Episode 151: 3 Time Management for Sales Teams: How Calendars, Power Hours & CRMs Drive Predictable Sales Growth

By the end of this episode, you will have learned three time management hacks that will help your team be more consistent in sales to increase your close rates. Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade Sales and business leaders. Finally, end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. By the end of this episode, we will have gone through the importance of predictable sales team calendars, how to leverage power hours into your weekly repertoires, and why CRMs have become important not just for recording customer data, but but keeping your sales team on track. Time management is a topic that is spoken about relentlessly and across the hundreds of leaders I've worked with and thousands of salespeople I've worked with over the last 25 years. It's rare that I meet either a leader or a sales professional that says they are impeccable with their time management. At the same time, I unfortunately find that time management becomes a beast for teams to want to improve and when they do training on it, they find that they really struggle to implement effectively the outcomes that come from it. Now, unfortunately, time management is really important. If we get it wrong and our teams are not focused on what is important, we will often end up with sales experiences that just don't land for our customers. Follow ups being slow key pieces of information being forgotten customers not being engaged in the times that suit for them rather than those that suit for us as a business. Really methodical follow up that just doesn't generate excitement and emotional connection from customers. So getting time management right is really important. But I certainly recognize that it can be difficult to change habits that are ingrained into people for so long. Now, James Clear is a great authority on this around atomic habits. He talks a lot around making habit change obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. And I'm going to very loosely follow some of those approaches from James Clear today. I'm certainly a huge advocate of his 1% better framework, but when we think about the lessons from Ford Motor Company that we profiled on Wednesday in episode 150, one of the pieces that came out of it was how do we streamline our sales process to make sure that we're delivering that excellent customer experience? Okay, so there's three areas that I'd love you to think about out of today. Number one is calendars. Using calendars for your sales teams As a non negotiable way to be constructing their days, focusing on when and how we meet. We have a very effective four ways of meeting framework you can download at strongersalesteams.com resources it is the best meeting frameworks that I have ever worked with across my 25 year career. But above that, what we need to be doing is making sure that our teams are using their calendars to diarize the important repeat events of their days and their weeks. Right. What happens unfortunately is that when we don't do that, what's urgent and noisy rather than necessarily what's important tends to get prioritized. And for salespeople, of course we need to be responding to customers with those urgent requests. But if we are not focusing on our pipeline and moving it forward, continuously stepping deals forward, then we end up with a very weak future pipeline. Right. And I say to salespeople that future Ben would be very annoyed with current Ben if we're not able to do that. So they're the types of important tasks I.e. customer follow up that often get missed when urgency prevails. So setting into your calendars specific events across the week is the most important aspect of time management that I see move the dial with teams. The second most important is setting up power hours within calendars. So these are dedicated times for either prospecting and or deal follow ups. Where I see teams use this really effectively is generally three lots of three. So three days a week, a three hour power block in each day where they focus solely on lead generation or working the active pipeline. I'll often see teams do one day which is focused on prospecting and another two days focus on their existing pipelines. Or sometimes I'll see teams do prospecting for the first hour and then focus on their existing pipelines for hours two and three. But what is really impactful and for me unequivocal in high performing teams is that they are diarizing power hours into their calendar each week. The third part of being more consistent in sales and thinking about that Ford Motor Company lessons around optimizing your processes is making the CRM non negotiable. I hear a lot of sales leaders say yes, we got a CRM, yes we use it. But I very rarely hear them say it's non negotiable. And the most impactful non negotiable part of a CRM that I can recommend you think about is using tasks to manage workflows. And that simply comes down to if you have an open deal, it must have a task associated with it so that anytime a sales leader jumps into a deal, we can see what the next steps are scheduled for the team member. So here, in essence, what we're actually doing is combining all three time management hacks into one smooth flow. We're using our calendars to include what's important. But of great importance, there is power hours are being scheduled in, and the CRM is dictating where our focus in those power hours come from. So our calendars, our vehicle, the power hour, is the focus time, and the CRM are all the details that we need to be rolling into that focus time. Super impactful, quite easy to roll out. Now, of course, there's some behavioral change needed there, so making it attractive, that is finding ways to really encourage the team to do it can be something that I'd suggest you think about. But I think the most important part here is that when we have our time managed for calendars into power hours and using the CRMs to task guiding what we focus on, it can be really satisfying. Because teams do close more deals, they are more consistent in their sales processes, and in general, they come to work with less uncertainty, but more structure and clarity in how they need to approach their days. So they're the three key takeaways from today for effective time management, focusing on sales team calendars, power hours, and the use of the CRM. If you're taking a call to action out of today, the key focus I'd be recommending is to be setting up first of all your power hours in your calendar. 3 lots of 3. Start 2 weeks in advance to allow teams to have their calendars clear out so there's no immediate pressure. You might even start with two lots of three hours for the first couple of weeks and then build into three. But certainly schedule it two weeks down the track. Build your power hours in. All right. And start the teams using tasks in your CRM. This may mean clearing out all your old tasks, but if your calls to action can be power hours into your calendar and tasks being used by the team, that's perfect. Now we're really grateful for everyone listening. Thank you. It's 25 years of sales experience that we love sharing. We're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday ready for you when you start your working day. A focus between each of our episodes for you and your teams is around how you can be 1% better each and every day because without question, it does make an impact. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three parts, podcast listeners that we speak to this week will offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which, by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our Show Notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.