Transcription
A lot of times the difference between the top rep and the average rep is not how hard they're working, but it's the way that those top reps are spending their time. They're squeezing more juice out of every single hour because they figure out what makes them money in their sales day and they find out how to do that stuff first and then make time for all the other BS that gets thrown on your plate in sales.
And so I'm going to walk through my exact sales calendar that I used when I was an AE. And then I also coached all of my reps on when I was a VP of sales leading a team of 40 plus reps. Alrighty.
So my last quarter as a SAS sales AE, I did 287% of my number. I'm going to be honest, I was not the best closer at the time. There were two things I was good at. Number one, I was really good on the phones. I was really good at prospecting. I knew how to book meetings. And then number two, I knew how to manage 20, 30, sometimes 40 opportunities in a transactional deal cycle while continuing to prospect, even if it was the end of the month.
So, we're going to take two steps in breaking this down. Number one, I want to talk about like three time blocking or calendar management principles that just explain like anytime you're trying to figure out like when you should be doing something or what you should be spending your time on, this will give you like the guiding point for that. And then number two, we're going to walk through my literal calendar where there are four layers to building the perfect sales calendar.
Alrighty, so let's get into this thing. So first I want to talk through three key principles when it comes to managing your day in sales. So the first principle is called frontloading. Frontloading means you literally take the hardest part of your sales day and you do it first. So I remember when I first started insurance, we had no cold emails. It was a 100% cold calling, 100% commissionon culture. And what they would do is every single day they would start us off. They would get us into a room at 8:00 a.m. They would put the numbers on the board and then they would say at 8:30 a.m. everyone is going to start cold calling together. And you would be amazed, it was really, really, really hard to miss your cold calling commit if you were forced to do it with a group first thing in the morning, unless you literally were not dialing efficiently during that hour.
And so here's the thing, folks, is a lot of times when people go from SDR to AE or they go from meeting setter to closer, a lot of times what happens is they're like, "Oh, the most important thing is revenue rules all and so I need to prioritize my customer calls or meeting prep to make sure that I can actually close these deals." That is not true. You need to take the thing that is the hardest thing to do and you need to do that first. And nine times out of 10, the thing that requires the most energy from you is picking up the phone. If you go through two customer calls and then you research 20 accounts and then you eat a lunch and then you do a pipeline review with your manager and then at the end of the day it's 3 p.m. and you're like, "All right, time to do 50 cold calls." There's no way you're going to get it done.
And so the rule that I would usually set when I was coaching AES is if they were really struggling to hit their activity commit, I would literally be like, "All righty, here's the deal, dude. You are not allowed to open your inbox until you make your first $40. That means you get in at 8:00 or you get in at 8:30 and you dial from 9 to 10. And I hope you check your inbox last night because a prospect can wait between 9 to 10 for you to get a reply even if it is the end of the month." And I know that's going to make a lot of people cringe right now, but like to hammer home the point, if you are not done with your cold calls by 10:00 a.m., then nine times out of 10, you are going to miss your cold call commit because that is the hardest thing to do and other things are pulling you away. So that's number one.
Number two is called time blocking, aka Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law is a law that states the longer you allocate to do a task, the bigger that task will get. So, for example, if I say I have an hour to get ready for work, I'm going to spend that whole hour like cleaning up the floor. Maybe I put a dish away. Maybe I make my food. Maybe I like make my bed a little bit more. Maybe I sit on the couch longer. Maybe I read longer. And then I'm going to walk out the door. If I know I have 5 minutes to get ready for work, I'm going to be like, "Shoot, I'm going to prepack my bag last night so that I can literally wake up, throw water on my face, grab my backpack, and leave." And guess what? I'm still out the door ready for it.
So, this is not me advocating that you should do every single thing in a rush. But whenever you decide to do something, I always recommend putting a time block on the calendar that forces you to say before you start the task, this is how long I think the task should take. Usually when you're doing any sort of deep work, 30 minute blocks are not good. 30-inut blocks should be used for very quick tasks or for very quick alignment meetings. But if you got to do something hard like cold calling, the hardest part of cold calling is your first five dials are your worst five dials. And so usually what you want to do is you want to block out an hour because the first 10 minutes are like warming up and just like ah god like someone kicked my ass over here and it's like okay now after my first 15 minutes I'm warm. Imagine if you stopped after 15 minutes. You're going to get like 10 dials in 30 minutes. Go all the way through the hour and sprint through the finish line and force yourself to hit 40 dials in an hour or maybe more if you're using like a parallel dialer.
