Energy not time management key to new business prospecting

Time management isn’t what it used to be.

In the current workplace and economy—disrupted by the pandemic and new workforce expectations—sales organizations need to seek out new ways to keep their workforce motivated, engaged, productive and thriving. This is especially true in hybrid and remote work environments, and means salespeople need help differentiating what’s a priority and what isn’t, to operate at their fullest potential.

It’s No Longer About Peak Performance, It’s About Energy

The old model of time management focused on “peak performance” in a way that’s irrelevant to the modern salesforce. In this new era of knowledge work, businesses need to align to changing needs and preferences which necessitate constant shifts in priorities and bursts of urgent requests. This is challenging for those who are linear thinkers or who prefer to follow rules and protocols in an orderly, prescribed fashion. To develop a sales organization which performs at its best, we need to help employees find ways to do more with the time they have: we need to shift the focus from managing our time to managing our energy.

The following four strategies, adapted from the work of Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, will help you get there.

Strategy #1: To increase performance, focus on managing your energy, not your time.

Many of us in sales race through life without ever taking a break. We return home exhausted from a long day’s work, feeling overwhelmed with both work and our private lives and, no matter how hard we try, there’s never enough time to get everything done. But energy, not time, is the fundamental ingredient of efficiency and high performance. While we naturally focus on optimizing our time, time alone won’t help us achieve our sales goals.  We also need energy: without it, we can’t perform at an engaged level for any sustained period.  One way to efficiently manage energy and get more accomplished is to work less and take more breaks. Think about it: How do you feel after working for four hours straight? Most of us feel completely drained and frustrated, and that that last Grande Dark Roast didn’t hold our focus and productivity.  Instead, try maximizing your energy (and therefore your productivity) by planning your work around breaks. 

Strategy #2: To maintain energy levels, work in "bursts."

Each of us has a limited amount of energy. If we expend more energy than we can recover, it will inevitably end in burnout. In fact, recovery is an integral part of sustaining high levels of energy and thus peak performance.  In David Kleitman's famous sleep research, he found that humans can only operate at optimum levels of engagement for about 90 minutes at a time.  He called this the Ultradian Rhythm. Kleitman suggested that we need to rest approximately 10-15 minutes after every 90-minute "burst." In sales, this means taking a relaxing break. Have a coffee, connect with colleagues, or take a stroll through a nearby park for fifteen minutes before getting back on the phones or finishing off that proposal. As salespeople plan their work, they should also plan their breaks. Salespeople can plan an entire day around these work-break “bursts” and have four to five of them in a workday.

Strategy #3: Embrace the value of vitality and creativity.

There’s never been a greater need—or value—for creativity in engaging prospects and clients. Creativity also requires time and energy, and the challenge is, the more we try to achieve creativity, efficiency and focus all at once, the harder each becomes.

So how do we balance them all? The key is how you use your own mental energy. First, we need to find ways to focus most efficiently on our work. This means adopting realistic optimism: viewing the world “as it is” while simultaneously working positively toward our desired outcome. Realistic optimism helps us keep our sights on the target, even when things go awry. A helpful tip to accomplish this is to create a daily "big six" list: six priorities each day that will drive you to your week's most vital outcome. This beneficial hack keeps you from becoming too tactical with your to dos and ensures your laser attention on the right work. Once you’re able to keep your focus through realistic optimism, you can set your sights on boosting your creativity, and managing your time and energy to allow your own brain to perform in both its analytical and creative capacities.

Strategy #4: Think big and focus on the broader context of the sales job.

When salespeople are stressed—maybe on the verge of burnout—they tend to focus on the small tasks or tactics.  In times of stress, focusing on the small things can seem less daunting, but it also can impede appointment setting, sales calls, and overall goal attainment. Before salespeople can fully harness our energy toward our professional goals, we should examine the sources of energy and how they connect to what’s most important. 

We’re all familiar with physical energy (what we all use to get around), but there are three additional sources of energy we bring with us to our work: emotional, mental, and spiritual.

• Emotional flexibility allows us to align our emotions appropriately to a given situation rather than responding with rigidity. This allows us to experience the business day at a flat emotional plane, absent of tone or subjectivity. 
• Mental endurance keeps us focused and concentrated over time. It helps us, for instance, to power through the times when we’d rather quit but shouldn’t. 
• Spiritual strength helps us stay connected to what we value most deeply. These values are our life’s compass which keep us connected to our career and personal life mission. 

Focusing on and maximizing each of these energy levels will help us perform at our peak and feel our very best. We should use them to set bigger goals that drive and inspire us. These are goals that at first blush almost seem impossible to achieve but, with a good plan and deep energy stores, can be done. 

Energy in the New World of Work

Today’s and tomorrow’s workplace presents new challenges and opportunities that are different than we’ve seen before. Each of us must develop the ability to adjust and respond to the challenges of balancing a remote working environment while maintaining personal and professional engagement. The good news is that salespeople are resilient creatures and, with the help of sound energy management and full engagement practices, organizations can help them achieve a sense of accomplishment and purpose no matter where they work or the type interactions they experience.

To help individuals become and remain fully engaged, people must learn to actively build their energy capacity and direct this energy intelligently to the right tasks and activities each day. Performing at our best requires focus and finding ways to do more with the precious and limited time we possess.

In today’s and tomorrow’s workforce, managing our energy is not only a recommendation - it is a survival strategy.

To learn more about BWST's Energy is the New Time program, text Bill Walton at 917-439-3271.