal’s experience is integrated into google, outlook calendar and has an app for iOS.