Time Management:
The Key to Improving Sales Productivity
Time management is an OXYMORON. You cannot manage time, but you can manage YOURSELF through a disciplined process of maximizing your time by prioritizing activities which will help you achieve…your sales goals. This discipline must be ongoing…not something you do once or occasionally.
How do you self-manage activities? First, identify time wasters, then, identify the source of time wasters and finally, change your behavior pattern.
Example: You spend 1 hour socializing each morning before you make calls. Who is the source? You… Does this really create personal procrastinating, because you don’t want to face a prospect saying, “no”? How could you change behavior? Perhaps plan your call schedule the night before? Establish daily activity/performance goals e.g. Make “x” number of calls before 9:30am…every day. In order to manage activities you need to evaluate, track, and measure what you do. Develop a checklist in terms of…
Organization
What activities can you prioritize in order to reach personal sales/income goals? Number of completed phone calls, number of appointments, number of closed sales at $x? What need to be accomplished weekly…and daily in terms of behavior? Do you track and measure it? What keeps you from achieving goals? What must you stop, or start doing to achieve your goals?
Action
What behaviors must you focus on to produce results? What distractions or low priorities can be eliminated? Set specific daily, weekly, monthly activity goals. What activities make money?
Evaluate
What goals did you achieve? What problems or setbacks did you encounter? Did you make the right choices? What did you learn from this? Do you know your “metrics”? How many calls to appointments? How many appointments to proposals? Closing x% of proposals?
Remember: Time is a depleting asset which cannot be recovered. By priority planning you will be able to concentrate daily on important things first. So what are your priorities (or what should they be) in sales to help manage your time?
DO IT NOW!
