FranklinCovey-The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Leaders

HABIT 3: PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST

WHAT’S EATING YOUR TIME?

GETTING IN THE GAME IS A PRIORITY I’ll often ask a group of salespeople: If there is one thing that you could do consistently well that would make the most significant difference in your ability to get results, what would it be? The answer I most frequently hear is: “We need to spend more face-time with our clients.” That makes enormous sense. And in my experience, most salespeople overestimate the time they do spend with clients. Then I ask sales leaders, “What one activity could you do that would make you more effective as a sales leader with your team?” The answer is usually along the same lines: “I need to spend more time with my people.” It’s likely that one of the things that made you successful as an individual contributor was the amount of time you actually spent with customers, not back at the office building engaged in “good” meetings. If it’s mission-critical for you to get out of your office and be with your salespeople and with customers, so that you can observe your team in action, hear them and coach them, then how will you do it? It’s my direct observation that most coaching is done in the office and not in the field, and isn’t regularly scheduled. It’s more a matter of random happenstance. It turns out, often the reason why sales leaders don’t do this is this issue we’ve been talking about: There are lots of things that require their immediate attention, which may or may not be important. As a sales leader, you need to block out time proactively. Schedule your priorities, rather than prioritize your schedule.

“Time management is really a misnomer— the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.” Stephen R Covey

Say ‘No’ to these activities in order to steal time for Quadrant 2. This ability to judge is like a muscle and can be developed and strengthened. I’ve found that other people habitually invite you to Quadrant 3. A quick example: I was on the phone in my home office and one of my kids appeared in the doorway. It was obvious he wanted to ask a quick question. But since I didn’t look at him and allow him to distract me he stood and waited. Sensing I wasn’t going to be done with the call for longer than he was willing to wait, he wrote me a note and handed it to me. I turned it face down on the desk so I wouldn’t be interrupted. Finally, he tapped me on the shoulder. I waited for an opportunity in the conversation and said, “Can you hold on a moment? Someone’s just walked into my office.” I turned to my son and asked, “What do you need?” He replied, “Do you know what happened to the potato chips?” I allowed this trivial interruption because it seemed urgent. Similarly, our attention may be interrupted by colleagues frequently throughout the day. A good exercise for a sales leader is to look at the Time Management Matrix in the context of one of your typical weeks, and estimate the amount of time you spend in each quadrant. The ones above the line are important—they fall into the two categories of urgent or not urgent, and you should focus on these because they’re important. The ones that fall below the line are not important, even though some of them may be urgent. It also might be a good idea to identify who or what pulls you most into Quadrant 3 and take steps to reduce it, which could be a Quadrant 2 conversation with someone.

We all have the same amount of time in a given week. How can you allocate yours to achieve the things that are most important? FranklinCovey’s Time Management Matrix helps identify what activities eat up your time. “Urgent” matters require immediate attention. As Covey writes, “Urgent things act on us… They press on us; they insist on us. They’re usually popular with others. They’re usually right in front of us.” “Important” matters have to do with whether something contributes to your mission, your high-priority goals and the results you want to achieve. The danger is they don’t act on you, they wait for you to act on them. They require your proactive attention. Given those descriptions, you can see that Quadrant 1 is “urgent and important”— this is the quadrant of crisis. These are things that must be done because they are first “important” and second they are “urgent.” Many people live their lives in a constant state of firefighting because they have put off doing something until it is a crisis. Beware though, this is an addictive quadrant and when you’re done with Quadrant 1 activities you typically move to Quadrant 3. Being addicted to Quadrant 1 is dangerous because we don’t often judge well between activities that fall into Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3. The difference is big because Quadrant 3 represents those things that may be good to do, but they eat your time and don’t contribute to your mission. It’s easy to fall prey to this quadrant because it still is laced with a sense of urgency. But by definition they are not important, just urgent.

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