The third principle is stacking. So what stacking means is you want to stack similar types of activities in similar parts of the day. So, for example, it's really, really, really hard to go from researching accounts to customer meetings to pipeline reviews to cold calling, back to researching accounts, back into customer meetings. And the reason for that is you're context switching. So, mentally, it's just a lot of load on you. Two, you're energy switching. So, it's a different energy to bring into like a customer meeting than it is to bring into cold calls than it is to do like account research where you're sort of like tinkering away at the computer. But then also literally like your computer setup is completely different. Like your tabs for account research are different from your tabs when you're like clearing tasks on email, which are different from your tabs when you're cold calling, which is just like one screen. You're looking at that only thing.
So like try to stack similar activities. If I'm meeting with customers, I try to stack as many customer calls as I can back to back with quick little bathroom breaks or things like that. If I'm researching accounts, I usually do that like all my list building for 2 hours at the end of the day where it's like, all right, I'm going to prep for all of my meetings tomorrow. I'm going to do all my recaps from today and then I'm going to prep my entire list for tomorrow. And like all of that stuff is sort of the administrative work. But when you go from like prospecting to meeting to admin, back to prospecting, back to meeting, back to admin, like you'll find that like you have to get into the momentum again and again and again. And like that's usually what ends up killing someone's day is not that like they don't have the right things blocked in their calendar, but it's like they're switching from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing and they're never actually completing anything.
So we're going to take these three principles and we're going to use that to build our calendar in a couple different steps. Okay, so I'm going to pull this up right here. Your cold email reply rates literally triple if you pair them with a cold call. Right now you can get 34% off our 30 minutes to President's Club outbound bundle which includes our cold calling course, Cold Calls to President's Club, which will teach you exactly what to do, what to say, and how to sound for every single step of a cold call. It also includes our cold email course which will teach you how to write personalized onetoone feeling cold emails in minutes not hours and how to make world-class offers to your buyer to solicit responses instead of just asking for time. And so if you go to 30mppc.com/courses, go check out our outbound bundle and you will find yourself booking meeting after meeting after meeting and on your way to President's Club.
>> Step number one is you want to divide your day into three types of hours. So, you've got your green hours, which are really the hours of like 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Okay, those are your morning hours when you usually have the most energy. Your goal in your green hours is you want to try to hit your prospecting goal inside of your green hours. Okay, so what that means is like especially cold calls, you want to get all 40 cold calls you're making or whatever your dial commit is done by noon. Okay, you put it first.
So, then you transition. You usually have some lunch and then you go into your yellow hours. And after lunch, there's like a big decline in energy. But when it's still early afternoon, you can usually muster up the energy to jump onto a meeting or a customer call because it's a little bit more energizing to be having like a back and forth conversation with someone than it is to be like cranking out those cold calls. That's really hard to do at 2 p.m. It's not hard to jump on a discovery call at 2 p.m. in my experience. Okay, so call it from like 12 to 3, give or take. Those are your yellow hours. And again, you want to stack as many customer calls in those hours if possible. Now, you can't always control when your demo request round robin is going to be like putting meetings on your calendar, but whenever I'm booking meetings on a cold call or whenever I'm booking follow-up meetings in my sales cycle, I always try to put them in that 12 to3 block.
Here's the thing. Inevitably, some of those customer calls are going to like get pulled into those green hours because you can't control it. you have a 1 hour dial block and a 1 hour email block, you are not allowed to move that dial block outside of the green hours. So the moment customer calls start to crowd into your morning, you just got to move the dial block and you are never allowed to delete it. Okay? So those are your green hours.
And then you've got your red hours. And your red hours are the hours where it's purely administrative tasks. So, anytime I see someone who's like list building at 11:00, I'm like, you are burning dollars because you literally could be doing this at 3:00 a.m. if you wanted to. You do not even need to have a customer who's awake to build a list, to send a recap email, to prep for a call the next day. The only reason you're doing it is it's the easiest thing to do. And that's why you should do it at the end of the day is the death of a sales rep is in the red hours. is when you start letting admin bleed into your golden or your green hours. You got to push all that stuff to the end of the day.
So, let's actually break down what this looks like in practice because this is like what the calendar should look like. But the reality is like meetings get thrown onto your calendar. You get distracted by emails and you got to make time for some of the other things in sales. So, there are a couple steps to actually like getting this thing right.
