30% of your time.
10 tips for Sales to better manage your agenda and improve your performances.
Have you ever wondered how much time you spend interacting with your clients?
Recent studies have shown that Sales professionals spend only 30% of their time on client-facing selling activities. You might find yourself in a similar situation.
Today's newsletter will cover 10 simple tips to help you manage your time better.
Once implemented, you will spend less time on low-value tasks and have more efficient conversations with your customers and your manager while gaining control and comfort.
Start your day with a to-do list.
First, you want to start your day by spending a few minutes listing your objectives for the day. Have a realistic and tangible to-do list.
Instead of aiming to "Call as many prospects as possible”;
Opt for "Call these ten prospects."
Or even better, link them with outputs: "Get five prospects to sign exclusivity deals."
Your to-do might also include day-to-day tasks that you need to perform. What matters here is that your start your day by identifying your priorities, adjusting your agenda accordingly, and achieving your goals step by step.
Schedule your breaks.
Secondly, managing your time relies on your capacity to manage your energy.
To help you understand your rhythm, ask yourself these three questions:
How much time can you stay focused? Is it 30min? 60min? 90min?
Then, how difficult is it for you to swap between tasks when not taking breaks?
Finally, have you ever found the expression "sleep on it" to be true?
It has been well documented that taking breaks helps your brain to switch between two tasks, boost your ability to focus, be productive, and reduce similar redundant ideas. Many studies demonstrated that your efficiency and energy would decrease over time when not taking breaks. It's about quality, not quantity.
See your day as several small tasks, small slots, highlighted by breaks in between. Having scheduled breaks will organically set deadlines and help you complete your task before moving on to the next one.
Allocate time to track your progress weekly.
Let's say you have your one-on-one meetings with your manager every Tuesday:
You could have a 30-minute follow-up on Thursdays to review your current week's performance and to-do list.
And identify the remaining key actions to perform before the weekend.
This will prevent you from executing without direction and help you course-correct your actions to achieve your KPIs of success.
Have email cleaning slots.
Managing your priorities is paramount. As the week goes by, you will have more unexpected actions to perform and more customer interactions.
That's why we recommend you have scheduled email cleaning slots.
You don't want to spend your entire day answering emails and switching back and forth between an email and a call. You want to help your brain focus on one task at a time.
These backlog cleaning slots will help you to:
Answer some emails that can be answered quickly and simply.
Control your response time and your time allocated to emails versus calls.
Identify patterns and recurrent questions and therefore create email templates.
Also, you'll notice that some emails will be resolved by themselves by not answering immediately. Your customer or internal stakeholder will have found the answer when you reply.
Identify dependencies.
Try to spot emails with dependencies that require support from someone else, most of the time internally.
They might take a few days to answer, so it's best to handle them right now and remove them from your own to-do.
Have email templates.
Make sure to have templates for call follow-ups, introduction emails, most recurring questions, and most visited F.A.Q. Articles...
Now that you have structured your week and optimized your mailbox let's talk about your call activities.
Create dedicated calling slots.
You first want to create dedicated calling slots at different times of the day (some customers never answer calls in the morning, for example), with varying moments between cold calls and customer meetings.
Regardless of the tools you are using, such as Calendly, Mixmax, or Salesforce.. they all allow you to select the moments when your customers can book a call in your agenda.
Unsurprisingly, you should have enough time to call the required number of prospects and clients to achieve your goals.
Have clear agenda details.
Moving on, make sure to facilitate things for your point of contact by inserting clear agenda details, documents, and meeting goals.
This will save you a tremendous amount of time, avoid any confusion before the meeting and ensure that you focus on actionable items.
Take notes during your meetings.
Instead of writing follow-up emails after your calls, do yourself a favor by taking notes during your calls, following a structured template.
Therefore you'll be able to send your email right at the end of the call, saving you precious time and making you appear like an efficient professional in your contact eyes.
Last tip: kill non-necessary meetings.
Do you sometimes attend useless meetings? In which you have no active role? With topics that could have been covered by email?
Remember, you are in control of your time.
You have every right not to attend some meetings according to your company's policy.
We strongly encourage you to have a Friday slot dedicated to killing non-necessary meetings happening the week after.
This is one of the most potent actions to perform every week and can make the difference between achieving your goals and over-achieving.
You’re all set!
Now, how will you better use the time you just freed up?
You have the opportunity to transfer this time towards more impactful actions.