Guest post by Gregg Schwartz.
We are all given the same 24 hours in a day, but the most successful people manage to make more efficient use of these hours—they waste less time, they get more done, they focus on the right activities at the right time to maximize efficiency. Small businesses can often develop a competitive advantage not by price or selection, but by being more efficient and focused than the big companies.
Here are a few time management tips for your small business sales process:
- Waste not, want not: Pay rigorous attention to how much time is being wasted every day on non-essential activities. Are you having too many meetings, or too many conference calls? Are you losing too many hours to disorganization or uncertainty or indecision about what to do next? Figure out the root of the problem and then correct it.
- Make it a habit. Set aside a block of time every single day for making sales calls, prospecting, or doing the unglamorous work of drumming up new business opportunities. If you don’t put it on your calendar, it won’t get done. Make sales a daily ritual. Treat it like a client meeting and schedule it in—after all, your business’s most important client, ultimately, is YOUR business! No one is going to step in and force you to do what needs to be done to get bigger sales results; you have to do it yourself. Whether it’s a simple pen-and-paper to do list or a customized spreadsheet or a more sophisticated CRM system or project management system, you need to find a way to systematically map out your sales prospects and keep updated notes on where each prospect stands in your sales process.
