There are countless sayings about time that we have all heard. “Time flies”, “How did it get so late so soon?”, “Time is something you’ll never get back” and, “Time is money”, to name a few. In sales, we like to say that “time kills deals”. In other words, the longer you wait for an answer the worse your chances are to close a deal. Why? Because sales is like a ripe banana: when you are in front of the prospect it is a nice yellow color. They are telling you how they like your proposal and sharing reasons why your product or service might work to help them solve a problem. Then, as days, weeks or even months go by, they stop returning phone calls, are no longer attentive to you and you eventually figure out that it’s over.
In a typical article on this topic, I would want to discuss what to do about that and how to structure your meetings so that type of behavior doesn't exist in the first place. However, based on the current state of affairs, the labor shortage and the good economy I’d rather concentrate on the other side of the coin; time management itself. Your ability to stay focused, manage your time on the important stuff and avoid behaviors that steal from your time is a good topic for this article.
Let’s review some excellent approaches to time that will help put some time back in your pocket. Although the methods are particularly useful for salespeople and sales organizations, really anyone can benefit if applied.
The WIN Method
With the WIN Method I need to give credit to Lou Holtz. Lou Holtz is mostly known for being the head coach of the Notre Dame football team. He was highly successful and was particularly liked by his players. One thing Lou did to help his players was to teach them what he called the WIN Method for time management. WIN stood for What’s Important Now. He taught his players to use this method for everything that they did, in order to maximize their time and keep them focused. As example, if it was a Friday night before a game the player would ask himself, “what’s important now?” It might mean to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, to prepare mentally for the game. It might mean to study the playbook. It might mean to start thinking about their goals for the game in the morning. At that moment, that would be what was important. That would help the player stay focused on the task at hand.
Now, after the game, if a player asked himself, “what’s important now?” he might decide that rest and recuperation is what’s important. Or, it might be preparing for an exam or doing an important school project that is coming due. At that moment, football was not what was “important now”. When the player went home for the holiday, he would teach that “what’s important now” is not football, not school, but family. Concentrate on that. Having used this method for years, the thought process has saved me literally hundreds of hours wasting time on something when I should be spending it elsewhere. I no longer do tasks like cleaning off my desk, organizing, researching or even writing articles like this during business hours. For me, “What’s important now” during business hours is spending time with clients, going to important events, training, speaking and other customer focused tasks.
$5/$50$/500/$5000
This system is simple and is another method that will have you working on the right priorities at the right time, ultimately saving you time as well. It goes like this: every task that you perform during your day can go into one of four categories, $5, $50, $500 or $5000.
If a task is a $5 task, it is likely a task that anyone could do and is only worth $5 to you. Examples might be organizing, cleaning, typing up a document, changing the paper in the copier and so on. Clearly, we are suggesting that during business hours you leave these $5 items for later or with someone else. The $50 items are those tasks that are a little more important but won’t likely make a big difference to your bottom line. They aren’t revenue producing tasks, but are necessary. Many spend too much time in this quadrant. Tasks in this quadrant could be creating a proposal, doing project specific functions, planning or having a meeting about an employee. The $500 and $5000 quadrants are truly where we should spend most of our time. These two quadrants are where people make money for themselves or their company. $500 might be meeting with a customer or potential customer, calling a customer to make progress on a deal or following up with a proposal. The $5000 quadrant is meant for the high payoff situations such as meeting with a company to secure a sale, negotiating terms on an existing project, prospecting a large potential customer or going to a high-level event to meet a potential new customer.
Used properly, one can save a tremendous amount of time working less on tasks and events that don’t produce large revenue. In our programs we talk about always ‘moving the needle’. Moving the needle means that every day you focus on how to move the revenue needle.
Ivy Lee Method
In 1918, a quest to increase efficiency was created by a man named, Ivy Lee, a highly respected productivity consultant at the time. His method was a multiple step system that worked like this:
Step 1: the night before, write down the six most important things that need to be accomplished the following day.
Step 2: Put them in order from most important to least important
Step 3: The next morning start working only on the first item; the most important. Finish that task first before you continue on to the next task.
Step 4: This is where it gets tricky. If any items are left at the end of the day, most people simply move those to the top of the list the next day. Don’t do this. Instead, that night look at all of the tasks you have to do and start fresh, putting those most important six tasks on the list, in order, for the next day. Sometimes what is left over makes the list, and other times new tasks jump in front of those.
Using this method, the most important tasks always get done, rather than the tasks that you choose to do because they are simple, short or more enjoyable.
Having systems for managing time become essential in today’s working world. If you think about it, we actually all have the same amount of time, it’s more about what you do with it. In essence, we aren’t really managing time, we are managing our activities.
Want to get even better at managing time? Try using apps like “2Do”, “ToDoist” or “Trello”. Read books like, Getting Things Done, by David Allen (my personal favorite) and use time tracking systems to determine where you spend most of your time versus where you should spend it.
For those that I left hanging, thinking that this article was going to be about how to stop wasting time chasing people that may never buy, I will offer one suggestion only. Because, after all, time is money. When that proverbial banana starts to go brown, cut to the chase with your prospects. Learn to win and lose faster by telling them, “I get the feeling you’re moving in a different direction. Am I right or wrong about that?” With some, the truth will surface. Either way they answer, you save time. Now, get moving – time’s a wastin’!