Time Management for Sales – The 3 Key Areas

by Ben Lai | Aug 12, 2019

Transcript: Hi, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today, I’m going to cover the three key areas of effective time management for sales. Sales managers and sales people are well known for having difficulty prioritizing the most important activities. In fact, you could say that any worker has this challenge. How do we decide what is most important and how do we achieve those things in the most effective manner?

#1 Key Area of Time Management for Sales: Setting Goals

The three things that I’m going to share with you will help you in all of your time management, but it starts with number one — goals. You have to understand the big picture before you start setting your priorities. Setting goals is critical because it sets the direction in which all of your activities will flow. If your major goals is to increase sales revenue, then anything that doesn’t contribute towards achieving that sales revenue is no longer a priority. So setting the goals is the most important thing to start off with.

#2 Key Area of Time Management for Sales: Setting Priorities

Secondly, we need to understand what our priorities are. As I mentioned, priorities are those things that contribute to the goals. But being able to understand which are the most important priorities is critical for successful time management. For sales managers, your top KPIs, the key performance indicators, and your priorities are managing your team and coaching your sales people. For sales professionals, your key priorities are prospecting, attending meetings, sending proposals, anything that will progress sales. Anything that falls outside of this has a lower priority or no priority at all.

Now before I go into the third aspect of time management, quick offer to those of you who are sales directors or managers. If you would like to sit down with me for one hour for a complementary consultation, feel free to fill in your details below. We will talk about your top major challenge and I’ll do whatever I can in that hour to help you to resolve that. No obligation subsequent to that.

#3 Key Area of Time Management for Sales: Focus

Now, the third aspect of effective time management is focus. Once you have the goals, you have the big picture, you understand what priorities you need to do, focusing on those things becomes the next challenge. We’re living in a time where there are distractions everywhere. Social media, internet websites that are not related to work, email notifications, phone notifications, people coming to your desk, there are distractions everywhere. Your ability to protect yourself from these distractions and focus in on what you need to do is the greatest challenge for time management in today’s day and age.

So to recap, set the goals, set the priorities, and then focus on those priorities, and then your time management will be more effective than ever before. What are the things that you do to help to increase your time management? What are the tools that you use? Feel free to leave a comment below, click like and subscribe, and remember that integrity plus skills equals success.

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