Struggling to manage your sales tasks and stay sane when your to-do list is avalanching you?
Just as we thought.
Actually, you’re not alone: 77% of salespeople struggle to complete assigned tasks efficiently.
But no worries, we’ve found the way out. We’ve asked business leaders and sales professionals and rounded up the most innovative or even radical tactics on handling sales tasks and time management tips for salespeople.
Whether you’re a sales manager or a sales rep, you’ll definitely find something valuable for your team and yourself in this article.
Read on.
9 Best Practices for Managing Sales Tasks and Improving Performance
Learn how to manage your sales tasks more effectively from the expert insights below.
Implement sales task prioritization.
First and foremost, you need to plan your day and map out all sales activities you have on that day.
Only after that prioritize sales tasks in order of importance and urgency by using the Eisenhower Matrix:
- Upper left quadrant: important and urgent
- Upper right quadrant: not urgent, but important
- Lower left quadrant: urgent, but not important
- Lower right quadrant: not urgent, not important
For example, sales prospecting may be one of your top activities to prioritize.
Alternatively, you may want to first deal with sales tasks related to existing clients with high lifetime value.
Why exactly?
“If you look at different customer profiles, the high-value customer should be your top priority in sales time management (more time may be needed on those) and task prioritization,” explains Jim Pendergast, Senior Vice President at altLINE Sobanco. “Such customers typically spend from three to five times more than average clients. So, investing in them can have a huge impact on your company’s bottom line.”
Optimize your time usage during meetings and calls.
Wise usage of time is critical to effective task management in sales teams, particularly when it comes to appointment setting, whether to meet in person or over the phone.
What if we told you that by optimizing meeting and call time, you can automatically increase sales productivity?
Anthony Martin, Founder and CEO of Choice Mutual, reveals one of his team’s time management secrets:
“We follow a 15-minute rule in sales calls and meetings, which benefits both parties. For one thing, we get less meeting rejections because people value their time. For another – this time is more than enough to show our product demo and convert prospects into clients.”
For example, when booking a call with one of the licensed insurance agents from Choice Mutual, prospects can select a 15-minute time slot via Calendly.
But what about cold calling?
“When cold calling, it’s better to stick to five–ten minutes,” Martin suggests. Such cold calls have a 50–75% success rate. You should use this timeframe effectively to make the most out of your calls. For that, prepare cold calling scripts for every situation to avoid wasting time and win more deals.
Look at this example used by SmartReach.io.
Eliminate distractions but take micro-breaks.
Picture the following.
You’re ready to work on LinkedIn sales. But all of a sudden, you hear a smartphone notification. You check an email that arrived, notice a social media DM, check it, and scroll your feed, just a bit, and some more, and more… Yeah, we’ve been there. Then, your colleague comes up, and you start chatting for a while.
When you finally look up at your laptop, you see that half an hour has vaporized, and none of your sales tasks are marked as done.
You may easily get distracted and lose track of time.
So, here comes the next task and time management strategy for sales reps from Jesse Hanson, Content Manager at Online Solitaire & World of Card Games. He recommends removing distractions (smartphones, social media, etc.) to concentrate solely on your sales activities. Instead, “You should schedule micro-breaks, 5–10 minutes, and scatter them at intervals in your task list to increase your focus, motivation, and overall performance.”
Add these to your calendar:
- Break time
- Smartphone time
- Game time
- Nap time
- Team’s “water cooler” time, etc.
Schedule virtual relax/recharge chats with your colleagues to exchange fun sales memes, kick back, and unwind.
Ditch the multitasking habit.
Are you on your call, and in the meantime, sending a follow-up email to another prospect?
Trying to multitask again?
Don’t kid yourself. Your brain is just rapidly switching attention from one sales activity to another. And it does more harm than good. It cuts your ability to remember information and leads to attention lapses. Even worse, it causes mental blocks and robs a whopping 40% of your productivity.
But what can you do instead, as a sales representative or a team leader?
According to Stephan Baldwin, Founder of Assisted Living, it’s monotasking. Here’s what he said:
“It’s necessary to get rid of the bad multitasking habit and master the fine art of monotasking. Taking one task at a time, you can practice being in the moment and give your full focus to it. Taking small steps (mini-tasks) will help you achieve larger sales goals in the long run.”
Expand your sales tech stack.
If you still paddle your sales boat single-handedly with only one “oar” (most probably, Excel), it’s time to add automation to your sales management processes.
Put your sales tasks and time management on autopilot with technology in sales:
- Time trackers: Toggle Track, Harvest, Time Doctor
- Email finder tools: ProspectDaddy, Skrapp, Hunter.io
- B2B sales prospecting tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LeadIQ, AngelList
- Team communication tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chanty
- CRM software: Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce
- Sales engagement platforms: SmartReach.io, Expandi.io, Klenty
For example, SmartReach is an all-in-one sales engagement tool that can boost your sales team’s efficiency. From automated emails and follow ups to phone calls to SMS to social media communications, you can successfully run multichannel tasks and integrate it smoothly with your favorite CRM.
