Managing a sales team entails juggling lots of responsibilities. Not structuring your schedule well can hinder your performance and your team’s. Furthermore, constantly feeling as though there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to take care of everything that you need to could make you susceptible to stress or burn out. Being organized about time management, developing smart habits that support productivity, and identifying resources to optimize your work output will help you excel in your role as a sales manager.
Start Your Day With Challenging Tasks
The start of your workday is when you have the most momentum. Before you get interrupted with requests for help or operational matters that require your attention, you need to make the best possible use of time that you have to yourself. Don’t get drawn into simple stuff because you think it might feel good to check a few things to do off of your list. Checking off just one or two of the hardest stuff on your to-do will feel a lot more gratifying than a bunch of not-so-hard stuff.
Use Technological Tools To Consolidate and Review Information
Great managers stay current with industry news,so you should make it a point to leave enough room in your schedule to analyze articles, reports, and other informative resources. Reading all of the materials that you want to check out may be unfeasible when you’ve got to spend the bulk of your day connecting people.
Consider using a program that will read and summarize information. Advanced GPT-J features can comb through large volumes of dense text and extrapolate the most important bullet points and takeaways. Using a desktop’s snipping tool to capture information on summaries is an excellent tool for compiling cohesive notes quickly.
Track and Audit Your Time
A lot of the professional world is in the habit of tracking their time very closely. Sales professionals don’t do this as much as people working in other fields because their time doesn’t represent billable hours. Nevertheless, monitoring where your time is going could be a huge help in managing your schedule.
Over the course of a busy workday, jot down some notes about how you spend your time. Ideally, you should use increments no greater than twenty minutes, but fifteen minutes is better. At the end of the day, go through your notes and enter a final account of how you spent your day. This exercise is going to enable you to reflect on what you’re doing well and what types of tasks you might be spending too long on.
You also want to analyze how closely a written schedule that you’ve used to plan your day correlates with how you actually spent your time. Honing in on discrepancies are going to be useful for making more accurate projections about how long things will take in the future.
Set Regular Meeting Times With Staff
Adding more recurring meetings to your schedule might not strike you like a time-saving hack, but this managerial habit builds structure and consistency into your interactions with your staff. With a predictable meeting time that you can plan on, you’ll be sure to have sufficient room in your schedule to meet with everyone who you need to. It may also reduce the number of interactions that people try to initiate with you when you have to be focusing on other agenda items. Unless something is time-sensitive, your team members can wait until their meeting time to ask for your input or give you updates.
In sales fields where the total volume of revenue you generate may not necessarily be proportionate to the amount of time and work that you put into it, it’s crucial that you use your time effectively. Ultimately, practicing better time management can be transformative for your work style and the quality of the work that you produce.
