Time Management Skills in Sales Part 1

 

Guest articles > Time Management Skills in Sales Part 1

 

by: Daniel Milstein

 

I don't know how I can get it all done,' and, 'There just aren't enough hours in the day!' must be two of the most often repeated phrases by new and veteran salespeople. While working an 18-hour day is one way to ensure you can tackle a never-ending 'to do' list, most people are either unwilling or unable to follow that schedule, so they look for a proven system to help make each day more productive.

There are numerous business management gurus who promote seemingly fail-safe guidelines for work success, but these techniques do not always apply to everyone. For example, many experts insist that time blocking is the answer to enhancing your organizational effectiveness. Time blockers designate a specific period of time each day to accomplish certain tasks. They reason that you will achieve maximum efficiency by scheduling an hour in the morning for phone calls, followed by 1.5 hours for staff meetings, and two hours for customer contact, and one hour for returning e-mails, and so on. The problem is that this is often too regimented and inflexible for most high volume producers. If you are in the phone call hour and a valuable customer visits unexpectedly, do you stay with phone calls or meet with the customer? During your staff meetings do you ignore calls and let them accumulate until you have a long list of callbacks? Time blocking is effective for people with a fairly set work schedule that lacks many unexpected challenges, but is not necessarily ideal for those who are faced with a daily barrage of interruptions. I tried time blocking in my early days as a loan originator, and found that I often became more concerned about keeping a predetermined schedule than I was about accomplishing my daily tasks.

As a salesperson, you must develop your own time management skills. While it is important to keep up with the daily duties of the profession, it is also necessary to be flexible and adjust when new situations arise.

 


Daniel Milstein is the bestselling author of ABC of Sales. For more information, visit: http://amzn.to/ABCARTICLES.


Contributor: Daniel Milstein

Published here on: 04-Jan-2015

Classification: Sales

Website: http://amzn.to/ABCARTICLES