Joe Flynn, CRO at Certify, advises remote sales teams to block calendar time for focused work, personal breaks, and a hard end-of-day cutoff. Managers should share tactics and let reps adapt schedules to home life rather than enforce rigid structures.
All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another study break with Sales Assembly. Want to give a shout out to Vidyard, our sponsor today? I am here with Joe Flynn. Joe, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
So my name is Joe Flynn and I am the Chief Revenue Officer for Certify. We are a digital workflow company. So we primarily market to the hospitality industry, who has been hit pretty hard during COVID and then about 25% of our business is just to the SaaS industry. We provide signature capture tools, electronic payment tools, payment capture online. We work with some of the larger vendors in the industry. We integrate seamlessly into these kind of flagship products. So we have done pretty well over the last 90 days because can you imagine, people need to work remotely and people need to capture payments remotely. And so we're weathering the storm, but happy to be here.
Wonderful. I'm happy to have you. And there's a lot of areas where I think you can help. Most notably right now. You've been working remotely for a long time, and a lot of people right now, especially frontline sales reps, are finding themselves working either from home or remotely for the first time ever in their careers. And what are some quick tips that you have for people who are working from home for the very first time and want to find ways to be productive and efficient?
Yeah, well, first of all, it's not easy, I can tell you that. Right. So I've been working remotely for 30 years right now. And some quick tips I would give people is you really need to manage your day, right? Manage your calendar. And you need to put. Put in little blocks of time, like me time. So things that I did, I would work out at lunchtime and I would actually physically go to the gym. And it was like a commute, but it was to the gym, right. And I would keep that schedule. You need to take breaks and kind of, you know, set a time at the end of the day where you're going to end your work day, because you could be sitting in your home and look up and it's 8 o' clock at night. And I'm a big believer of work life balance, and you've got to somehow manage that. So I would say really manage your calendar and put blocks of time on your calendar. That keeps you on point. Those are things that I do and you've got to stick by it. It's really easy to say, I'll just keep doing this. And what happens is you find that the day's gotten away from you and you haven't got out of your chair because when you're in the office environment, you know, people can stop by. There are sidebar conversations. People may go to lunch. When you work at home alone, that doesn't happen. So, you know, really take it upon yourself to map out your week and really physically put those blocks of time for yourself in your calendar and then execute on those blocks of time. Do what you proposed that you were going to do. And you'll find that you'll get in a rhythm and that will really have more of a satisfaction from working home. Keeping the morale up is that you got to do things that were, you know, me time. And you executed upon that.
Yeah. The calendar management piece, I think is a really, really notable thing to do. Do you find? So if I'm a sales manager, it's easy when I have people in the office to be able to know when are people going to be in their seats, when are people going to be on lunch. I can manage sort of the team time in terms of managing individuals who are all over the place. Would you advise managers to let each of the people on manage their own calendar? Or how much of a stake would you have the managers put in actually planning out the day to day of their people from a calendar perspective?
You know, I want to empower employees. So I typically say, hey, if I were you, this is how I would do it. Give some tips and tricks and ideas, you know, but works what works for Joe Flynn might not work for somebody else. So I can give you tips and tricks based off of experience and then you kind of take that and morph it into what works for your home life. So never want to kind of be draconian about it, but certainly share from experience. And I typically tell our sales team why I'm telling you this is because I've learned from the mistake I made in the past. I don't want you to repeat that mistake. So it's real school of hard knocks. Don't do it that way. And here's why. And so that typically, you know, the team embraces that. So I want them to own it once I give them an idea.
I love that. And mistakes are worth it. You can teach somebody else how to do something the right way.
If you're not making a mistake, you're not learning, right?
Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you.
I've learned a lot because I've made a lot of mistakes.
Haven't we all? When you mentioned people don't stand up and get out of their desk, I'm like, it's me. I haven't stood up today. I need to go stand up and go do something. So that was wonderful and wildly helpful, Joe. Thank you so much. Once again, I'm Christina Brady, president of Sales Assembly. Thank you to Vidyard for sponsoring our content. And we will see you next week for another study break. Bye.
Bye. Thanks, everyone.
