Data-Driven Selling By Sales Insights Lab

KEY MOMENTS: 
0:55 1. Remove non-sales clutter.
2:12 2. Don’t say yes to people. 
3:25 3. Use tech to leverage your time.
4:40 4. Have a virtual assistant.
5:45 5. Only do what makes you money.

1. Remove non-sales clutter.

One of my sales mentors always used to say that salespeople should only be doing activities that get us paid. Everything else that fills up our workday—literally anything that’s not helping us to actually make money—is just clutter. That’s why the first key habit for an ideal salesperson daily schedule is simply to remove all non-sales clutter from your routine.

If you're not on the phone, on a Zoom, or face-to-face with a prospect, or working on a proposal for a prospect—then don't do it.

Removing all of the non-sales clutter from your calendar is the first key to building your ideal salesperson daily schedule. Making this a habit will make you more money, plain and simple.

2. Don’t say yes to people. 

Now, I’m not telling you to be a jerk to people. But I am telling you to stop saying yes to every favor. Most salespeople are natural people-pleasers. But you need to get out of the habit of wanting to please anyone and everyone who comes your way. Only say yes to people who are likely to be good prospects.

3. Use tech to leverage your time.

This is really a relatively newer idea in sales, but there are some incredible technologies out there that allow you to essentially replicate yourself and leverage your time in a much more efficient way.

A really good example of this is cold email. For every email that you send, you can manually type it up—or you can leverage cold email automation with high levels of personalization to send high-quality emails, leveraging the automation to significantly save your time.

The habit of using tech to leverage your time is crucial to building an effective salesperson daily schedule whether you use email or the phone to reach out to your prospects. Let's say you make phone calls all day long. You can manually dial each call, and take a break in between each one, making 10 to 20 dials an hour…or, you can leverage a power dialer, which is one of the greatest dialing technologies that exists today, enabling you to make up to 80 or 90 dials an hour. Use technology like this to leverage your time as much as possible.

If you're doing manual, time-consuming activities, chances are that you could be leveraging technology to be more efficient with your daily schedule.

4. Have a virtual assistant.

These days, having a virtual assistant is more accessible than you might think. There are sites like Upwork.com where you can find someone to do the sales grunt work for you at $5 to $10 an hour. By sales grunt work, I mean all that prospect research you’re currently doing, or any other operational, administrative, or manual labor that's slowing down your daily schedule, pulling you away from actually being in front of prospects.

Outsource all of the slow, laborious work at a really low hourly rate so you can spend all of your time in front of the prospects that you want to be in front of. Having a virtual assistant is absolutely critical. Whether you're a business owner or even an everyday salesperson, you can find a way to do this. If you are making $30, $40, or $50 an hour, then outsourcing some of that grunt work to someone else for $5 an hour will have a huge knock-on effect and allow you to make a lot more money in commissions.

5. Only do what makes you money.

I've already talked about this, but it's so important that it gets another shout-out. The most important key to having an effective salesperson daily schedule is to get in the habit of only doing what makes you money. Period. You've got to focus only on what makes you money. The more ruthless you are in cutting the clutter out of your work routine, the more hyper-focused you are on only doing what makes you money, the more money you will actually make.

And by the way, the data shows this, too. Most salespeople only spend about 20% to 30% of their time on true sales-related activities every day. This is terrible, because it means that the vast majority of their time is spent not doing anything to provide for their families in the first place.

It’s like if we were hunter-gatherers, but we spent six out of the eight hours of our hunting time just skipping rocks at the beach. Maybe that's fun, but it's not helping us feed our family. We've got to stop doing all of those other things that are pulling us away from what makes us money.