Sales professionals should be optimising their productivity to enhance their selling efforts and capture more leads. In saying that, here’s 5 quick productivity tips for salespeople!
- Make a To-Do List the Night Before
Being a salesperson isn’t easy. The job often involves hectic workdays and demanding tasks which may require immediate attention, leaving many people feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. This sense of fatigue and exhaustion can trickle into one’s personal life, while also causing complacency and disorganization in the workplace.
A quick yet effective way to combat this issue is to create a simple to-do list the night before work. It’s highly recommended that you limit your to-do list to the 5 most important items to complete for the day – a long list that has too many tasks will motivate you instead, so keep things short and concise!
Getting into the habit of prioritising these daily tasks will ensure that you wake up with a stronger drive to get things done in the morning. Creating a to-do list before your sleep is also a fantastic way for you to remind yourself of what you’ve done for the last 24 hours.
- Clean & Organise Your Workspace
There’s nothing more aggravating than having a messy, cluttered desk that disrupts your workflow. As a sales professional, you most likely spend a majority of your workday glued to your office desk. Since many of your daily tasks centre around this area, you need to optimise your workspace and declutter your mind to ensure that you are working effectively throughout the day.
Firstly, you should start off with keeping the essentials: your computer or laptop, phone, relevant files, and notes. It’s also important to charge your phone at home so you don’t need to deal with so many cables, and keep unnecessary supplies inside your drawers.
Keep the waste basket or rubbish bin nearby your desk to avoid any trash building up. Also, any trinkets and decor (such as photos and calendars) should be kept near the wall, rather than taking up desk space. Every day, you should set aside 10-15 minutes per day just simply tidying your desk – this quick and basic habit will do wonders for your productivity!
- Manage Your Emails Efficiently
According to the Email Statistics Report 2014-18, business professionals receive an average of 85 emails per day (around 600 emails per week). They also spend more than 30% of their working time reading, organising and responding to emails. As a sales person having to deal with multiple tasks, clearing your inboxes substantially eats up your productivity goals.
A better way to manage your emails more efficiently is to first of all, write shorter emails. For many busy people (especially ones who you don’t have an established relationship with), they tend to skip over long-winded emails. If you want to improve engagement and have quicker replies, you should get into the habit of writing short and concise smartphone-sized messages. In fact, the optimal length of an email is actually 3-5 sentences.
Additionally, you should actually ensure that you have the time to respond to an email before you open it and spend time reading the contents. If you respond later, then you’d have to reread the email again, which can be time-consuming. Most emails are not that urgent and don’t require an immediate response, so give yourself room to breathe.
For those salespeople guilty of constantly checking their emails, another golden rule to better manage your time is to check your emails only thrice a day – each email check should be limited to 10-15 minutes. Freeing yourself from checking emails can be incredibly difficult, but here are some extra simple things you can do to optimise your productivity:
- Every month, you should set up a day where you go over all your emails and unsubscribe from half or more of them. Not only will you reduce your inbox, you’ll become more judicious with which sites you subscribe to.
- Unsubscribe from social media notifications
- Filter out any forwarded emails, which typically contain office banter or chain emails. You can easily check them on less busier periods like the weekend.
- Think before sending CC’d emails – try to minimise any unnecessary replies.
- If applicable, send emails which don’t require responses. E.g. “No reply means everyone is fine.” or “If I don’t get any response, I’ll assume this is okay.”
- Schedule Your Meetings With Prospects
For many sales professionals, the process of organising meetings with clients or colleagues can be incredibly painful. Not only that, considerable time can be wasted if the meeting becomes unproductive and discussions lead to nowhere, leading to worker dissatisfaction.
Having quicker and concise meetings would be immensely beneficial for all parties involved. A great way to do this is to schedule client meetings in clusters – do some early planning where you determine your entire day’s schedule, then estimate the hours for all other work tasks beyond these client meetings.
Additionally, if you have a concrete time in mind, you can easily work with the client to come to an agreement about the planned schedule. Productive meetings don’t necessarily mean longer time commitment either. In fact, you should try to schedule short 15 minute “connect” meetings with your sales prospects.
- Leverage Sales Automation Software
It’s no secret that many sales representatives go through many unproductive (often monotonous) tasks that don’t result in any captured leads. An effective way to sell more and save time is to reduce any extra manual work by automating your sales processes. This includes eliminating or minimising admin tasks like data entry.
According to statistics, businesses that use marketing or sales automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads. There are several tactics to automate your sales process such as email templates, triggered follow-up emails, hiring service dial phone calls, or tracking apps that log various tasks. This ensures that salespeople can focus on closing deals. You can then analyse these results to further improve your efficiency.
Get More Productive with Leado!
The benefits of integrating Leado tools into your lead generation process can add immense value to your pipeline. Using this efficient cloud-based software, you can acquire customers outside of your network and enter new markets within days.
Optimising your Leado campaign means that you can reach your desired audience much more quickly and effectively – yet this can be an overwhelming process for many beginners. That’s why Leado enables you to get access to Email Support, 1-on-1 Strategy Calls and a dedicated Account Manager to get the most out of your campaign. Contact us for more info!
