Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Sales Management Time Management Tips

By Barry Treeman

Time management is an important part of any effective sales team, and as a sales manager, it is your job to find new ways to help your team achieve this. Fortunately, there are many time management strategies that anyone can learn and implement, which will go a long way towards helping you make the most out of every work day.

Effective sales managers create weekly and daily to-do lists. This is an easy and concrete way to keep track of all of the tasks that you have to accomplish, and you can take the simple list one step further and rank tasks in order of priority if that helps you. Once you have a weekly and/or daily list of tasks, take a look at your list to make sure that you have not over-scheduled yourself. There are only so many tasks that you can realistically hope to accomplish in a day or a week, and over-scheduling will only lead to loss of productivity and frustration.

Many people become frustrated at the end of the day when they discover that they haven't accomplished as much as they wanted to. While we can't control all the extenuating circumstances that hamper our productivity, we can control how many times we mindlessly surf the Internet and check our emails throughout the day. Technology makes it possible to constantly bombard us with information, and it can be difficult not to get caught up in it, but you must make a constant effort to do so. Designate certain times of the day just for Internet browsing and email checking, and incorporate this time into your to-do list.

The best sales managers are also the best at task delegation, because they know that many important tasks will come their way throughout the course of the day and they can't possibly accomplish them all, at least not without neglecting their to-do lists. Don't be afraid to assign difficult tasks to junior members of your sales team"they need the learning experience, and you need to be able to maintain your focus. - 15246

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