The Sales Experiment

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I Must Be Ruthless about My Time

One of productivity’s biggest killers is our tendency to allow other people’s priorities to determine our schedules.

We become ineffective if we do not filter every opportunity or task through the lens of our personal and work priorities.

We must be ruthless about our time. It is the most precious non-human resource we have at our disposal. The way we use our time predicts our relationships, our work outcomes, and our health.

When we allow others’ opinions about what we should be doing at a particular moment, we give up our overall effectiveness.

Will we please a particular person at a particular moment? Maybe.

Will we be rewarding their bad behavior so they will continue to butt in on our days with a sense of entitlement to our immediate jumping when they request we jump? Most definitely.

It’s a Balancing Act

If you’re reading this, then you are probably in sales or marketing and you are responsible to clients, managers, and other stakeholders.

Consequently, you must balance others’ very real needs of your time and effort with your commitment to producing long-lasting results.

The question is how to do this. How do you make sure to enter info into your customer relationship management software while still taking time to prospect into new opportunities while quarterbacking a servicing need for an existing client? Two of which always seem urgent (guess which one always gets put on the back burner).

Keeping all of these priorities (because they are all things that need to get done) is a skill that can be developed through developing some key habits.

Practices to Help You Develop Time Management Ruthlessness

We are all different, so I will not be prescriptive here. As a matter of fact, I continually play with different practices and habits to help me win in this area. I struggle with people pleasing in the worst way and find I must be vigilant about my tendencies to “Yes” myself to death.

What follows are mindset shifts and tactical practices to help.

Mindset Shifts

  1. Be Intentional: Most of us live in our inboxes. And we feel busy. Inbox triage all day long is the opposite of intentionality.  Develop an intentional mindset. When you do something, ask yourself if it serves your key responsibility areas, your primary goals, and your ultimate personal priorities.
  2. Be Willing to Say No:  You must be willing to say “No” or “Net yet” or “I’m not the best one to do that for you.”  We can’t usually disregard a request completely, but we can put it in its proper place on our calendar or delegate it to the best priority.
  3. Be Selfish: Learn to take the first few hours of the day to plow through your main priorities and tasks. Don’t feel bad about waiting until 10am or 11am before bouncing around like a pinball according to others’ priorities. Treat your first couple hours as if you had a client meeting. And your client is yourself.

Tactical Practices

  1. Time-blocking: Duh. But do you do it? This fits hand in glove with being intentional. Determine the best days and times of the week for certain important but not urgent tasks. Block time for making prospecting calls. Block time for creative work. Block time for strategic planning. Treat these times as appointments and meetings. There’s nothing that someone needs from you at 9am, that they can’t wait for until 10am or 11am.
  2. Process Creation: Identify where your work can be broken down into processes. Codify those processes. Inform others. Creating processes does two things: (1) It helps you create a habit around a task so you don’t need to think about it every time, and (2) it gives you an easier way to say “No” or delegate or put a false-urgent into the calendar because you have a “proven process” to handle such requests.
  3. Email Avoidance: Many people balk at this one. Just try it. Turn off your automatic send/receive for at least 30 minutes two times a day (and expand as you can). You can still send emails or review any relevant emails for a project you are working on.  Most email clients allow you to send manually without receiving messages.

How Do You Protect Your Time?

Let me know in the comments. The six items above are quite general and basic, so I’d love to hear how you specifically ward off time thieves.

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How to Gain Clarity Every Single Day

Most of us are overly busy, so there’s very little chance that if you’re actually reading this post that you have an empty schedule.

It might be that you’re reading this post because you’re distracting yourself from what you really need to be doing right now.

And you’re distracting yourself because you don’t want to do what you really need to be doing for whatever reason:

  • You don’t think you’re good at it.
  • You just plain don’t like to do it.
  • You are afraid of doing it.
  • You love being lazy and procrastinating.
  • You’re not clear on what you actually should be doing at this very moment.

I battle with this last bullet point often: I’m not clear what I should be doing at any given moment.

We have so many irons in the fire that we procrastinate from making the choice about the next most important task or project we must engage.

This lack of clarity is why we spend so much time in our email inboxes. Since we struggle making choices on our next most important task, we choose to allow others, in the form of their emails to us, determine what we do next.

In essence, we allow other people to determine our priorities and to clarify what to do next. It’s easier than sitting down with our stuff and sifting through the demands on our minds and time and making decisions.

So, then, the problem: lack of clarity. 

The solution (I promised this in the headline, didn’t I?). 

As mentioned above, I struggle with this, too. But here are some thoughts on what practices are starting to help with gaining a bit of clarity each and every day.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing Who Should Do Each Task

Regardless if you decide to do the task or if you react to someone’s email, ask yourself this simple question with every single task:

Am I the best person to do this task?

If you start answering ‘No’ to that questions, you’ll find patterns. Decide who should be doing that thing and start forwarding those tasks on.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing Why You Do Each Task

Is this a thing that even needs to be done? Be diligent about weeding out old habits. Do you really have to read every email newsletter? Does every email require a response? Why are you doing it?

If you can’t think of good reasons, then you have a bit more clarity.

Gain Clarity by Reviewing How You Feel About Everything You Do

This one is more ontological (a fancy word that has to do with your ‘being’ or who you really are and how you’re made up).

Do  you like doing this next task? Is it engaging your mind and heart? Is it in your skill set?

You might still have to do the thing, but as you ask yourself the question about how you feel about the task, you’ll start gaining clarity on the work you (a) love to do and (b) are truly good at doing.

Clarity Doesn’t Come in a Flash

You and I must be intentional about gaining clarity every day. We have to ask these types of questions regularly in order to make sure that we don’t just shotgun our work lives in a billion different directions.

Gaining clarity over time will help us better leverage the small amount of time we have for work for optimum effectiveness.

As you discover what you love to do and what you’re good at and which things should actually be taking up your time, you discover where you can make your greatest contribution.

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This post was inspired by Day 5 of 10 Days to a Better Blog, a short online workshop from John Saddington. The exercise was about detecting blogging patterns (which categories, tags, topics that you gravitate toward) and using those patterns as clues where you might want to dive deeper. 

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Finding a Place to Write

As much as I love to write and try to connect it to sales and marketing, I’m not a fool.

The top 5 salespeople in my firm wouldn’t be caught dead trying to figure out how to create a post in WordPress or any other blog software.

It’s not mandatory to be a good writer in order to be an effective salesperson.

That said, writing can be a powerful way to clarify thinking and develop a content library to benefit clients and potential clients.

Writing has been the stuff of marketers, but these days, it can be the stuff of salespersons who want to develop not only their bottom lines but their thought leadership.

A long lead in to this: How do you find time and space to write?

We live in a modest house with a 6 year old who loves to wake at 5:45. Consequently, my space is my dining room table, and my time is between 5:00 and 5:45am. That’s not ideal.

But I’ve decided it’s important and if it’s important, I can’t worry about finding the perfect zen location and time for putting my thoughts down on paper (or word processor).

The key is this: Keeping a commitment to the act of writing and building it into the schedule. When the schedule gets disrupted because a little guy bounces downstairs too early, be gracious, attend to the relational priorities, and try again the next day.

While it might be helpful to have certain music playing and to have a particular private room with the minimalist laptop desktop, many of us have a shared computer and no extra room to craft into an office.

In that case and if writing is important, the key thing is to pencil it in the schedule and put the laptop in the right place so when the time comes to write, all you have to do is sit down and start tap, tip, tapping away.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be a priority.

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