Your inside salespeople can play a bigger role in generating revenue, if they manage their time and customer contacts correctly.
"Since inside salespeople have multiple responsibilities, their work day is varied as they need to stay in touch with their customers, partners, and prospects. On the con side, they need to manage this hectic day. Prospecting is often one area that gets neglected. Full-cycle inside sales reps have to keep their funnel full as they’re looking for the next big opportunity. Time management is a required skill for inside sales reps," says sales expert Matt Stanton in an article in Sales & Marketing Management magazine.
Here's a list of top 20 time management tips to help them make the most of each day:
- Outbound prospecting: Carve out time for prospecting — get it on your calendar.
- Schedule cold calling sessions days in advance during most productive times.
- Do the hard stuff early. You are less likely to do the hard stuff as the day goes on.
- Prepare for tomorrow calls today. Make it the last thing you accomplish in your day.
- Minimize social media research time for high-volume cold calling. Create your outbound calling lists with a specific goal or target in mind, so when you do connect, you’ll be prepared.
- Allot time to connect with partners each week (if you work with them) — nurturing partnerships puts feet on the ground where you can’t be.
- Persuade yourself to “buy into your own discipline," Practice something for 21 consecutive days and it will become habit. Habit in your work day will lead to efficiencies that support time management.
- Take your paid time off (PTO) during the slow times of year, when everyone else is off anyway.
- Minimize non-productive tasks.
- Delegate (or automate) busy work to others if possible, such as writing sales email templates or developing new call scripts.
- Share your tips and collaborate with your co-workers.
- Turn off distractions like email and cell phones.
- Can you justify the work that you are doing? Always ask yourself, if my boss were looking over my shoulder could I easily justify what I’m working on? Is it important work or time-killing work?
- Automate follow-up tasks with your CRM.
- Use CRM and meeting integration tools, like Salesforce for Outlook and GotoMeeting’s Outlook Calendar Plugin, logging e-mails and scheduling meetings becomes a much speedier process.
- Use an e-Check list like Trello and be specific on what time you’ll devote to prospecting, account management etc.
- Use calendar tools like calendly or TimeTrade to eliminate back and forth when trying to nail down times to meet.
- Schedule email to send to yourself or others in the future. For instance, the delay delivery option in Microsoft Outlook helps you get something off your plate now but makes sure it is not forgotten.
- Recycle old emails as much as possible. Why spend time writing and email you have already written many times? (Proof read, though. You don’t want to call someone the wrong name or use the wrong company name.)
- Use sales acceleration tools such as sales dialing automation, CPQ (configure, price, quote), document management, data sourcing, lead flow management, lead scoring, and predictive intelligence solutions.
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