How to Plan Your Sales Month

How do you spend the first and last 10 minutes of each work day?

For most people, they check Slack and email for “urgent” messages they may have missed, and within minutes our work day immediately takes control of us. When you jump into email first thing, you’re deciding to start your day in a reactionary way and it’s difficult to pull yourself out of that flow once you start.

9 times out of 10, you haven’t missed a life-altering message. Most things can wait. The truth is - we love notifications so it’s extremely easy to fall for that beautiful red dot on your Slack app.

Instead of reacting, start your day by confirming your top priorities and decide on 3 major actions/decisions you can make today that will move the needle forward.

If you’re planning accordingly, you’ve already decided today’s top priorities yesterday, at the end of the day - which is how you should spend the last 10 minutes of each day. Planning for tomorrow.

But, consistent planning is challenging when leadership is constantly throwing more stuff at us. Side projects, compliance training, new reports to run, etc. It feels like there is always something pulling us away from our main focus - closing new business.

In general, it feels like most companies and leadership are making things much more difficult and complex than they need to be, right?

Here’s how you can hedge against all of the noise and stick to your plan:

1. Protect your time above all else: you should feel comfortable challenging your peers, cross-functional partners, and even leadership with accepting/attending new meetings. If you don’t feel comfortable having that conversation, you may want to look for a new company. As a salesperson, you have a quota and your company needs to give you the time necessary to go hit your number.

2. Plan your entire sales month: At the top of the month you should know; focus accounts and prospects within those accounts, which sequences you’re sending out, upcoming webinars/events, etc. And, you should have a commitment to yourself in writing about the specific activities you’re going to complete to achieve quota. Additionally, you should be able to look back on historical data to inform the level of activity you’ll need to execute in order to hit quota, based on historical conversion rates. You can do this easily with the Monthly Sales Planner - delivered to your inbox on July 1st.

3. Investigate & Replicate: The second you book a meeting, no matter how you do it, the first thing you need to do is stop! Then, investigate what just happened. What did you say? What questions did you answer that your prospect responded well to? How did you position your company/value prop? Overall, what did you do in that moment to convert? Write down a few specific items and double-click on those. Replicate those actions which produce positive outcomes. On the flip-side, when you fall flat on your face, as well do - repeat the Investigate process except this time, remove the actions that produced failure from your process.

Do More of What Works (minus) Less of What Doesn’t Work. That’s the recipe.

To provide Salespeople with more support on Sales Planning, I’m releasing a Monthly Sales Planner on July 1st (running a pre-launch promo here). This will include the plan only.

If you’d like to do a 1-hour coaching session to ensure we get your plan set up in the most effective way, you can sign-up for that below:

Happy Hunting!