How to focus on high-value tasks?
Start by understanding your day-to-day and breaking down your tasks.
As a sales rep, taking a step back to analyse how well your time is spent and where you should focus your efforts takes a lot of work.
As a manager, identifying where you can have an impact and how to prioritize your support can be challenging to process.
There is an formidable way to understand the scope and time spent:
Running a task breakdown.
What is a task breakdown?
It's about listing all the tasks performed by a given sales function (or else) with the highest level of detail and granularity.
It is usually initiated by a manager and sent to the sales team.
Here is a template for an account management role:
It’s about understanding where time is spent.
Let’s say that you have a team composed of 5 sales members.
Each member will individually and separately insert their time on each task.
The manager will aggregate the data and have something like this:
Number of hours per week/month spent per individual per task
Total number of hours spent on critical chapters
Discrepancies between team members with team average, highest and lowest time spent on a given tasks
Most time-consuming tasks
Most underdeveloped tasks
Moving forward: analyse and identify opportunities.
Observation #1: in this example, the five account managers spend 70% of their time on activities that have a direct impact on the business (great!):
Observation #2: looking at member-level, you can identify discrepancies:
Which, by the way, is 100% fine and should be encouraged!
But it would be interesting to:
Understand how member #2 manages to spend less time on “client-facing activities”? What about his/her performance compared to the team? Therefore, can this member share valuable practices to others?
Some members (#3 & #5) don’t spend time on their development. As a manager how can you help them? Do you allocate enough coaching time? Do they have too much on their plate? Etc.
Member #4 doesn’t spend time on Quarterly business reviews: is this person more efficient? Does this person has found a way to shorten the meetings, improve the efficiency, generate decks quicker? Going deeper, you can notice differences in quarterly business reviews preparation:
Observation #3: 6 tasks account for 71 hours of the total time spent by the team:
The question to ask yourself here is:
How can you reduce your time spent on low-value tasks? On Repetitive tasks?
I’m pretty sure that these tasks can have some automation, alerting system or templates at their disposal:
Create deck,
Review your top accounts,
Reply to frequently asked questions and emails,
Send weekly emails,
Send monthly reports,
Gather data from the competition.
Reducing the time spent on these tasks would allow the Sales rep to spend more time on higher-value tasks. At least you now have an idea about the size of the opportunity.
Observation #4: running a task breakdown can help you understand your current team’s focus.
In our example, the account managers spend most of their time and efforts on Hardware & Travel clients.
Is it what is expected? Do you have numbers to back that up?
Does the team have insights, practices to share on why they’ve decided to focus on a given industry?
Running a task breakdown offers endless possibilities and can be a formidable coaching tool.
So make sure to have a collaborative and genuine approach with your team (rather than a micro-management one).
Otherwise this exercise would arguably back fire and be counter-productive.
Feeling like trying it?
You don’t have to start from scratch!
Here is the template and fake results.
