Quick Sales Hacks Part-1: Time Management

Rank your sales Tasks

Every sales activity has value attached to it. But some tasks, while necessary, don’t have a high return on investment when compared to others.

List out all the tasks you have to do in your sales role and stack rank them according to the return you get. And then press the start button & keep calculating your score 3 times in day, during first coffee break, after lunch and after the evening coffee break to keep yourself in-check with better sales tasks.

Avoid Multitasking

Multitasking is a myth. Studies have clearly shown that people cannot actually do two things at once; they’re really just quickly switching between tasks. And that switching dilutes focus and slows people down because their brains have to adjust to each task.

From a sales perspective, different tasks engage different mental muscles. For instance, giving demos requires a much different mind-set and focus than pre-call prep or pipeline management. Sales reps can gain efficiency by grouping similar activities.

Take prospecting for instance. Let’s say your organization advocates using voicemail and email as critical components to prospecting and you’ve got two hours planned to make prospecting calls. One approach is to dial the phone, get the prospect’s voicemail, leave a message, write a follow-up email, send the email, document the activity in the CRM, set a new activity to try and reach the prospect again, and then move on to the next prospect on your call list and keep repeating this cycle for two hours.

This approach can chew up a ton of time because of all the activity switching. There are a lot of ways to streamline it. One way is to group activities:

• Figure out how many prospects you can reasonably call in the two hours if all you did was dial the phone and leave voicemail messages. Research that many prospects before your planned and scheduled prospecting time.
• When it’s time for your two hours of prospecting, pull up the list of researched prospects you want to call.
• Call each prospect and leave personalized voicemails based on your pre-call research.
• Log just the call activity in the CRM and quickly move onto the next prospect on the list. Repeat.
• Later in the day during scheduled administrative time, revisit the set of prospects you called to send out the follow-up emails and set the times you want to reach out again in the CRM.

This simple move to grouping activities will yield a much higher volume of calls, which improves the odds of actually talking to someone on the phone about what you’re selling. And that's what it's all about, right?

Eat the Biggest Frog First and as fast as you can

I’m a big fan of Brain Tracy’s Eat that Frog book on overcoming procrastination, as this one practice saves a lot of time and also improve the self-esteem.

Every rep has at least one task in particular that they simply can’t stand. Prospecting, logging activity, writing follow up emails, etc. I’ve got mine. I’m sure you’ve got yours.

The funny thing is we can all find plenty of ways to appear productive and avoid those important tasks we dread the most. But by overinvesting in one area to avoid doing work in another, time gets away from you. And behaviour like that always catches up to you in the end.

The bottom line: Just do the thing you're uncomfortable with and get it over with. In fact, do it first if you can.