Selfish vs. Unselfish Time
If I tell ya what I’m doing today Will you shut up and get out of my way Got the Time, Anthrax
If I tell ya what I’m doing today
Will you shut up and get out of my way
Got the Time, Anthrax
I once had a manager at Siebel that continuously wasted my time. I cannot blame him as he was getting the same treatment from his boss and his boss’s boss. It was the series of person meetings, calls, administrative trivia, and endless CRM tasks that ate into each work day, forcing me into constant catch up mode.
Eventually I found a better opportunity and left behind Captain Time Suck of the Many Meetings. But even negative experiences have learning value, and the lesson for me was to appreciate just how valuable my time is as a sales professional.
A few years later, I had the pleasure of working for a wiser and more level headed boss, the polar opposite of my former manager. He was allergic to pointless meetings and shared with me this saying:
“Be selfish with your time”
That was in the days when I was in managing consulting where time really is money. Your goal is to bill out your time because consultants are measured on utilization. Anything below 80% was a red flag and typically the firm wanted you at 85% or above.
What if we had the same concept for sales reps and paid them based on their “selling utilization”? In other words, what is the amount of time salespeople are actually engaged in customer facing activities?
Depending on whose statistics you believe, that number could be as low as 18% to as high as 38% percent of total working time (I am going with Salesforce’s numbers in the chart). I hope you find that appalling, because that is a total embarrassment. Some of that is the responsibility of sales reps that have poor time management skills or are prone to procrastination.
A large chuck of that non-selling time however is organizational. You can put these in buckets; management’s mismanagement, poor sales processes and tools, non-strategic corporate initiatives, and unstructured meetings. All of these are roadblocks to productivity.
If you are a sales rep, you need to control your destiny and manage your time better. That means saying no to many things. Ultimately your job and your compensation is based on bringing in revenue, not appeasing corporate interests. Be more selfish with your time.
For manager’s, your goal is the exact opposite. You need to spend more time coaching reps, nurturing newer reps, and solving problems on deals. I have observed that manager’s that are more giving with their time have more successful teams with higher overall quota attainment.
So over the years I have modified the saying as follows:
“Reps need to be selfish with their time and managers need to be unselfish with their time.”
Reps need to guard their time wisely and managers need to give their time to help their team achieve success.
Now I am going to completely contradict myself and cause much mind bending. This saying is actually false. It’s false not because of the underlying premise (reps losing selling time and managers wasting time in meetings). It’s wrong because this saying does not represent the type of sales team that is poised to succeed in today’s environment.
In the old world sales model, salespeople were individual units and operated as such. It did not matter that the rest of the team was not pulling their weight. As long as you made quota, all was fine. Same goes for managers, if their team was the lone success, that was fine for the team. It is the proverbial sharktank that you might observe on sales floors, a dog eat dog atmosphere.
This is a losing approach for the company’s prospects and terrible for morale. It creates massive rep attrition and damages your brand. Hiring becomes harder. Prospecting results drop, customer acquisition costs goes up, and customer churn spikes.
Why? Because in the sharktank, you do not have a culture of learning, collaboration, sharing, and helping. Instead you have a culture of winning at all cost gladiator style where reps hoard leads and learning and information. When there is no incentive to do otherwise, the result is a vicious, backstabbing, unemphatic “team” that has little concern about customers or each other or the company they are employed by.
The new sales model for winning teams emphasizes teamwork and collaboration. You still have personal ownership and responsibility, but everyone contributes to the pool of shared learning so that each person on the team is equipped to exceed quota. As such, the compensation ensures that both individual and team based objectives are taken into account. The goal is to have everyone win and invest in the success of the team.
At the same time, managers need to dedicate time for their own development. They need to build internal relationships, spend time with and listen to customers, and build up their own skills as leaders so they can more effectively coach their teams. At least 20% of your time should be dedicated to professional development and learning.
These days my mantra for time management is a bit different. I have changed it:
“If it helps your team win, be unselfish with your time.”
I feel better for it, it is much less confrontational and stress inducing.
The great equalizer in life is time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. How will you use your time to help your team and yourself win?
If you found this essay personally helpful, I encourage you to sign up for the weekly Enterprise Sales Forum Newsletter where I share my thoughts on the state of B2B sales, practical tips for improving your sales acumen, and upcoming sales talks across the global Enterprise Sales Forum community.