Cardinal Initiatives Newsletter Apr 1, 2023 4 min read

Time is Free, but it’s Priceless.

Value your time. You don’t get more. Please don’t waste it. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.

This week I share tips and techniques for protecting time and improving sales productivity.

How much time did you spend selling this week?

“But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning – what the heck are you doing?” Naval Ravikant

How much time did you spend selling this week?

How much of your week was spent sitting on internal Zoom calls?

How many internal emails did you read?

What value was provided to your accounts as a result?

How about you – did you learn anything?

What actions were assigned to you as a result of these calls and emails?

How long did it take you to complete those actions?

What actions were taken with your responses?

What were the outcomes of these exercises?

Answering these questions may frustrate you.

It’s okay to be frustrated. I was.

For years I struggled with the crippling time suck.

How can I free my sales team to spend more time with their accounts, selling, and making money?

The larger the company, the bigger problem.

Fortunately, I found some strategies that worked.

Weekly 1to1s

If you don’t have a weekly 30-minute 1to1 meeting with your manager, send a calendar invite today.

Use 5-10 minutes of this meeting to speak about your business: how last week went and your plans for this week.

Use the rest of the time for professional growth and deeper relationship building.

How this saves you time

Most good managers are looking for ways to take administration off the plates of their sales team.

It is very credible for your manager to say: “I spoke with Megan this morning on this…” when stepping in to handle a potential time-suck for you.

Calendar Management

1) Plan your day the night before.

• Review your priorities for the week.

• Rank what you need to work on tomorrow.

• Make changes in your calendar as required for tomorrow and every day for one week out.

2) For every calendar entry for an interaction with an account, add two more entries:

2X the length of the scheduled interaction for preparation and .5X for post-call debrief.

• That makes three calendar entries for each interaction.

• The carpenter’s rule, “Measure twice, cut once,” applies to best practices in sales.

How this saves you time

You begin your day in execution mode, knowing precisely what you must do and your priorities. You have saved at least 30 minutes of selling time because your daily planning is already done.

You are proactively blocking your calendar for tasks you will be doing and should be doing anyway.

It prevents the hijacking of your time due to a perceived opening in your schedule.

Email Management

A phone call, text message, or chat are forms of immediate communication.

Email is not.

Yet, looking at our email constantly throughout the day is a common practice.

Don’t.

Make a daily entry in your calendar for reading and responding to emails.

After the reasonable window for customer interaction closes, the end of the day is an ideal time.

If you are concerned that you may miss an important email from your manager, some email systems allow you to place a filter or automatically classify certain emails as Important. You can change your settings to be notified with an alarm when you receive one.

How this saves you time

It saves precious selling time reading and responding to emails throughout the day.

You are free to work on what’s important instead of urgent.

Fire Drills

Almost 5 hours each week are lost to one task:

Responding to requests for updates on Opportunities in the Forecast.

These are commonly called “Fire Drills.”

Most of the requests are resolved by providing three pieces of information:

1) Next Step(s) – Who is doing What with Whom and When?

2) Results from the last Step(s) – Who did What with Whom, and was that good, bad, or neutral to us winning the business?

3) Trending – How are we doing relative to the last update (Better, Worse, the Same)?

How do we reduce the amount of time spent responding to Fire Drills?

I have a hack called the Fire Extinguisher that I’ve uploaded for you here.

Summary

The tl;dr for maximizing the time you have for selling:

• Weekly 1to1s

• Plan your day the night before

• Allocate time in your calendar for preparation and debrief

• Stop looking at email – allocate time at EOD

Know the answers to these questions to every opportunity in your forecast:

• Next Step(s) – Who is doing What with Whom and When?

• Results from the last Step(s) – Who did What with Whom, and was that good, bad, or neutral to us winning the business?

• Trending – How are we doing relative to the last update (Better, Worse, the Same)?

Time – we can all use more of it.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff

Read my weekly newsletter every Saturday. It’s free.