As a sales professional, time is your only inventory. You need to be 100 percent absolutely positive that you’re doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

There is a myriad of things that can waste a sales professional’s time, but if you have solid goals and attempt to achieve them, you should be able to weed out the time wasters and continue to ad value to your life.

Here’s an example of wasted time you don’t even think twice about because it’s time, your time. Say a co-worker stops you in the hall and demands $150. Of course you say no because you know the value of $150 and you won’t just give them that kind of money; however, you allow this same co-worker to hijack your time by dragging you into a meeting that has nothing to do with you or your sales process for hours on end. Where is the value in that? Time is money.

One of the main keys to successfully managing your time is to take back control of it. Take charge of your own time and attention. Don’t be to quick to give other people power to boss you around or delegate their work to you, unless that is your job, to help others and only if you have the time and it is a learning experience or can ad some other type of value to your life or goals. Also, don’t get caught up in reading countless articles or data on the Internet or magazines, a few will keep you up to date, so will watching the evening news. Time wasters don’t get home in time to watch the news, but professional salespeople do.

One of the major time wasters of culture today is e-mail. It can take up to a day to catch up and most of it isn’t as important as the subject line indicates. Use the folders feature in your e-mail program. Make a folder for anything addressed to multiple recipients, another for ‘press releases’ and another folder for ‘urgent.’ This way, you will not be checking your e-mail every few minutes of the day. Set aside a certain time, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, perhaps before you go out on a sales call or take a break, to check and respond to an e-mail.

If you work with a team, get them together and discuss a mutual subject line for e-mails and tell them of your plan with the e-mail folders. Hopefully, this will catch on with the rest of the team and time wasting will be cut down. Another thing you might want to discuss with your team while you have them all gathered together is questions and answer time in addition to quiet work time. If you have a conference room, you could all set up in there, say, every other day, and work independently of one another, but if questions arise or if someone needs help, you are all right there. No hunting for someone who may be busy doing other work.

The same goes for quiet time. Designate a period of time, everyday or every other day, which ever works best for you and your team, so that no one interrupts each other. Everyone remains quiet and to themselves for the duration of the quiet time. Of course if there is an emergency, a client or customer on the phone, that is different. I am talking about your co-workers and time wasting with constant questions or interruptions of other kinds.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating; learn to say “no.” If it’s hard for you to say “no” try using words like “kinda interested” or “maybe later” or “I’ll need a little more information,” then make your decision to help this person based on the information and the amount of valuable time you have to spare.

“My interest is in the future; as I’m going to be spending the rest of my life there.” Charles Kettering

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Filed under: Common Sales Errors • Professional Sales Tips

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