Time Management

Mike Montague interviews Maria Ellis, author of Redefining Entrepreneurial Success, on How to Succeed with a Healthy and Holistic Lifestyle.

At many of the organizations we work with, the size of the average sales team has increased over the past decade. Given that there are a limited number of working hours, and given that sales leaders now find themselves responsible for supervising, training, mentoring, and coaching larger teams, what best practices should they embrace when it comes to time management? Here are three to consider.

Read Time: 5 Minutes

Jim Ayraud, Sandler trainer and co-creator of www.SalesAccountability.com, shows you how to succeed with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful at maximizing your time invested. Get the best practices collected from around the world.

Listen Time: 29 Minutes

Summer can be a challenging time for businesses. Reduced productivity from individuals going on vacations or taking time off can lead to slow sales. This common phenomenon is a subject we’ve covered before on the Sandler Blog, with tips on how to combat the slow season.

There are only 24 hours (or 1,440 minutes) in a day. What you do with those hours has a direct impact on your overall productivity and your career. From the cold calls you have to make to the internal meetings and client visits, how can you squeeze it all into each day without missing out? The way you schedule your time, the format of your meetings and even your approach to delegation are important. Your overall approach to time management can help you make the most of each day to ensure you have a positive impact on your career.

As a leader, you are limited. Limited physically, financially, emotionally, and mentally. You are limited by the amount of time in a day. I have seen countless leaders who tried to ignore this simple fact from time to time with devastating effects on their physical health, family, and mental health. There’s a limit to how much one person can do.

Giving sales-related tasks their due diligence is part of growing your business. As business growth occurs, you have to divide your time amongst more tasks, more clients, more sales team members...you can see where this is going. The busier you get, the easier it is to fall into the trap of ‘busy work,’ or tasks that make you feel like you're accomplishing things but actually detract from business success.

Stress is a natural response of the body to challenge, fear, attack, excitement and other external stimuli that gets our heart racing and the blood vessels pumping. However, too much stress, which happens regularly in a stressful workplace, and the body starts to break down. It’s not a good formula for a successful career, no matter how hard a person works. 

It's a fast-paced world and today's salesperson needs to be one step ahead of the prospect and working as efficiently as possible. In addition, we're more connected than ever and clients and prospects expect quick turnaround times and faster response rates. While it may seem like there aren't enough hours in the day, there are more than enough apps available to us to help us manage our time, stay on task and find even greater success. Here are a few free apps that Sandler Training's associates and clients use often in their everyday life

The question is a bit of a puzzle. Ideally, there would be a reference book that lists, by industry, how much time you should invest in prospecting activities. Unfortunately, there's no reference book. Why? How much time you invest will depend on the number of prospecting activities you plan, the nature of the activities, and the intended results of the activities