Maximize Your Productivity: Plan Your Week with These Proven Strategies

Unlock your potential by mastering the art of weekly planning to boost productivity and sales success.

You will accomplish more by planning your week before it starts. Put what you need to do on your calendar before you finish work on Friday. If Friday doesn’t work for you, spend Saturday morning planning the coming week. By doing this in advance, you will not waste time deciding what to do, making you less likely to open your email inbox or spend time on social platforms.

One way to improve your productivity is to create three 90-minute blocks each day. Most people can work for about that amount of time. In one 90-minute block, you can do your prospecting. If you have a client proposal to write, 90 minutes is often enough to allow you to finish it. Three ninety-minute blocks each day for these types of projects or tasks amount to 4.5 hours of your day.

At the end of a 90-minute block, you can check your email and voicemail and return any calls you missed. You can also stretch, take a short walk, or hydrate while reading something. You can use these in-between periods for something other than work. This gives you time before you start your second block.

As you plan your week, you will have to work around your internal meetings and your sales meetings with your clients or prospects. If you want to be more productive with your time, you need to prioritize your work. You are a salesperson, so your priority is selling and generating revenue.

Optimize Prospecting Efficiency

By dedicating a 90-minute prospecting block every day, you will prospect for 7.5 hours a week. Provided you have an effective approach to booking a first meeting, this is often enough to fill your calendar. If you aren’t booking new meetings with 90 minutes a day of prospecting, you may need to find more time for it.

Follow Up and Move Deals Forward

I don’t like having to follow up. I prefer to have a meeting booked, but the nature of sales is that you have to follow up on the contacts you pursue. You should do your best to move every opportunity in your pipeline throughout your week. This second block is to follow up on contacts from your prospecting block to move your deals through the sales conversation.

Effective Preparation and Planning

In a 90-minute block, you can prepare for prospecting by doing your research and reading. You may use this time to prepare for your upcoming first meetings. If you want to succeed in creating new opportunities, know that your contacts will measure you by what you know about their company, their industry, and your approach to the sales conversations.

Maximize Face-to-Face Selling Time

This is the most important thing you need to do to succeed in sales, provided you are a highly effective salesperson. The more time you spend with your contacts, the more opportunities you create and win. Prospecting, follow-up, and preparation are about succeeding in these meetings.

Utilize CRM as a Strategic Asset

Most salespeople believe that the CRM is Big Brother, and that may be true if you have an old-school sales manager who counts calls instead of meetings. You should treat your CRM as a strategic asset. You should document the problems your prospective clients have as well as the competitor you are displacing. Your CRM is the record of your relationships, the most valuable assets you own.

Ensure Client Success and Satisfaction

If you want to have lifelong clients, you must follow up to ensure they are succeeding. Even if you have a client success function, you sold the client the results they needed, so your contacts should hear from you. If there is a problem, they will look to you for help. This will help you build the trust and relationships you need to succeed in sales.

Commit to Continuous Self-Development

You are perfect just as you are, but you can use a little improvement. Without working on yourself, you can experience the same year over and over again. Whether you take B2B sales training or some other self-development course, identify the areas that you need to improve. This includes pursuing self-development in personal areas such as dancing, martial arts, or calligraphy.

Regular Review and Reflection

You can improve your results by reviewing your week and reflecting on what went well and why. Then, consider what didn’t go well and what you might need to change to improve your results next time. You will improve yourself by doing this work. Buy a journal or use another tool you have available.

Increase Selling Time and Results

If the surveys are correct, salespeople spend 34 percent of their time selling. If you want to improve your sales results, double that 34 percent to double the results you are currently seeing. Too many sales reps lie to themselves about not having enough time. You and I each have 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

Improving your results is about prioritizing and planning your work. The more you rely on your calendar to determine what you should do, the better your ability to get the right things done. Managing your calendar can prevent you from spending time on things that aren’t going to help you win more deals and improve your income.

The time people waste causes all kinds of problems for them. Without a structure for planning your work, you are likely to drift from one thing to the next. Let the calendar decide what you do and when.

If you are a salesperson, plan your week before it starts. If you are a sales leader, require your team to do this work. It will go a long way to helping you and your sales team to reach their goals.