Real Sales and Leadership Thinking        

Creating the Ideal Sales Day: Ideas for Planning and Structuring Your Time More Effectively 

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Having a successful sales day is a matter of planning not luck

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Many salespeople spend as little as 20 - 30% of their time actually focused on selling and sales activities. Image how effective you could be if you could double or quadruple that percentage?

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What separates consistently successful salespeople from the rest is their ability to be disciplined in doing the things that their colleagues aren’t prepared to do and the biggest discipline is planning their sales day, here are some ideas to help you to become more effective during your sales day:

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End the previous day with a plan for the following day

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Planning for a successful sales day starts the night before, there’s a great deal of science behind planning and goal mapping and the principle of writing down your goals and plans, from my own experience if I don’t have a written plan for the following day I can guarantee that day won’t be as productive as it could have been if I’d gone into the day with a written plan.

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Planning doesn’t have to be time consuming or complicated

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Planning your day can be as simple or as detailed as you need it to be and it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, I have a template I use every day where I plan the next day but I have salespeople I work with that just use two sheets of blank paper to plan their day, the most important thing is that you map out and plan your day.

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The first thing I do is spend a maximum of 5 minutes going through the CRM I make a list of all the calls I need to make, the prospects I want to reach out, the follow up calls I need to make and the accounts I want to touch base with, the power of transferring these calls onto paper and having it in front of you keeps you focused and makes you more accountable.

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I then move onto tasks to the tasks I need to complete, again I spend no more than 5 minutes doing this, and I separate these into cash-generating and non-cash generating tasks so I ensure that the non-cash generating tasks don’t get in the way of my selling time

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Finally, I schedule everything in my calendar especially my sales calls and follow up calls, this starts the moment I agree a next step or a follow-up call with a client, I send over a diary invite so they are committed to the call and I can plan this into my daily schedule.

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There’s no better time to start planning your day than right now, so discipline yourself to spend the last 10 minutes of each day planning a successful day the following day  

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