I wonder if you can give me some tips on how to manage my diary better. Whilst I have reached my target for the year, I feel I should and could be doing better but I need to free up more time to prospect and be out there on sales calls.
What might be a good place to start is to develop an “Ideal Week” format which defines how you think you should best spend your time on a weekly basis. Keep it simple by first identifying what the weekly ‘buckets’ of activity you need to do are. For example:
- General administration
- Prospecting planning and preparation
- Phone and email prospecting
- Sales Meeting(s)
- Sales Reporting
- Sales call planning
- Sales Calls
- Sales call follow up
- Proposals and presentations
- Weekly catch up with Sales Manager
- General email and telephone calls
I recommend that you simply ‘chunk’ diary time for the key activities, ensuring that you also allow around 20% whitespace (this time remains open = unallocated) to allow for things that come up and need to be addressed on a daily – weekly basis. So for instance, principles and elements of your ideal week might include:
- No sales calls on Mondays – Mondays being comprised of Sales Meeting, Admin, Prospecting preparation, emails and calls.
- Monday afternoon from 2:00 through to 5:00 prospecting
- Tuesday morning sales call follow up, presentations and reporting.
- Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday and Thursday 80% of time allocated for sales calls with prospects and customers.
- Friday afternoon 2:30 – 5:00 whitespace for weekly wrap up, catch up on emails and unreturned phone calls and general week wrap up.
This should give you a good flavour of how an Ideal Week looks and works.
A couple more tips in relation:
- Working an Ideal Week requires discipline. Scheduling sales calls with prospects and customers, according to your time frame, requires focus and skill.
- Get ahead of the game with the scheduling of your sales calls. High performing salespeople are like any other professional, they are scheduling their time at least two to three weeks in advance. You should never be scrambling to make appointments for sales calls for next week – this is the territory of beginners and / or poor performers – hard I know – but true.
- Develop your Ideal Week and see how you go at working with it. It will not be perfect first up; so review and refine fortnightly for the first couple of months until you have something that really does work for you.
- With critical activities like prospecting, schedule a couple of time blocks in a week unless you are super disciplined. For example, if you build in to your schedule one 3 hour prospecting time block on Monday afternoons and you miss it next Monday because the Sales Manager has taken you out on a new opportunity with him, your prospecting goes missing for a week – best therefore to allow a couple of slots per week for such important activities to provide you some ‘make up’ time.
