“If you do this consistently over the next few weeks, you’ll start to notice you feel more in the driver’s seat of your time.” – Jack Wilson in today’s Tip 859
How do you spend your time and planning the week ahead?
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Jack Wilson on Sales Success Stories interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jack Wilson is back, and since you last heard his voice, he’s joined the team at Seismic working on the team of Enterprise all-stars that David Weiss has built. Here he is:
Jack Wilson: Hey there, Daily Sales Tips Community. Feels like it’s been a minute, but I’m back with another tip for you. Let’s talk about the coulda, shoulda, woulda’s, and how to take control of them. For many of you, you look back at the week and think, I did what I could. You know what activities you have to balance. And you did your best to organize them all and fit everything you could into your busy schedule. Doing what you can is the baseline for finding success.
The next level of execution is covering the shoulda’s. In addition to doing what you coulda, we all know the things we should do. These tasks are often the things we need to make time for. Making sure you’ve done the necessary prep before a meeting, preparing outreach strategies, planning the week ahead, even taking time for a personal and professional development. At the pinnacle of performance stand those who don’t spend much time thinking about what they would have done because they did it. And this is the most challenging part. If you thought making time for the things you should do is harder than what happens when you think if what you would do if you had the time or a plan to get them done. Fear not, you’ve got this tip. Before you can work to change something, you’ve got to understand it fully. Your schedule and your time is no different.
First, start by measuring where you spend your time, not the most, not where it’s wasted, just where it’s spent, and how just in general. Do this easily by color-coding your calendar. Take some time to review the last two or three weeks and break the activities you do in a common-sense categories, that could be prospecting, researching, client meetings, internal BS meetings. You get the gist.
Once you’ve created the categories, assign them each a unique color in your calendar, then take the time to go back those few weeks and label everything appropriately. Color coding helps you get a quick visual of how your time is spent without doing an actual count. You’ll probably start to notice some undeniable patterns.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time to look ahead, start to color-code your upcoming activities for the week ahead. Begin taking a tally in each category as your week progresses. You’re going to create your own activity ratios. After the next week has passed. Go back and create a ratio of each category over the total amount of activities you did.
For example, if you did 10 client meetings out of 100 total things, you’ve got a 10% client meeting ratio. Easy, right? Do this for each category you created, you’ll notice you can only have 100%. Sorry, give it 110% efforters. It’s just not a thing. It’s math. Now, your time is being spent, it’s time to do the real reflective work, where do you think it should be spent and where can you start making trade-offs. Create a target ratio for each category, and use this as your benchmark for planning your week and reviewing how well you spent your time.
This isn’t easy and yes, it will take some of that precious time, but if you do this consistently over the next few weeks, you’ll start to notice you feel more in the driver’s seat of your time.
Scott Ingram: For more about Jack Wilson, to connect with him on LinkedIn and for a link to his full episode on Sales Success Stories, just click over to DailySales.Tips/859
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!