6 Effective Time Management Strategies for Sales Professionals

"Time is money," as the old adage goes. No one understands this better than sales professionals. Every second your sellers are not engaged in huge sales activity is a missed opportunity—and a lost income.

Sales success involves handling a variety of duties, some of which are tiresome and time-consuming yet must be completed. This is when good time management skills come into play. It's a skill that the most effective salesmen have learned and implemented into their everyday routines.

Share these 7 time management strategies for salesmen with your crew, and they'll be getting more things done before you even know it!

1. Focus on the right tasks

When you begin your day, you might've been trained to prioritize your duties. However, some people prefer to start with the minor, insignificant items on their to-do list.

They begin to believe they have been productive after a long day of concentrating on these minor activities. That's just another technique to put off accomplishing the most vital things.

If anything pops up that will just take a minute or two to complete, do it straight away. You do not need to book it for the following day.

Your head will be free to concentrate on other vital duties, such as planning a sales proposal for your next customer.

If time is money, then wasting time means losing money for your firm. As a sales associate, failing to manage your time effectively may jeopardize not just your own ambitions, but also the deadlines of your team.

Prioritize work, avoid distractions such as social networks and other time-wasting tasks, and concentrate on the most critical things.

Better time management can help salespeople be more effective and move them closer to their own revenue targets.

2. Set time restrictions

When you place time limitations on your duties, you are compelled to complete more work in less time. It is the urge to increase your productivity when you set yourself a specific period of time so that you can finish right on time. This is the way Sales Huner finds deadline a drive to get his work done.

This involves spending less time on your task. Assuming you spend make 60-minute checking information and planning a sales meeting. However, when there are more tasks that need performing. You will need to cut your time in half. After that, You would find you could achieve the same outcomes in 30 mins as you did with 60.

Therefore, keep getting yourself familiar with the new time constraints and take a step further on the trail until you only need 15 minutes to plan a whole meeting and have enough time to focus on your greater projects.

3. One task at a time only!

Multitasking is an unproven theory. Studies have clearly proved that humans cannot accomplish two things at the same time; they are just moving between activities fast. Since their minds have to adapt to each job, this switching dilutes attention and slows individuals down.

Distinct jobs employ different brain muscles in a salesperson. Demonstrating, for example, takes a very different mentality and emphasis than pre-call preparation or pipeline management. Sales representatives might improve their productivity by grouping comparable operations.

Take, for example, prospecting. Assume your business promotes the use of voicemail and email as essential components of prospecting, and you have two hours scheduled to conduct prospecting calls. One strategy is to dial the phone, listen to the prospect's voice message, send a text, write a follow-up message, send the email, report the task in the CRM, create a new task to try to reach the prospect afterward, and then proceed on to the next prospect on your contact list, and repeat this loop for 2 hours.

Because of all the activity switching, this strategy can eat up a lot of time. There are several methods to make it more efficient. One approach is to organize group activities: Because of all the activity switching, this strategy can eat up a lot of time. There are several methods to make it more efficient. One approach is to organize group activities by determining how many prospects you can contact in two hours if all you do is take the phone and leave voice mails. Then Investigate as many opportunities as possible before your planned and scheduled prospecting period. After that pull up a list of studied prospects you wish to call when it's time for your two hours of prospecting. Call each prospect and leave individualized voicemails based on your study prior to the call. Then, Log only the call activity in the CRM and move on to the next lead on the list as soon as possible. Finally, Repeat.

4. Plan your schedule with your customers’ time

You've set out time on your calendar to call on clients, but you get too many unanswered calls or a common term "I'm busy". Why is that? Have you ever considered whether your schedule is suitable for your customers? You read and know experts agree that the greatest times to connect with prospects are in the afternoon, very early morning, evening, late-mid early morning, or on weekends but not everyone has the same perfect time to connect.

You're not properly planning your day if you're not phoning potential consumers when it's convenient for them. While statistics can tell you the ideal timings to contact prospects, understanding your potential buyers' habits and routines is essential. A phone call at noon to a restaurant that is usually full at lunchtime, for example, is unlikely to be effective. Statistics are only a starting point; watch your outcomes and learn about your clients' schedules so you can approach them when they are most available.

You can study your client’s routine easily through their activities on social media, through their jobs, and consider the time which anyone could be essentially unavailable.

5. Revise your day and prepare for the next one

It is necessary to look back on what you have done through your whole day to see how much you have progressed in a period and reconsider your working method in order to come out with a more effective way to optimize your time. Revising also helps you to stay motivated at how much you have done so you can do better tomorrow. 

A good way to recollect your data and make a report is through Roamie, a sales optimized app specifically for sales professionals to keep track of tasks and store the information of prospects to save your time effectively and to see how much you have progressed with automatically generated reports.

6. Do real work to take real break

There is nothing worse than not taking a break after a hard-working day. But the worst of all is to do mix your break with your work. Don’t just watch one sales training video on Mysalegene then spend 30 minutes on Youtube and continue learning. It is important to stay focused 100% on your job then grant yourself a fully relaxing time to recover your energy.

However, when taking a break, it is not recommended to lay on a couch and swipe your phone but rather get up to walk around and drink some water. Relax is meant to be staying away from the source of tiredness or related to your work, which is mostly from your desktop or phone. Remember this term: Work is work, break is break.

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