Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Can You Train Your Inside Sales Reps on Effective Time Management?

Some will argue that certain people have the intrinsic ability to manage their time well. Though some might be "better" at balancing their day, I think time management techniques are trainable, and we teach best practices here at AG as a result. Effective time management techniques can be taught immediately after a new hire begins, and also after a inside sales rep has been at the company for months - years even.  We like to hold periodic training workshops and effective time management is a perfect example of a one hour training workshops that we would hold for all inside sales reps, new and old.

So what are the top three techniques we find most effective?

1.       Planning your day and prioritizing. Determine the amount of teleprospecting activities you need to achieve in one day and divide that number by the hours in the day. For instance, if you are responsible for 60 calls in one day, you are going to need 7.5 calls/emails/conversations/etc per hour in order to reach your goal. If you hold yourself to the 7.5 number, you will reach your goal without a problem.

2.       Motivating yourself with rewards. This technique is directly related to number one - in order to hit your daily teleprospecting goal, you have to reward yourself for your hard work through out the day. You will wear yourself out if you slam the phone all day without allowing a few minutes of downtime. I like to tell myself "if you make it to call number 30 in the next 5 minutes, you can get up to grab a coffee." Some of the reps at AG work together to motivate themselves. For example, I just watched two gentlemen walk outside with a football. This is a typical routine for them - they just hit the phones hard for an hour, and now are taking a 5 minute break to toss the football around outside and enjoy some fresh air. Some may say this takes away from their productivity but we believe this makes them even more productive.

3.       Taking advantage of CRM. Inside sales reps can easily have access to the number of activities and conversations they are having throughout the day through our CRM's reporting function. If they know they need 10 conversations, and the report says they only have 3 conversations at lunch time, they know they need to turn it up a notch after lunch to hit their goals. We create dashboards on their homepage to make this easier for them - all they have to do is hit the "refresh" button and they can instantly view where they are for the day - this eliminates the number of times they must click through the CRM to find these reports, which means more time for them to make phone calls!

What techniques do you and your inside sales teams use for effective time management?