“If you can get all of these things done that day, I’m pretty confident that you’ll be able to say you won the day at the end of that day.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 1357
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got another tip of my own as I continue to process my own learnings from the Sales Success Summit. Another of the themes that emerged at this year’s Summit was the importance of Deep Work. Not all work and activity is created equal and the best of the best are carving out time, typically through time blocking, to really focus on things that are going to have a big impact. What these things are all over the place from focused prospecting to territory planning and strategy to defining a point of view or hypothesis to take to the executives inside your largest opportunity.
But let me ask you this. How do you know if your day was successful? As part of your planning and prep at the start of the day, could you define what you would need to accomplish so that if you got those things done you could call it a successful day? This is something I’ve actively been thinking about and working to incorporate into my own process and what I’ve come up with is the idea of Big Impact Items and Critical Completions. The Big Impact Items are those big rocks, the most important and meaningful things from a big picture perspective that are going to move you forward the furthest. The Critical Completions are those must do to-dos. They may not be as long-term impactful, but it’s really important that they get done today.
This is a situation where less is more and it really depends on your overall bandwidth. If you’re in wall to wall meetings all day or traveling, this list might be really short. If you find yourself with a lot of whitespace you might be able to block out more time to knock out more items. Ultimately this is about the simplest approach I could come up with that wasn’t going to create a big additional burden each day. As you’re planning your day you can quickly define the tasks that you have to get done, the Critical Completions, and then really think about what’s ultimately going to make the most impact and write down your Big Impact Items.
If you can get all of these things done that day, I’m pretty confident that you’ll be able to say you won the day at the end of that day. Over time you’ll also be able to learn and adjust as you figure out just how much you are and aren’t able to do and how much deep work you can really get in. Like anything, this type of proactive productivity is kind of like a muscle. It may not be very strong in the beginning. You’ll need to work at it consistently, but overtime you should be able to increase the load and improve your endurance and ultimately get more and more meaningful work done.
Hope that helps. I’m literally going to be working on this myself, so feel free to ask me about it or share your own approach. And then… Come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!