Adding Structure to the Week for Sales Effectiveness
In order to be successful as a sales professional, one must be able to juggle many different types of tasks. A sales person is primarily in charge of finding new clients and taking care of existing ones. But there is also a tremendous amount of work that must be done in the areas of administrative tasks, internal meetings, research, training, etc. and all of these must be taken care of to ensure sales effectiveness. One way to quiet the noise and decrease that chaos from all these different tasks is to add more structure to the week to create more focus.
By adding more structure to the week, we can assign time to work on each particular area and this can provide three key benefits:
1. Improve Productivity
By adding structure to the week, we can decrease the amount of multitasking and bouncing back and forth between tasks. By doing this and creating focus on one area at a time, we can improve our level of productivity in that particular area driving sales effectiveness.
2. Decrease Stress
With work needing to be completed in so many different areas, it can sometimes feel overwhelming and that you cannot get to it all. Add to that pressure from needing to hit quota targets and the level of stress can be high. But by adding structure to the week, you can feel more organized, in control, and productive and this can help to decrease the level of stress.
3. Improve Thoroughness
With the fast pace and demands of the day in the life of the sales person, it can be easy to over look certain tasks or to simply never get to them. If you add structure to the week, this will help to ensure that you get to what needs to get done improving sales effectiveness.
One way to add structure to the week is to divide the main tasks that you need to accomplish and then allocate time by putting blocks on your calendar for those tasks or activities. Below are some examples of tasks and times when they could be scheduled.
Administrative: Whether it is managing expenses, updating CRM tools, or filling out TPS reports, there is some sort of administrative work that is always accruing. Monday mornings can be a good time to go through and clean up some of these tasks.
Training: In order for sales effectiveness, it is critical to continue to learn and develop and this can be easily overlooked with all of the other business to take care of. Mondays and Friday afternoons are good days to shift from an outbound mode to more of an internal, developmental focus.
Cold Calling: It is easy to find other work to put in front of cold calling. By allocating time during the week for cold calling and shutting all other distractions down, you can make sure you get to this task and improve sales effectiveness. Tuesday and Thursday mornings is an example of adding cold calling time to the structure of the week.
In order to be successful as a sales professional, one must be able to juggle many different types of tasks. A sales person is primarily in charge of finding new clients and taking care of existing ones. But there is also a tremendous amount of work that must be done in the areas of administrative tasks, internal meetings, research, training, etc. and all of these must be taken care of to ensure sales effectiveness. One way to quiet the noise and decrease that chaos from all these different tasks is to add more structure to the week to create more focus. 
