It’s easy to feel like time slips away from you in a sales job. We get that. That’s why we put together this brief session on time management. If you can help your reps to be organised and efficient, you’ll have to spend less time following up and checking in and making sure they are doing the right thing at the right time.
Reps often have tunnel vision, only paying attention to certain activities. It’s up to you as a manager to guide them and teach them how to balance their focus.
So first off you need to get a sense of where time is being spent. Time and activity tracking is the simplest way to do that but remember this is not to micromanage, it’s to help them spend time where they can be most productive.
Make sure the reps are tracking their activities in the CRM and in a calendar for demos, appointments, meetings and anything else. By having them contributing to this aspect they get a better understanding of what they are doing.
You need to ensure that reps understand enough to do a little bit of everything daily. Reps should have a singular focus on certain things at certain times in the day that make most sense. For example, if you cover the UK territory it’s pretty difficult to get a hold of people after 4pm on a Friday so working leads at that time is a bit pointless.
We suggest that a rep should schedule time in chunks on their calendar, maybe 9am-10am – catch up on the previous day, 10am-11am – working leads, 11am-12noon admin etc. Whatever cadence works for you and your team is appropriate.
Here are a few more general tips:
- Make technology work for your team:
- Make sure the reps are continuously tracking activities in the CRM, but make sure you are actively looking to reduce admin by automating monotonous tasks.
- Have templates for common emails that need to be sent.
- Scheduling daily sales activities:
- Make sure your reps are not just doing a bunch of busywork and admin
- Make sure there’s a weekly cadence of a sales meeting so that reps know what to focus on and you can help them prioritise by noting actions from the meeting.
- Understand the metrics so you know what to drive daily/weekly/monthly.