The Art Of Effectively Organizing Schedules for Professional Salespeople

What is time?

With the assumption that we will live to age 80, we all have 4000 weeks across the span of years, more or less. That is an interesting thought - can you tell me how many weeks you have left?

The most valuable resource that a salesperson has is time, and how you use that time will have a direct effect on how successful you are. Maybe companies should spend more effort trying to improve their employees' time management skills than their tangible targets and associated activities. I occasionally come across a sales manager who talks about territory management and suggests that you should not drive too far between meetings and so on but that is about it.

Time management and the desire to accomplish more has been identified as one of the key problems amongst salespeople.

A typical objective of people in sales is to get rich, and the majority are motivated to pursue commission sales. However I would expand on this financial definition of wealthy to include all aspects of your life. So being truly wealthy is having enough money and time to have a balanced life to include cash and investments, family and friends, personal well being, and quality time for yourself.

This diagram illustrates this well. The ultimate goal is to have a balanced life between work, family and friends and you time. What happens for a large number of professionals, is that work can take a disproportionate amount of time putting a squeeze on time available for your family and friends and you, Surprise surprise - you make the personal sacrifices of your time on behalf of your family and friends, leaving no time to do the stuff that you like doing: Going to the gym, reading a book, going for a walk, riding your horse, going on a development course.

Despite earning a large amount of money, I meet a lot of salespeople who do not feel fulfilled.

At the ultimate extreme there are high flying executives in the City for example, who have such a demanding job that they have no time for themselves or family and friends. When your life is just focused on making money, it can be very shallow.

A good example for you to consider is Richard Gere's character in the motion picture Pretty Woman. Burnout is an occupational hazard for City traders. It can really make you feel lousy and consume your life. Don't allow this to be something which happens to you! And now let me help you begin to manage your time through good organization.

There are four ways to look at the way we utilize our time.

1 - Not Important and Not Urgent
2 - Not Important but Urgent
3 - Important and Urgent
4 - Important but Not Urgent

Firstly Not Important and Not Urgent as Distraction We all get distracted at work by a multitude of activities which do not contribute to the role we are supposed to be performing. Common distractions include non-business related email that keep pinging into our inbox and the temptation is to stop what we are concentrating on and just have a quick look! Some other things which can be done are to check the progress of ebay auctions or various social networking sites.

Secondly Not Important but Urgent as Delusion Have you ever experienced the feeling as if you've been working hard but not accomplishing much? This is caused by being purely reactive to others and could be further defined as busyness. Here are a few examples of what I mean: people showing up without notice, co-workers showing favoritism, time-wasting meetings, others just dropping their cares on you without thinking, etc., etc., etc. Unfortunately, this will occasionally happen to everyone at some point.

Thirdly Important and Urgent as Demand on your time. Here you are just working away. You meet with your customers. You present your findings. You make your necessary calls. And so it goes. Should be taking up the majority of business hours during the day. The best would be to have a plan laid out which tells you your daily dose of activity needed to meet your objectives. However, do you know anybody who has one and manages to stick to it?

And lastly, Important but Not Urgent. The ZONE is the space that is most often neglected or ignored when other needs arise. This is a vital area and it's the activities that we all know we should be doing but for some reason or another never have enough time to get done. When you start operating your own company, remember to focus on tasks that fall into the category of working on your enterprise instead of in it.

Activities like planning your account, creating personal activity plans and undertaking training courses for personal development and meeting with potential strategic partners. Working on a one-on-one basis with sales people and managers, I try to concentrate on these first.

To illustrate, if you saw some money on the pavement, how much would it have to be for you to stop and pick it up? What is your time worth?

So how do we ensure we are managing our time effectively?

Let me tell you about something I heard about a French philosopher. A large crowd gathered around the man who stood up front to talk about the priorities in people's lives.

In front of him on a table was a large glass jar. He took a bucket of rocks and poured them into the jar very carefully. When the rocks had reached the top he asked the gathered crowd if the jar was full and to a man they all answered yes. He shook his head and then took a bucket of small pebbles and carefully poured then into the jar on top of the rocks shaking them down into the gaps between the rocks until the pebbles reached the top of the jar.

He asked the crowd for a second time if they thought the jar was full. Some muttered yes without being 100% sure. He was able to fill the voids between the rocks and pebbles in his container by combining it with sand, after shaking his head in disbelief.

Again he asked the crowd if the jar was full and again there was a little uncertainty. He shook his head for the final time and produced a large pitcher of water which again he carefully poured into the glass jar until the water reached the top. He then turned to the crowd and said now it is full.

The moral to this story is that the jar had to be filled in the above order otherwise everything would not have fitted. You need to identify your rocks in order to link it back to time management. (important and not urgent) and put them into your schedule first otherwise the pebbles, sand and water will take up all the available space and leave no room for your rocks.

For this exercise, you must commit to writing down your rocks and actually making time to do them. You must not be distracted by less important tasks.

At the end you can build up what is referred to as a default diary, which we will talk about another time.