August 10, 2022 – Time management is crucial to the success of any role in sales. There are only so many hours within a week, and so many of them are wasted because sales reps aren’t effectively prioritizing their time. According to Falon Fatemi, a contributor to Forbes, there is an art and a science to effective time management
Fatemi writes in Forbes, “The most effective salespeople are time management czars. Their discipline and focus gifts them with additional hours each week to focus on high-impact revenue-generating activities and enables them to stand atop the leaderboard.”
The reality is that time management has more to do with the body’s internal clock than a compilation of to-do lists. Fatemi cites Daniel Pink’s book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, saying there is “extensive research to support the fact that humans experience three distinct phases of productivity throughout the duration of each day: a peak that occurs in the morning after waking up, a trough that occurs in the afternoon, and a rebound that transpires in the evening.”
Because sales reps are highly analytical people, they draw on their analytical skills throughout the entire sales cycle – from the early prospecting process to the close. Because of this quality, Fatemi argues that sales reps should schedule analytical tasks such as lead scoring, pipeline tracking and management, sales forecasting, and acquiring new knowledge during their peak period in the morning. “Night owls, on the other hand, should schedule their most analytical and logic-oriented work in the evenings when they reach peak levels of alertness and focus.”