How to Have a Productive Sales Day

Have you ever had a day where you felt like you were spending your day at work wisely, you had the golden touch when it came to connecting with your B2B sales prospects, and you left the office that day thinking you had the most productive day ever? If a day like that isn’t your norm, shouldn’t it be? Read on to learn how to make most (if not all) of your days productive and successful, and see a timeline for a productive sales day.

We all know how easily a day can get away from a person, especially at work. You get pulled into meetings that could have been emails, have emails coming in every moment, and let’s not even mention texts that pop up on your phone – all demanding your attention.

Learn 12 pieces of advice for new sales reps. Read our blog.

What’s a sales representative, sales development rep (SDR), or business development rep (BDR) to do? Besides turning your phone and email completely off, here are a few ways to make you feel like you have more control of your day.

Control Your Email

According to the McKinsey Global Institute and International Data Corporation (IDC), the average worker spends 28% of their workweek reading and answering emails. Per Forbes, workers check their email 15 times a day, which equates to every 37 minutes. That’s a lot of time that could be spent on more productive tasks, unless all your emails are from your sales prospects or customers.

Here are some tips on how to better use the time you’re spending checking, reading, and answering emails:

• Turn off notifications, so you don’t get a pop-up or ding on your computer with every single email that comes in. You'll find that 99% of the time, that email can wait.
• Make it a point to check email just once every hour or try once every two hours if you can.
• Create folders and move your new emails into them after you first read them. These folders can be the name of the sender, or even be a folder that is titled “Reply at end of day”. That way, they’re there to take care of all at once instead of feeling like you need to reply right at that moment.

Leave Your Phone Alone

Texting is a double-edged sword because it commands your attention and makes it so easy to communicate, but it can also be the biggest time-suck. This is another time when you should turn off notifications (seeing a pattern here?), so your phone doesn’t vibrate at your desk or ding every time a text comes in.

Yes, your buddy wants to finalize plans for the football game this weekend. But you don’t need to reply to that text right now. It can wait until lunch or after work, can’t it?

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If you have a sick child, parent, or spouse/partner, then of course you’re going to want to see any texts from or about them immediately. But that truly is the exception.

Timeline of a Productive Day

Let’s break down how successful and productive sales reps manage their time each day:

• 2 hours a day running human agent-assisted dialing sessions (1 in the morning, and 1 in the afternoon) with software like Team Dialer
• 2 hours a day performing research to enrich your top 100 targeted accounts and qualify them in and out of your pipeline
• 1 hour a day conducting follow up calls and meetings with your choice of dialer, which could be Click Dialer, Personal Dialer, or Team Dialer
• 1 hour a day updating your sales cadence (a la TruCadence) emails and sequences
• 2 hours a day remaining as you see fit – for administrative tasks, attending internal meetings, having lunch, etc.

Following this schedule each day leads to:

• More conversations
• More meetings
• A bigger pipeline
• More closed deals

What sales rep doesn’t want that?

Get Organized for the Day

Did you catch that bit about updating your sales cadence above? TruCadence makes it easier than ever for sales reps, SDRs, and BDRs to take control of their workday and know what you need to do each morning when you come into work with the task list feature.

When you use TruCadence and open it up, you’ll see two lists: Pending Emails and Pending Calls.

Go through the Pending Emails list and decide if you want to send out each email as is OR if any of those emails need customization or personalization. Once you’ve taken care of that, hit “send” and each contact receiving those emails moves to the next step in your cadence.

For your Pending Calls, you can choose which dialer to use with TruCadence (depending on which one(s) you’ve purchased -- Click Dialer; Personal Dialer; or our human agent-assisted dialer, Team Dialer) and start making your calls. Once you’ve made each call, ConnectLeader reflects that call in your preferred CRM, like Salesforce, and moves that contact to the next step in the cadence.

Reach out to us here at ConnectLeader today to see how to help your sales reps, SDRs, and BDRs be more productive and build a bigger and better pipeline. Simply click here or give us a call at 800-955-5040.