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How to Make Time Go Faster: 5 Tips for Salespeople
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Samir Majumdar
Samir is the CEO and Co-founder of Veloxy. After spending 20+ years creating corporate systems, boosting revenue, and eliminating inefficiencies, Samir started Veloxy to help sales professionals shorten sales cycles, accelerate pipelines, and close more deals.
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When you’re a salesperson, some days go slower than others.
Mondays. Rainy days. Popular vacation days that you happen to work on. It’s a long list.
Luckily for you and me, Salesforce did the necessary research to discover one of the biggest pain points that cause slow workdays.
Did you know that salespeople spend over 1,300 hours every year not generating revenue?
That’s right, they spend it on boring data entry, dull admin tasks, redundant meetings, and other non-selling activities that make the clock crawl like a snail.
Here at Veloxy, we help sales organizations eliminate non-selling activity, and hence, accelerate your average workday while making two to three times more revenue than before.
With that being said, we also have an additional 5 ways to make your workday go by faster.
1. Speed up by slowing down
Your alarm goes off and you spring out of bed.
Shower. Breakfast. Traffic. Desk. Repeat for 260 days every year.
Tony Robbins has one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard in my life.
“If you don’t have 10 minutes, you don’t have a life.” Tony Robbins
Ever since I recovered from Covid in 2021, I’ve invested ten minutes in meditation every morning after I wake up. These are the 5 steps I repeat every morning:
It’s that easy. There are plenty of unique meditation techniques on YouTube and elsewhere on the world wide web. Find what works for you. After doing this for a week or two, you’ll feel calmer and your days will flow like a gentle stream.
2. Track your daily accomplishments
You look at your watch. It’s five o’clock. The inner naysayer whispers, “What did you accomplish today—nothing!” You return to the office the next morning feeling defeated.
Wait! You didn’t leave last night with your head down. You left with your head up smiling because you use a productivity tracking app.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “These apps take up too much time.” Maybe, if you consider spending 10 seconds clicking on a tab and checking a box “too much time”.
For argument’s sake, let’s say it takes you one minute to find a task and mark it complete.
If you completed 15 tasks in one day, you would spend 15 minutes checking boxes. And if you’re using the right app (like this one), you’ll get reminder emails telling you what a great job you did completing that task.
Or you can complete 15 tasks in one day, and forget what all you accomplished the next day.
Which of these two paths do you think the happy “today flew by” employee follows?
When you’re reminded just how productive (and successful you are) every single day, you’re happier, and happy employees find that days fly by.
Stop Procrastinating
In addition to the app that we recommended for tracking your accomplishments, I want to emphasize a related recommendation. Stop putting tasks off—especially the small ones.
No matter how repetitive, trivial, or small a task may be, if you know that it needs to get done, so does your subconscious mind.
As Nike would say, “Just do it.” Preventing procrastination is akin to ripping off a bandaid without thinking about it. The pain is very short-lived and the positive emotional response is long lasting.
3. Listen to instrumental music
Earlier in this blog post I shared a link to some meditative music, but that’s not always the best selection for when you’re researching prospects or writing up a proposal.
You most definitely want to focus on music that has no singing. Instrumental music, aka no singing, is the most popular form of music listened to by the average employee.
While it is calming, instrumental music more often than not stimulates your mind rather than relaxes it. Binaural and theta music is well known for this, but we’re going to focus on the two most popular forms of music listened to by us and our clients:
Classical Music
Beethovan. Mozart. Bach. The three heavy hitters of classical music.
One of the best attributes of these musicians is the longevity of their tracks. Even when the track is short, the passing to the next track is almost seamless, keeping you on task.
Plus, how often have you heard someone say, “I love Mozart’s Piano Concertos, but that Larghetto track is just plain awful.” Never.
We all have similar opinions on songs with lyrics, but criticism and skipping is much more rare when it comes to classical music.
If you want a recommendation I’ve used since taking college exams, it’s Alfred Brendel’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s – Mozart Piano Concertos No. 20 & 24.
Movie Soundtracks
If you are of the sort that finds instrumental music boring, especially classical—pivot to movie scores.
Movie soundtracks are made to keep the movie viewer engaged and emotionally tied to the story, and the same can be said of why we work every single day.
Imagine writing a proposal for a new opportunity and you have the soundtrack to Interstellar playing at the same time. Improving the customer experience, solving customer pain points, getting a huge commission check. It’s just as exciting as traveling through a black hole!
Other popular options include:
You’d be surprised how many employees listen to movie soundtracks that are near or strictly instrumental (not sure if a woman making a “wooo” noise is considered lyrical).
4. Walk with a coworker
Perceived scarcity of time rears its head again with this recommendation. If you don’t have time to meditate, if you don’t have time to check a few boxes, and if you don’t have time to walk around the building with your coworker—you don’t have a life!
Stop me if you’ve experienced this before. You’re seated at your desk and a coworker stops by, inviting you to brainstorm a few ideas around a new outreach strategy.
An email drops into your inbox. Make that three emails. You have a Zoom call in 45 minutes.
How are you supposed to concentrate on brainstorming when you’re surrounded by reminders and other things demanding your attention?
Break free from your desk and get outside! Not only is a leisurely walk good for your body, it’s also good for your mind, improving your mood and helping your day go by faster.
Plus, walking with a coworker or two is a great opportunity to brainstorm.
5. Automate as much as you can
Humans are not meant to perform boring, monotonous tasks.
Exciting = getting a new lead (one second).
Boring = having to fill out 32 fields in a one single Salesforce record (10 minutes).
You have to automate more than non-selling activities tied to Salesforce.
You have to automate non-human activities.
This begs the question—What makes an activity human? I invite you to spend 5 minutes meditating on this.
In my opinion, if you can’t automate it, ie. if the activity requires some degree of improvisation, it’s likely a human activity.
This is where challenges reside, as well as achievements and human interaction. When salespeople are spending over 90% of their time on activities that generate revenue (human activities) and less time on those that don’t (non-human activities), they and their organization are likely growing revenue faster than the competition…which also makes time go by faster!
Faster Days. Faster Results.
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, I invite you to use our new Revenue Growth Calculator.
If you’re wondering what this calculator has to do with making your day go by faster, it automatically calculates how much more revenue your sales organization would make if you eliminated non-selling activity.
It also extends that growth to a year, taking into consideration the progressive adoption of spending more time on selling activities, and adopting new selling technology such as lead prioritization and other sales artificial intelligence capabilities.
Once you use the calculator, request a complimentary consultation with our senior revenue director, Jeff Grice. He’s great, and he is on a mission to make your life more enjoyable and profitable!