Lesson 54 - Manage Your Time

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Time management is vital for juggling the multiple tasks and priorities that inevitably come up as a seller. This lesson will teach you techniques like time blocking, prioritization, and task batching. Your assignment will involve creating a weekly schedule that aligns with your sales goals.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's episode, you're going to time block your upcoming calendar and learn how to manage your time more effectively. As a salesperson, it can be very easy to get distracted when you log in each morning, you're going to have emails, Slack messages, one on ones with frivolous stakeholders. You'll have travel you'll have last minute customer requests, you'll have internal meetings like crazy. And it's really, really easy for your calendar to get out of hand fast. And ultimately, what you end up with at the end of the day is a day that was filled with busyness, but not necessarily productivity, right? And the difference is, when you think about productive tasks, you want to think about doing things that are getting you closer to your goals as a salesperson. And ultimately, your goals are to build effective pipeline, maintain ongoing, productive relationships with your customers and close business. And if you're not doing something that is working towards one of those three goals, then really you're being busy, but not necessarily productive. So let's talk about what effective time management will allow you to do. One, you'll be able to prioritize your tasks more effectively, to directly contribute to revenue generation. Two, you'll maximize the amount of time that you spend in front of customers, which is your top priority. Three, you'll keep your pipeline healthy, which means you'll avoid last minute scrambling at the end of the quarter. And finally, you'll maintain a better work life balance, which ultimately allows you to enjoy the things in life that your new role affords you, which is the entire point. So one of the best time management strategies proven over and over again is time blocking. Time blocking basically means you're setting aside specific chunks of time in your calendar blocked off for specific job related tasks throughout the day. So and it also means, by the way, giving yourself kind of small breaks in between. You're not just going going going right, and when you time block, you'll proactively take control of your day, and ultimately, you will spend less time reacting to distractions or last minute requests. So before we jump into time blocking, let's think about the things that are important and all of the tasks that you should be doing each week as a salesperson, number one, customer meetings and follow ups. The most important time that you spend each week is time in front of your customers. So whether it's discovery calls, demos, closing conversations, you should be prioritizing the amount of time that you spend in front of customers, making sure that you also include time for preparing for those meetings, creating content for those meetings, rehearsing your presentations for those meetings, meeting with the other internal stakeholders, like customer calls, can take up a lot of time, and they should, and That's where you should be spending your time. Number two, equally just as important, is prospecting. You should always be building the pipeline. And if you don't have dedicated time to prospect, you will not do it. And the reason I say that is because prospecting is hard. You have to face a lot of rejection in prospecting. You're struggling with ways to creatively, kind of get your foot in the door, and your brain will naturally want to avoid doing that. So you need to maintain dedicated time for prospecting and emails, phone calls, LinkedIn requests, all of that territory planning. You need to make sure that you're taking time to map out where your biggest opportunities lie and how you'll prioritize your outreach efforts. That typically is going to happen at the beginning of the each quarter. Account research and account planning, you need to make sure that you're regularly spending time reviewing your top accounts and their progress, to make sure that you're on track towards your goals for each account pod meetings, make sure that you're regularly meeting with your pod. That's your solution, engineer, your sales development, rep, your customer success manager, so that you can continue to strategize your territory and accounts together. Administration and follow up. You need to make sure that after each customer call you've blocked time for taking notes. Make sure that you're sending recap emails, you know, talking about the value that you provided and what the next steps are. We've talked about mutual action plans that can be another one and, yeah, follow up resources, you know, all of the stuff that you would want to send a customer. CRM, hygiene, I know it's not fun, but it is important for the business to make sure that Salesforce, Clary, HubSpot, that all of your tools are up to date and that you're forecasting effectively. You're building out your forecasts, updating deal statuses, filling out things like med pick, adding notes from recent meetings. All of those things are going to be important for other stakeholders. And you know, if you leave the business and move on to a new. Opportunity you want those records there for the next salesperson, the next person that comes in to take over these accounts as well. And then finally, you know, continuous learning and career development and professional and personal development, those things are important as well. Sales is always evolving, and staying up to date with industry trends and new sales techniques and product updates, making sure that you're continuing to hone your skills so that you don't fall behind, whether that's conferences, webinars, e learning, lessons like this one, you know all of those things are going to help contribute to your success, and that can include like meeting with your manager or meeting meeting with your mentor. Those are all going to be be valuable. So we've talked about the things that you should be prioritizing, and frankly, I feel like those are the order in what you should