Getting Organized and Managing Your Time

If you’re going to be successful in sales, the best results will come from being intentional about staying organized and managing your time. This doesn’t happen by accident.

Certain jobs allow us to wing-it or drift without much focus and effort. Sales is not one of them. If you’re unorganized and don’t have the discipline to prioritize what’s important, you will fail at sales.

Here are some tips to help get you started.

Getting Organized

Prospect List: The first thing you’ll need is a prospect list. Your company may provide this for you, however, don’t rely on your company to give you a solid list of contacts that are sitting by the phone waiting for you to call. There are plenty of free resources available to find prospects.

Start with a long list of prospects and then narrow it down to the companies that may be the right fit for your company. Prospecting is an ongoing effort to find companies that are the best fit for your company. Researching in advance to identify your top prospects will save you time in the long run.

Making Contact: You can refer to my post on How to get a New Prospect Meeting for tips on landing a meeting. Once you start contacting your prospects, keep track of your numbers, and know your ratios by keeping a record of the following:

1. How many times do you attempt to make contact before you make contact?
2. How many times do you get through before you get a meeting?
3. How many meetings do you need to win a new customer?

The reason you’ll want to track this is to know how many attempts to make contact you’ll need to win a new customer.

When I first started my career in sales, I needed to make 5 attempts to make contact 1 time. I needed to make contact 5 times to get 1 meeting, and I needed 5 meetings to win 1 new customer. So how many attempts to make contact did I need to make to win 1 new customer? The answer is 125. That’s right, 125 attempts to make contact would equal 1 new customer. During my first year in sales, I opened 40 new customers. That means I made about 5,000 attempts to make contact with a new prospect that year. That doesn’t mean I contacted 5,000 different companies. I probably contacted about 500 companies 10 times each on average. My numbers have improved over the years as I got better at avoiding the people that would hang up on me and spent more time calling people that wanted to talk with me.

Managing your Time

First things First: Simple, right? Focus on the most important things first. When it comes to business, most would say revenue-generating activities are the most important. While this is where you will want to spend a significant amount of time, don’t neglect preparation and planning. I spend about 20 percent of my week on preparation and planning.

Minimize Time Wasters: We all hate wasting our time. Two of the biggest time wasters are:

1) Not delegating work that someone else can do. I have fallen victim to this and still do from time to time. There are certain things that your company hired other people to do; only sometimes we feel we can do it better and faster. Let your people do their jobs, and you will have more time to spend on accomplishing your goals.

2) Spending time on a prospect that is never going to buy from you. It can be challenging to determine the difference between a real opportunity and a waste of time. Move on if the prospect never returns call or emails, cancels meetings at the last minute, always has something more important they are working on, etc. If you have a valuable product or service, some people actually do want to talk with you. Spend your time finding the people that want to speak with you and stop wasting time on the people that don’t.

Schedule Everything: As Michael Hyatt says, “if you schedule it, it gets done.” Time is not replenishable. Once it’s gone, it will never come back. If you looked at my calendar, you would see that I’m booked 2-3 weeks out. You may think that I have back to back meetings every day, however, this is not the case. Yes, I have meetings but I also schedule time for prospecting, checking email, eating lunch, etc. Not only will this keep you on track, but it will allow you to say “no” to unimportant requests. You can honestly say that you’re not available at that time. This will also make you think about what you will need to give up in order to commit to something else.

Office Time: Face-time with a prospect is essential. However, you also need a sufficient amount of time to contact new prospects, follow up on action items from your meetings, work on proposals, etc. Many salespeople fall into the trap of thinking they need to fill their schedule with face to face meetings to be successful. Sometimes a phone call is just as effective as a face to face meeting. Don’t try to force a meeting unless there is a specific purpose.

Many of my prospects are in New York City, and I live in New Jersey. If I add up the amount of time it takes to drive to the city, give myself extra time for traffic, park the car, have the meeting and drive back to my office, it takes me about 6 hours to attend a 1-hour meeting. Maybe the prospect can come to me. Perhaps we can have lunch or dinner together and discuss our business at the same time (one of the few forms of multi-tasking that I approve of). Maybe we can make it a phone or video call instead of a face to face meeting.

“It can be challenging to determine the difference between a true opportunity and a waste of time.”

– Michael Tattersall

Next time you’re tempted to contact new prospects without doing any research, say yes to a potentially unproductive meeting, answer a random phone call when you’re focused on hitting a deadline, or put something unimportant ahead of something important, remind yourself that you only get 168 hours in a week. Don’t let this happen too often, or you will eventually run out of time.

Mindset – Focused

Not focusing on the task at hand can make it hard to be productive. When I’m working alone and not interacting with other people, I can easily get distracted by email, phone calls, any noise, etc. The best results will come from shutting down all possible distractions and focusing on one thing at a time.