Time Management Tips: Don't Confuse Activity with Results

Sales is all about action. Sales people are usually high energy people who would rather be out shaking the bushes than sitting in the office. That's a good quality as long as you're taking action on the right things. As a sales person you're responsible for your own results and you feel like you're getting pulled in multiple directions all day everyday. Time is money for you because if you aren't getting the most value from your time you aren't getting the money you could be. Yet still you have customers, staff, and sometimes sales managers all making demands of your time so you have to allocate your time in the best way.

This time management tip is about gaining control of your time and income potential. If you allow others to pull your strings like a yo-yo they will, and you'll be the one who suffers. To avoid this syndrome you need to develop routines and habits based on the best investment of your time.

One of the best time management tips when it comes to routines and habits is starting your day the night before. Before you end the day decide exactly how you will invest your time the next day. By that I mean know exactly who you will call, in what order, and have all the contact information at your finger tips for when you start the day tomorrow.

Know exactly when you will review your email and voice mail and respond. If you allow the customer and others to dictate how and when you respond you're training them to disrespect and ill use your time, and that is costing you both time and money. You can't predict the behavior of others, but you can predict yours. Everything isn't a crisis so stop allowing every problem a customer has turn into one. When you think about the problems customers have you begin to see that most problems aren't new, and that means you can develop a procedure for dealing with and responding to them.

Procedures that help you deal with and respond to problems you can identify entire problems or parts of problems that you can delegate. Then rather than having to take all the individuals yourself you can have others do them for you and all you have to do is follow up to make sure everything is handled. Procedures provide a predictable way to deal with most of the problems that come your way so you can focus on the one to three most important actions for you to take each day rather than actions that don't produce results.

About the Author

About the author: Cheryl A. Clausen can help you get where you want to be. Helpful Time Management Tips get her free analysis. Enhance your Time Management Skills, look here. 

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Interesting article. And in

Interesting article. And in sum, another name for "planning actions" is called schedule, to measure outcome is called performance review. Along that line, one would do better.

Cheers,

Don

More tips on Time Management

Here are more to improve your management of time:

1. Get rid of the clutter and get organized.

2. Learn to prioritize.

3. Make time to work ahead.

4. Schedule your appointments and other work activities efficiently.

Source of ideas: Gregg Hall

More Time Management articles can be found here:
http://time-management.bestmanagementarticles.com/

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