be prioritizing them as well. People would probably disagree with me, but now that we've talked about the areas you should be prioritizing, here are 10 best practices to consider when it comes to time blocking. Number one, before blocking time. Make sure that all of your prospect calls required team calls are on the calendar right. Calls where you're actively in front of a prospect are always going to take priority. So put those up there first. Any calls that you're required to be to be at, like a weekly one on one, a weekly team call, put those up there too. Block your prospecting Time First, and most people like to do prospecting at the same time each day or at the same time each week, but make sure that you're blocking enough time for prospecting. It's your life blood. It's absolutely essential to your career. So make sure that you have significant time dedicated if you're not hitting your pipeline numbers, add more prospecting time if you're blowing your pipeline numbers out of the water. Maybe you can reduce pipeline time and focus on honing the sword discovery. You know, other parts of the funnel batch similar tasks together. Your brain doesn't like to switch gears. People are like, Oh, we should multitask. And I feel like we're starting to come around to the fact that multitasking just isn't what we're designed to do. So try to focus on similar things at the same time. It's really easy to get distracted. Build in flexibility. Time blocking is powerful, but things are going to change, right? Mike Tyson used to say, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And I really think that, you know, time blocking is basically what you're hoping the week will, week will look like. But you should always make room for things to change. And then, you know, in that same vein, you should be scheduling breaks, right? You should be scheduling what I would do is follow the 5010 rule. I think it's called, like, the Pareto Principle, or something like that. I'm probably wrong, but the principle is, essentially, you work for 50 minutes and then you break for 10. You work for 50 minutes and then you break for 10. And by doing that, your brain knows, hey, I'm not going to be here forever. I'm going to be here for the next 50 minutes, and then I'm going to take a break, and I can scroll on my phone, I can run to the bathroom. I can eat. I can go for a walk outside. You know, meditate, whatever you need to do to unwind and decompress. Eat breakfast, eat lunch, to eat snacks, right? Eat. I see so many people who get so busy they forget to eat, or they'll see it as some sort of a bragging right? Like, Oh, I haven't even eaten today. I'm like, okay, that's dumb. Eat. That's gonna fuel you. It's gonna make you more productive. So make sure that you're doing that. Grab a coffee, a coffee if you need it, right? Talk to your manager about the meetings that you are attending. This is something that not enough people do. Look at your calendar and ask yourself, Do I really need to be here? Do I really need to be in all of these calls? One really quick red flag is, if you went through the entire call without saying a single word, you probably don't need to be in that call. If you can't articulate in one sentence why it's important for you to be on that call, ask your manager if you can remove it, if you can get that off of your plate, because chances are they may not even know that you're in that call. A lot of times, other stakeholders will pull you into things without telling your manager, so make sure that they're in the loop. Be protective of your time and ask your manager to help you here, use the two minute rule. If a task takes less than two minutes to complete, do it right now. Otherwise, it's just like unnecessary psychological load. You don't need unnecessary tasks just kind of filling up your to do list and stressing you out. So if it takes less than two minutes, just do it right now. Limit distractions during your focus time, during your prospecting time, close slack. I don't mean press the X button at the top. I mean right, click it and exit it. Do not have your email tab open on your computer. I. Um, you need to turn off your cell phone notifications. You need to turn off notifications in general, make sure that you are reducing distractions as much as you possibly can. If you are required for your job to have these things on, fine, but if you are not, I would turn them off for that focus time um, set daily goals. Each morning when you wake up, write down two to three non negotiable tasks that you must complete. What are the two to three things that if everything else fails, if everything hits the plan hits the fan at the end of the day, what planned items should I be thinking about that need to get done? What will I be happy if I've achieved these two to three things, right? So set your daily goals. Create a completed list. A lot of people have a to do list, but I like to keep a What did I do today? List, what you can do, like a completed list or a done list. Write down things as you complete them, and then at the end of the day, you can look back at that and say, Are these things contributing to my goals? Are the things that I did today corresponding with my professional and work values? Are they? Are they leading towards sales success? Right? Because creating a completed list really helps to illuminate what are you actually doing with your time each day? Cool. I think those are all of my tips. Those are all of the things that you need to prioritize. And now it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to time block your calendar for the upcoming week. Don't just think about it. Do it if you're using Google Calendar, time block Google Calendar, if you're using Microsoft, time block Microsoft, right? You want to actually put these holds on the calendar. Make sure that you include time for the most productive areas we discussed today. Make sure that you follow the tips given in today's lesson, prioritizing the customer calls the activities that directly contribute to pipeline and your overall success. Work with your mentor, manager or new hire buddy on this. They may have some tips for structuring your time that I'm not thinking about, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.