The report by Salesforce has revealed that salespeople, on average, spend only 28% of their workday on sales activities. Most sales professionals spend more time responding to internal activities, such as scheduling meetings, participating in conferences, or handling calls.
The scope of the activities evolved in the sales department, and managers simply lack the time to finish all their tasks.
Luckily, they can streamline their workdays and optimize the time they spend on less important activities so they can focus on boosting their numbers.
1. Track time and analyze
The first step to making the most of your time at work is understanding how you’re spending time. Sales managers are in charge of achieving a specific sales volume, meaning they must use their time as best as possible.
Most respond to emails, talk to partners, participate in meetings, enter information into their CRMs, create reports, and write proposals outside sales activities.
Luckily, there are various time-tracking software used to automate the time-tracking process. You can log hours directly from your computer, track time manually or with a timer:
- Tracking time manually means you will have to add hours at the end of the workday.
- Tracking time with a timer means you must add activities and click on the timer when you start working on those tasks.
These tools will not only give you information about how much time you’ve spent on different tasks, but you can also add tags, comments, and additional details about your productivity.
2. Differentiate selling from non-selling tasks
As a manager, you need to know which tasks should be your priority at any given moment. But since there are so many things sales managers do during the day, it becomes hard to juggle between selling and non-selling tasks.
The important activities sales managers should handle include:
- Protecting the pipeline: This involves analyzing the sales data to identify trends and potential issues, optimizing the sales pipeline to ensure efficiency and effectiveness, and providing actionable information to sales reps to help them improve their performance. Additionally, it may involve conducting market research to identify new opportunities or changes in customer needs that could impact the pipeline.
- Coaching and training: Effective sales managers prioritize coaching and training for their team. This includes identifying areas where individual reps need support, providing training resources to help them develop skills, and creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
- Evaluating your team: In addition to coaching and training, sales managers need to regularly evaluate the performance of their team. This includes identifying top performers, assessing areas where improvement is needed, and developing strategies to help struggling reps improve. It may involve conducting performance reviews, setting goals for individual reps, and providing feedback on their progress.
- Directing the sales journey: Sales managers are responsible for guiding their team through the sales process, from prospecting to closing deals. This requires a deep understanding of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive success, as well as the ability to help reps set realistic goals and track their progress toward them.
- Making big-picture decisions: Sales managers must be able to think strategically and make decisions that will help the company achieve its overall sales goals. This includes gathering and analyzing data to identify trends and opportunities, developing strategies for expanding into new markets or product lines and collaborating with other departments to align sales with broader business objectives.
3. Spend time coaching sales reps
The success of salespeople is directly related to sales managers. The more knowledge sales managers can deliver to their reps and give them guidance backed with numbers, the more successful the sales team will be. Sales reps that receive training can help a company increase its win rates by up to 25%.
At the same time, companies that offered focused training to their sales reps increased their revenue by 8.4%. Here’s how you can approach your coaching.
Motivate reps
Sales managers shouldn’t just tell others what to do and set goals. They must empower and motivate the sales team to improve their performance.
Establish a formal training process
Set in place a formal training process and stick to it. Use repeatable and proven methods to achieve effective results. Ensure you’re not wasting time on random and unnecessary coaching activities that disrupt your team’s everyday tasks.
Meet with sales reps when necessary
It’s generally a good idea to hold meetings, preferably monthly, where you can see how much your reps have learned and what could be improved. Additionally, it’s an excellent opportunity to gather feedback from them. This also gives you an insight and a chance to prepare for the next coaching session.
Focus on long-term development as well
Most coaching activities often focus on closing current deals and teaching people to find their way in the current business climate. Only 24% of coaches teach reps long-term skills they can always use, like communication, active listening, problem-solving, good negotiation skills, strategic prospecting, etc.
4. Don’t try to fix every problem
Many sales managers must spend more time trying to fix the problems sales reps should be dealing with. Delegate tasks and emphasize accountability by asking the right questions. Managing a sales team is difficult, especially for action-oriented managers that are used to selling.
Why? People with this mindset usually take responsibility for their reps’ problems. They spend time fixing other people’s mistakes and giving them progress reports. Even though this might look good, it wastes a lot of time.
Instead of fixing other people’s mistakes, you should let the rep know they are accountable for their mistakes and that they should take specific action to deal with the issue. For example, teach them to be self-reliant and help them only with quick guidance.
Ask them what the problem is and see how they would want to resolve it. Offer guidance while they are dealing with the issue. Don’t do the actual steps yourself. If the issue is too complex, you can delegate the task to another sales rep who can help them with it.
Not only that you can focus on more critical tasks, but you can effectively deal with issues.
5. Use intelligent software
Many sales managers still don’t use CRM systems, appointment scheduling tools, etc. In other words, they are wasting tremendous time on mundane tasks, documentation, and getting the information they need.
For example, all sales reps and managers need customer relationship management software. This tool is the central hub where you can see all customer information and get valuable integrations for analytics, marketing, engagement, etc.
As mentioned earlier, use a time tracking tool to allocate time effectively for all tasks based on their importance. Furthermore, you can also use tools like scheduling software to save time on scheduling meetings and notifying everyone about what’s happening.
Tools can help you save vital time and get important information. However, don’t rely on a dozen tools because you’ll have to switch between them constantly.
Conclusion
Optimizing and improving your sales cycle is an ongoing process that requires lots of time and effort. It’s the same with optimizing your time spent as a sales manager.
Use intelligent tools that can give you actionable data for mistake detection and time-wasting process automation.
You don’t need to do more to get desired results, but the other way around. Most managers lose a lot of time engaging in countless activities that don’t help them improve sales results.
Effective time management can help you create a robust pipeline and remove time-wasting tasks to optimize your sales process. The goal is to work smarter, not harder.
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