Time management is probably one of the biggest opportunities for most salespeople to get more sales.
With all the heated debate about call quality versus quantity I though I would share some valuable information about how you can increase your calls without dropping any of the quality issues.
The Biggest Time Waster
Besides simply not working the biggest time waster is the interruption.
If you simply focused all of your time management energy on this one area you would probably profit greatly. Interruptions cost you lots of time. Some experts estimate that the average interruption cost you as much as 22 minutes to recover from.
What is an “interruption?”
An interruption, just to be clear, is a distraction of any kind from your current efforts. If you are making cold calls and some comes into your office to ask you about an order – that’s an interruption. If you are working on your forecast and the phone rings and you pick it up – that’s an interruption.
How do interruptions waste so much time?
Years ago I wrote and taught a time and territory management class for the American Management Association. In that course I had designed a drill to show how much time interruptions really waste.
In the drill there were two very simple tasks, read some text and alphabetize a list of words. In the first pass students would read on sentence and then switch to the list and find the first word in the alphabetization continuing back and forth until both tasks were done. In the second pass they would read all the text and then go to the list and alphabetize it.
The results were that most of the people doing the drill were about 30% faster at completing the tasks if they did them individually one at a time. The key to remember here is that this was a simple task and there was no significant set up or shut down to do the task.
In your sales efforts looking up an order can involve a number of steps. Then you must go through that order to find the information that needed to be checked. You may have to make some changes or corrections or write a note to the person asking about it. When you’re done you have to put everything back and return to the task at hand. The chances are you will have lost your focus on the previous task to some extent and you will have some ramp up time to get back on track.
Between these things you can waste a lot of time. If you are making sales calls you also are likely to lose your rhythm. If you were on a roll with the calls you may find that edge is now gone and you have to spend some amount of time getting it back.
Summary
So if you simply guard your selling or calling time and prevent interruptions you will probably have a much higher rate of production. You’ll make more calls, you’ll be sharper for a higher percentage of them and thus you’ll get better results.
As a sales manager time management represents a huge opportunity. Looking for ways to decrease interruptions to your sales team’s calling is a very profitable activity.
So time management is actually interruption management.
This is actually what I explain to people as time management.
If you are doing email, send your calls to voice mail and have a sign of some sort that means “don’t bother me”. Only do email for a limited time and turn it off outside those defined times.
If you are doing calls, turn off the email and hang that “don’t bother me” sign.
Each task you do, define a time for doing it and do nothing else.
When I had an office with a door that actually closed (do those still exist) I had a few different signs that I would post in different colors.
Picture of a phone and one of people in red – do not enter.
Image representing email in orange – if urgent, knock and enter.
My open door had a green circle and I forget the other images that I used.
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Sort of unrelated, during the creation of a disaster recovery and business continuity team I was the lead for EMEA IT and I was not able to turn off email or my phone.
For the call centers that I built I was on call for medium or above issues 24×7 (we lost $1million an hour if the center went down) so I was not able to turn off email or my phone.
Bad example of time management, I am.
.-= McLaughlin´s last blog ..Using LinkedIn to Drive Traffic to Your Blog =-.
Interruption management a Innovative thinking. Anyways doing Time Management you always remove time waster and annoyance.
.-= Agent 001´s last blog ..Time Management is Important – Fools Just Say it but Smart People Do it Always =-.