My role at work changed this year. I am focused on sales once again, reporting to our Dallas GM. The role is an interesting one and is one that I actually pitched to him and his boss late last year. I am back to driving sales of my own, which I never really stopped doing, but I am back to having “a number”. That works for me. I need hard and fast goals like that.

The other part of my job is to help our Dallas salespeople increase their close rates, deal sizes, and to improve the strategic nature of their deals. I completely dig sales strategy, and I think I am pretty good at it, so this part of my job is something I am quite interested in.

So for the six people that actually read my banter here, you will notice a new category called Sales. I will probably be mostly focused on this category moving forward, but I am a geek at the core, so every once in a while I’ll pop in with some technopimp stuff.

Just this week, the boss-man asked me to focus on a couple of things. One is helping to formalize a new offering, and the other is to talk about effective sales time management with the sales team. That takes me to my first blog post…

Sales Time Management

The basics

Start early

• Look at the next month, quarter, and year well before it begins.
• Get that lazy behind out of bed and hit the bricks.
• Leave for appointments AT LEAST 10 minutes before you think you need to.

Plan ahead

• Hand in hand with the bullet above about looking at the next month, quarter, year well before it begins, don’t just look at it, plan it out early. What do you need to do next month to increase sales by 10%?
• Plan around the holidays to make sure you are on track during the times that your contacts/prospects are unavailable. Sales managers don’t want to hear that your prospect was out of the office, so your contract didn’t get signed. Plan it out and get it signed before they leave. It is really that easy!
• Spend a bit of time each night preparing for the next day’s activity. You would not believe how much a focused 20 minutes of preparation time can impact your effectiveness the following day. You will also find that your meetings with customers and prospects are quite a bit more productive, which will shorten sales cycles.

Have respect

• The holy grail of sales…. Respect your time and respect the time of your customer of prospect. Most often we as salespeople do not respect our own time as much as we need to, but when you call meetings with customers without specific objectives and outcomes, you are not being respectful of their time and they will not take too many more of those meetings.
• I alluded to this above…. You have to be on time to every meeting. If you leave early and get there early, make a call to fill the time. If you have no calls to make, you have other problems.

Where When am I?

At the beginning of each sales period, which is what I call the lowest denominator of time that you are measured within as a salesperson, make sure you know how many days you have to work with in that period. How many business days are there in the month, quarter, and year? Know where you are tracking from a goal standpoint. Are you at 10%, 50%, 100%, etc.

I have always been a proponent of breaking down the quota and goals by sales period. Often you get an annual goal. I would always break it down by month and quarter and had a spreadsheet that I used to track my performance throughout those periods. I added my own goals to that sheet. These goals were smaller goals that involved the tasks that I knew I had to complete to be successful.

For example: in December of 2006 your Sales Manager gives you a $6M quota for 2007 and the sales period for your company is monthly. I would take that $6M and do the math and would give myself a $500K “quota” to hit each month. I would then look at my pipeline and determine the number of prospecting calls I had to make that month, meetings I needed to have, proposals I needed to write, contracts I needed to have signed to get me there. I would track myself using this sheet. It was always in front of me. When I closed a deal, I logged it in this sheet and it would deduct from my quota and tell me what I have left.

This methodology allowed me to set higher goals for myself as well. If I knew my accelerators kicked in at $6.5M for example, I would bump up my monthly goals to hit that. If I needed to sell more of a particular type of service to get an additional bonus that quarter, I would modify my monthly goals to support that. In other words, always be analyzing where you are and modify your activity based on that. Spend time as effectively as you can.

Be Organized

There are critical hours of the day for the salesperson. Those hours are from 9AM to 4PM, Monday through Friday. These are the hours you are to spend on your customers and prospects. Your entire professional life revolves around these hours of the day and the most successful salespeople are the ones that most effectively use this time. It’s really important that you defer as much as you can to the hours before and after 9AM and 4PM.

Within these hours, you have to make time for prospecting. The amount of time you spend prospecting week to week should change based on how your pipeline looks, but at a minimum you should spend 40 minutes per day prospecting. The time you spend prospecting should change each day as well. You have to mix it up if you hope to get anything but voicemail. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen the letters LVM (Left VoiceMail) on the salespeople that I have managed prospect lists. LVM gets us nowhere. LVM for a true prospect (someone you have never talked to before) can do more harm than good. I’ll probably write a post later on prospecting, although I would admit that this is my weak area as well.

Schedule everything. Live by your Calendar. Fill every hour with something that helps you reach your sales goal. White space on a calendar is the first thing that I would check for before my one-on-ones with my salespeople. If there is white space on the calendar, especially during the critical hours discussed alone, fill it and fill it with something of quality.

Try to complete your follow-up items from meetings as soon as possible. This makes you look incredibly responsive to the prospect or customer. It also minimizes the chances that you will forget the follow-up. Of course, write everything down for follow-up and mark it in a way that it will not slip through the cracks. To-Do items on the PDA are perfect for this.

Use the hours before and after 9-4 wisely. Some of the most valuable things to do during these hours are:

• Complete your to-do/follow-ups
• Do research on your prospect companies and their important contacts
• For us tech sales folks, do some product / offering training
• Do some more prospecting!

A little something extra

Here’s the bad news…. selling is not an 8 to 5 career. Even with the most effective time management skills, you will need to put in some extra time. How much is up to you and your situation. You have to have a healthy work/life balance. I had a sales manager tell me once that if I were to spend an extra 25 minutes every day doing productive sales activity, I would buy myself an extra day per month. That could mean the difference of an extra deal a month!

Try to make windshield time as effective as possible. If it takes you 20 minutes to drive from that morning sales call to your lunch appointment, make calls. I wouldn’t make cold calls to brand new prospects during this time because you have to be in a nice quiet place to effectively do that, but call customers or make follow-up calls to prospects during this time. Spin plates. Always keep the plates spinning. The more you have spinning at a time, the better.