3 Tips For Time Management In Selling

When I ask a room full of sales people about the number one area in which they would like to improve “time management” ALWAYS makes the list and generally at or near the top.

Let’s examine the REASONS for that and also some potential solutions:

Reason For Time Management Challenge #1: Too much of a sellers time is spent in chase mode. The salesperson has a meeting with a prospect, the prospect seems very interested, they are given company information or a quote, the prospect then says “looks great, let me review this and lets talk next week.”  Some version of that scenario is playing out daily for many sellers but all too frequently the “very interested” prospect disappears and the salesperson is left in chase mode.

Multiply how many times this type of situation plays out each week and it doesn’t take too long for a salesperson to be spending an inordinate amount of time chasing prospects who have gone into hiding.

• Solution To The Chase Mode Dilemma: Do a better job in the qualification process and set mutually understood and agreed upon outcomes for every sales meeting. The number one reason prospects disappear is that they weren’t properly qualified prospects to begin with. By agreeing with the prospect in advance to a “No Pressure” way to either say yes OR no at the end of a call there will be far less time spent chasing unqualified prospects and more time to work with the real ones.

Reason For Time Management Challenge #2: Too many “non-value added” meetings, reports, etc. that are required by sales management and the company. Not much a seller can do about this many times but I always encourage sales leaders to be ever vigilant to this deadly and self-inflicted time management killer.

I did a research project with a Fortune 1000 firm’s sales team to find out how much time a week was actually spent in direct conversation with customers and prospects. The shocking results were that only 17% of the time each week was actually spent selling to other human beings!

• Solution To The “Time Suck” Dilemma: As previously stated every company should be vigilant about streamlining the demands placed upon sales professionals to perform tasks outside those that are directly adding value to the sales process. Sales enablement tools and CRM systems are often touted as a piece of such a solution but are, as often as not, just contributors to the problem. Helping sellers to organize their time into 2 primary buckets is a big piece of a solution to the “time suck” problem. At Sandler Training we refer to those two buckets as “Pay Time” and “No Pay Time.” What that means breaking down each day of the week into the prime times for selling and the non-prime times. Keep all “time suck” activities out of your “Pay Time” each day. As this discipline becomes part of the company culture time management improves, more time is spent actually selling, and company sales go up.  Here is a saying that illustrates the concept of Pay Time: “If you want to make your daily score, stay out of the office between 10 and 4.”

Reason For Time Management Challenge #3: The sales person puts off prospecting activities such as cold calling because it is too stressful. No one likes prospecting for new sales opportunities. Activities such as cold calling typically come with heightened levels of stress induced by feelings such as rejection and disappointment. Often times a sales professional will find every alternative activity possible to put off the prospecting behaviors required for success in sales. The day ends, the sales rep has been busy, but the most critical elements of the sales process may have been completely avoided by adding in some self imposed “time suck” activities. In other words the representative was busy but not truly productive.

• Solution To The Self-Imposed Time Suck Dilemma: First and foremost a seller has to learn to not become emotionally involved in the selling process. When a prospect hangs up on a cold call or berates the seller for interrupting his day it is NOT personal. A good way to establish this separation is to keep in mind this simple distinction: the act of prospecting is NOT about trying to turn a suspect into a prospect. It is only about sorting through the suspects to identify the prospects. That is hard enough. When someone says no, hangs up, etc. they are merely sorting themselves OUT of the prospect category, nothing more and nothing less.

There are certainly other problems, which cause sales professionals challenges with time management, but here is a simple philosophy that is universal. It isn’t about managing TIME it is about managing PRIORITIES. If you always do the highest priority things on a daily basis you won’t go too far wrong.