Need proof?
Read how Sales COR cut the time on operational tasks in half and boosted demo bookings by 20% once the company transitioned to SmartReach.
Assign the right tasks to the right sales reps.
This is, by far, one of the best sales task management tips for team leaders.
Choose carefully when assigning a sales representative to a particular prospect or customer to provide personalized guidance and build relationships. First, you must see each sales rep’s unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, one may have a knack for closing sales with small businesses, while another may be exceptionally good at dealing with enterprise customers.
Or –
One salesperson may be better at writing cold email subject lines and body copies rather than sitting on calls.
Volodymyr Shchegel, VP of Engineering at Clario, shares his company’s experience:
“Whenever we need to prepare technical presentations about our cybersecurity app or deeply technical instructions for clients, we assign these tasks to sales engineers with more profound hard skills. Knowing the insides of the spyware detector, they can showcase the product’s features and integrations in the best possible light.”
Indeed, while average sales representatives are responsible for the general sales cycle, sales engineers take over technical nuances. They may close the gap between complicated tech concepts and the prospect’s needs faster and more efficiently.
Delegate some work to AI.
Delegation is often the #1 imperative among time management hacks for busy salespeople.
But here, we’ll talk about the revolution in delegating sales tasks – delegating to artificial intelligence (AI). Rather than transferring it to other sales professionals, give it to AI.
In fact, McKinsey claims, AI can free up approximately 20% of a sales team’s capacity. And sales leaders are optimistic about generative AI’s use cases in sales.
Let’s review the most impactful of them.
- AI-powered upselling and cross-selling
AI can take up your upselling and cross-selling tasks.
For example:
Lidl UK launched an AI bot “Margot” – a virtual wine consultant that answers basic inquiries, gives recommendations to customers, and upsells products. Implementing an AI chatbot allows Lidl UK to increase live chat sales while freeing up time for sales agents to focus on priority interactions.
However, Andrew Pierce, CEO at LLC Attorney, warns about ethical and legal issues related to AI chatbots. One of the most bothersome is client confidentiality. Pierce says, “In the case of privacy, an AI-powered bot may collect and store clients’ personal data and conversations history. Ethical risks arise when the chatbot mishandles or shares this information with third parties without user consent.”
- AI-generated content
In the study by HubSpot, 18% of sales reps reported leveraging AI to generate content, and 16% used it for prospect outreach.
You can also upgrade your outreach strategy and save tons of time simultaneously with SmartReach’s AI content generator. It lets you work on several drafts and pick the best one.
Check out this guide on how to get started with the AI content generator without hiccups.
Closely collaborate with your marketing team.
To squeeze more “juice” from this sales management strategy, you need to improve your sales and marketing team collaboration and always try to stay on the same page. Even literally. You can have a shared mailbox – a central email management hub for marketing and sales teams.
But how exactly can you cooperate?
Learn from the experience of Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, and her team. She says, “Our marketing team slightly warms up cold leads with welcome discounts, compelling lead magnets, or other promotional techniques. Later, we hand them over to the sales team. Working in collaboration, we watch leads successfully progress through the sales funnel.”
Moreover, the marketing team can help you segment prospects in your sales pipeline with the help of contact forms.
Stripe, for instance, implements geographic (country/region) and firmographic (revenue and number of employees) market segmentation types to build a targeted prospect list via the website.
The only way to know how effectively you manage sales tasks is by measuring your productivity with a data-driven sales approach. It will help you spot the bottlenecks in the selling process, fix them, and figure out how to reduce time on certain work types without sacrificing quality. For example, you can spot repetitive tasks and streamline them to boost your sales performance.
However, 81% of sales teams audit and analyze their sales processes infrequently. And that’s when they may fall short to improve sales task management. Regularity matters greatly for a comprehensive picture.
Additionally, follow the piece of advice from Morgan Taylor, Co-Founder of Jolly SEO, and “Share your weekly or monthly results with your sales team. You can later discuss failures and find ways for improvement. Whereas successes can empower and motivate your salespeople to perform even higher.”
For example:
Here’s how Jolly SEO shares the sales team results in graphs and screenshots via Slack.
Psst… You can easily track and measure your sales performance with SmartReach. It provides detailed analytics and downloadable reports.
Take Away Your Keys to Better Sales Task Management
With these strategies, you’re finally ready to revolutionize your sales task management.
And your secret key to sales success is SmartReach. Streamline your outreach via multiple channels and free up valuable time on closing deals. Try SmartReach today and experience the power of automated sales activities, enhanced productivity, and better business outcomes.
