At the end of 1999, a fellow regional sales manager in my company, Steve, changed jobs to lead our aerospace vertical. However, until they filled his previous role he had to juggle both jobs. By the way, his sales person in the Northwest U.S. had resigned about the same time, and he was filling that role too. These were three high profile and important spots for the company, and Steve had to fill all three of them at once. The surprise of the year was the sales performance of the Northwest U.S. in the first quarter of 2000 – that area had its best quarter ever.
A few months later Steve and I were in Philadelphia together touring a helicopter manufacturing plant. By that point, he was 100% focused on his new role. At dinner we had this dialogue:
Me: “How did you pull off that quarter? Do you follow some crazy time management philosophy? What did you do?”
Steve: Very humbly, “I think it’s more of what I didn’t do. I knew that I had limited time, so I didn’t focus on the things that weren’t important.”
Me: “How did you schedule around the other things? How did you know what wasn’t important? Did balls get dropped?”
Get ready, this is the paragraph that changed the way I work…
Steve: “If I had extra time, I got to the other things. Most weeks, I ran out of time. Some things didn’t get done, and a lot of things got done by someone else or my sales people figured it out on their own … but that stuff turned out to not be as important as I thought. I just had to get comfortable with certain things not getting done.”
As a sales manager, how much time are you spending on things that probably aren’t as important as you think? The only way to find out is to do all the important activities and watch less important items fall off your plate. What is one of the most important things you should be doing every week? Riding in the field with your sales people, right? However, dozens of other items get your attention because of the squeaky wheel philosophy.
Idea: Before anything else, make sure your calendar is full of time to spend in the field with your sales people – coaching them, helping them advance relationships and projects, and gaining their personal commitment to you. Just like saving for your retirement, pay yourself first and make sure this critical activity is scheduled. All the other things that worry you will get done by someone else or turn out to be not important.
I promise this: if you ride in the field with your team consistently for three months, their skill set is going to sky-rocket and the you won’t ever worry about those little tasks any more.
