How your sales team should manage their time

Are your sales team complaining that they can't find the time to prospect or close deals?

Time can be both your enemy and your friend in sales. There are only a certain number of hours in the day that your sales team can prospect, make sales calls, set appointments, visit customers, make presentations, attend meetings, negotiate, close deals, write reports, forecast etc. It is vitally important therefore that your sales team use their time wisely and focus on what’s really important.

If you’re finding they're struggling to find time to prospect or close deals, you could seek out an outsourced sales consultancy to help you, but if you’re looking to do everything yourself, the principles below might just be the helpful advice that you need during these difficult times.

If your sales team starts to adopt these principles - and execute them properly - you should start to see some positive results in a few short weeks.

How much time do they have?

Let’s look at a simple example. There are 365 days in a calendar year. When you deduct the number of unproductive days from this, you can establish how many days they have available to actually sell.

Weekends (52 weeks x 2 days) = 104 days.

Annual leave (typically 4 weeks x 5 days) = 20 days.

Bank holidays (typically) = 8 days.

Sick leave (approx.) = 5 days.

So, assuming they don’t work during the weekend or during their holidays, they each have around 137 unproductive days a year.

This leaves only 228 days to meet their sales target!

Put it another way, if their sales target is £1.0m, then they need to sell on average £4,386 of products/services per day or £83,333 per month to meet their target!

This exercise really puts things in perspective and focuses your mind on what must be achieved doesn’t it?

So, how should they spend their time?

To achieve their sales target they need to know where it’s best to spend their valuable time to make the most impact. To do this it is always advisable for them to have a plan. This can then be further broken down into sales call goals and objectives. They can then set their priorities and organise customer visits, meetings, and sales calls to maximise their efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately saving time and money.

As part of their plan they should focus on three separate key areas:

1. As 80 per cent of their sales generally comes from 20 per cent of their customers, they should analyse historical sales data from their existing customers to establish who their key customers are, what they buy, how often they buy and how much revenue and profit they generate for them. They can then investigate opportunities to develop more business from them and perhaps expand upon your product/service offering.
2. Review their outstanding leads, opportunities, and enquiries. Create a sales forecast focusing on those that can be converted in the short term and have received budget sign-off. Speak to the appropriate decision-makers and convert the sale.
3. Carry out on-going business development to build and maintain their sales pipeline. This can involve cold-calling old customers and prospects that they haven’t spoken to for a while, maintaining an existing relationship and establishing if there is a further need for your product or service. They could also create an avatar of their target customer, put a prospect list together and start chasing those leads!