Working harder and smarter is perhaps the most prominent theme of the nascent economic recovery we are experiencing now. All evidence points to the fact that this is mostly a jobless recovery, meaning that companies are discovering how to do more with less, and do it faster. While this strategy seems to be working, it also puts incredible pressure on everyone in the organization, making it more necessary than ever to squeeze all the productivity you can out of each minute of the day. This has a lot of managers rethinking their time management strategies.
Sales managers are in this same boat. Effective sales managers definitely don’t have to be reminded that “time is money;” they understand that sales organizations exist for the specific and sole purpose of driving revenue, so they place a high priority on eliminating demands on themselves and their team members that don’t directly help drive revenue.
As we begin to unpack the time management issues faced by sales managers and their teams, let’s start by touching briefly on the key principle that underlies any effective time management strategy: setting goals. You will never be effective at learning how to manage your time if you don’t have a clear understanding of why you are managing your time. The “why” determines your master goal (some people might call it your “mission”), which helps you define the high-value goals and supporting activities you pursue every day.
The master goal, or mission, of the sales organization is clear and unambiguous: drive revenue.
For the sales manager, every activity you are involved in must track directly back to helping your team to become more and more effective at driving revenue. Anything on your plate that isn’t connected to accomplishing that goal is a distraction and a drain on your energy, and should be declined or handed off to someone else. During this series, we have made it abundantly clear that sales managers should be devoting themselves to activities like creating an effective sales cadence, identifying key performance indicators, and working with their team members to help them develop account plans and manage forward pipeline. Underlying all these activities is the urgent need to use each of these as an opportunity to work with team members to identify skill gaps and coach for behavior change so they can drive more revenue.
To all of the above, I would also add one final goal: protect your sales team from unproductive, irrelevant demands on their time that would prevent them from focusing all of their energy and time on working with customers and driving revenue.
For sales reps, the goal is the same: drive more revenue, but their activities are different. First of all, sales reps must devote themselves to locking onto and relentlessly, intelligently pursuing High Probability Targets (HPTs). We have all heard the 80/20 principle that says 80% of your revenue is driven by 20% of your customers, with the understanding that this critical 20% are uniquely positioned to spend more, and spend more often, than everyone in the other 80% combined. These customers are your HPTs. Of course, that doesn’t mean the other customers should be completely ignored, because they are also a source of revenue and some day they might even develop into HPTs. Still, sales reps must commit most of their time and energy to working with HPTs who will help them drive that 80% number and keep it growing.
But here is where sales reps get hung up by not thinking strategically. First of all, too many sales reps tend to distribute their attention more or less randomly within their territory or account set, even though many of the customers don’t have the potential to drive large amounts of revenue. Even more problematic, as we discussed previously, some sales reps will spend most of their time with customers who like them, or who are easy to connect with, even if the income potential is mediocre or sporadic. It is the responsibility of sales managers to hold sales reps accountable to focus on identifying and pursuing HPTs, and to provide them with the tools and coaching to be successful at developing relationships with these customers that will drive revenue to its full potential.
There are a lot of other things we could say about time management strategies and tools, but without a doubt the most effective and powerful time management tool available to sales managers and sales team members is the CRM. Everything from contact management to tracking customer activities to account analysis to prioritizing opportunities to cadence management to forward pipeline management to forecasting can and should all be handled through the CRM. Our experience over the past several years has proven beyond all doubt that sales managers who fully leverage the resources of the CRM become far more effective at managing and coaching their teams, and sales reps who fully leverage the CRM become instantly and exponentially more effective at driving revenue.
Therefore, in terms of helping their teams become more efficient and productive at driving revenue, there is no higher priority activity on the sales manager’s to do list than driving CRM adoption within the team. As we have mentioned previously, many sales reps are initially very resistant to changing their normal process in order to implement the CRM, beginning with an unwillingness to take time away from customer facing activities in order to learn how to effectively understand and deploy the full array of CRM features and strategies. For this reason, the sales managers that grow from good to great do so based on their ability to successfully shepherd their sales teams through the process of fully adopting the CRM. You must do whatever it takes to get your team there, and the sooner the better.
Now that it is clear that the mission of the sales organization is to drive revenue, the goal of the sales manager is to effectively coach and train their team members to drive revenue, and the sales rep’s goal is to focus on HPTs in order to devote as much time as possible to activities that will drive as much revenue as possible, here is a very simple tool everyone can use to align their daily activities with their goals and hit the targets they are aiming for. It is called the four Ds.
As your day or week unfolds, every activity opportunity that comes across your desk needs to be evaluated against your most important goal.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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