So, step number one is you have to tame your email inbox. And so folks, this is like the first thing whenever I train this topic with AEES, the first thing I hear them complain about is like, oh no, like I've got to be able to respond to an email on time because if a customer emails me about a deal, I got to get back to them in 5 minutes. And I'm like, You do not need to get back to a customer within 5 minutes. If you are relying on inbox checking while you're walking to the water cooler, while you're in the middle of a dial blitz, while you're in the bathroom, then you are not managing your deals. Your deals are managing you.
So my goal is at any point in the day, I want to make sure that I have time to respond to urgent deals and customers. So there are three inbox blocks that you're going to put on your calendar. Your first one is first thing when you get in, unless you're on one of those funky dial commits for me. You're going to check your inbox and you're only going to clear out the urgent customer comms and then you're going to close it. If your manager has questions, if your company has questions, if there's like an HR onboarding task you have to do, you're going to do that stuff at the end of the day, not at the beginning of the day. Then you're going to do another inbox and lunch block at noon. That's another one. And then your last inbox block is going to happen after you take all of your customer calls around 3:00 p.m. Okay. So, you're going to reply to your customers at 8 or 9:00 a.m. You're going to reply to your customers at like noon. You're going to reply to your customers around 3. Sound good? Yeah. Your customers might have to wait 2 hours for you to reply. And if it is not literally the last day of the month where you are waiting on an urgent red line, that is totally fine most of the time.
Step two is you've got two morning prospect blocks, one afternoon flex block. we'll call it. So, here's the thing, folks, is you've got two prospecting blocks. You want to make the first one cold calling. And the reason for that is there is no interpersonal risk associated with sending emails. And usually, you can even send emails when you're pretty tired. The hardest, most energy draining thing to do is to pick up the phone. Okay? So, you're going to do your cold calls first. So, right after you inbox, you're going to jump right into your cold calls. We'll get to this a little bit later. That means you have to have your list built in your red hours the night before. If you're building your list after you check your inbox, you're burning green hours. So, you got to make sure that your list is built at the end of the day that you can come back in the morning and be like, "Boom, I'm literally getting in, grabbing my coffee, checking my inbox, boom, the phone is at my face." Then you can have another block later in the morning to finish up your emails. Or if you didn't hit your dial commit, I really recommend hitting that morning block again on cold calls and then use the afternoon flex block for your cold emails. Those first two blocks get you to quota. That third block gets you to President's Club. So, if you can get ahead on your cold calls and your cold emails in those first two blocks, then that third block is your leftover time where you can go deeper into the green and you can build more pipeline than other people are building because you manage your calendar effectively.
And then step number three is you start to plot customer calls in the gaps. So, I literally recommend you put those dial blocks on your calendar and then as customer calls come on board, you can start to move them around. But you're not allowed to move those first two blocks, especially that dial block out of the morning hours. So you start to fit customer calls in the gaps. You make sure you have some bathroom breaks, etc. And then the final step is you move all the admin to the end of the day. So I always like ran the triple at the end of the day. There were three things that I would always do. So I would write all of my recap emails back to back to back to back to back to back. That means you need to take good notes. And then I would do all my meeting preps for the next day back to back to back to back to back to back. And then I would do all my list building and I'd be like, "All right, today I'm gonna pull 25 accounts and then the next day I'm going to pull 25 contacts for those accounts and the next day I'm gonna write all the emails for those accounts." Or I would say, "I'm going to do five five5 account all the way through email all the way through." Okay, it doesn't really matter. Figure out the workflow that's best for you. But what's most important is you follow that principle of stacking, especially when it comes to your inbox, your recaps, and your prep.
Okay. So, what a lot of people do is they'll see these like customer calls over here or something like that and they'll be like, "Okay, I'm going to like get off this customer call and it was a really good discovery call and like I got to send that recap email right away or like I I've got to send them the business case recap right away or I've got to reach out to each of the people that was on the demo right away right after the meeting." And like guys, that's not true. Like you your customers right after your call, they're on to another call just like you. Nine times out of 10, your customer is gonna be like, "Yeah, I have a hard stop at the top of the hour." You can wait. The only thing that is time-sensitive is if you literally need to send a contract or if you need to send something that your customer needs to take action on internally, like if they need that business case, they need it to be able to make the presentation internally and they got to do it today, then you can send that right away. But nine times out of 10, a plain recap email if there's already a next step on the books is just like a refresher for your prospect. They will clear their inbox at the end of the day just like you clear your inbox at the end of the day. So that's step four is all your admin is at the end of the day.
So you might be wondering like if I'm an SDR and like I don't close deals. Only thing that changes is I want you to imagine that like your green hours get duplicated for the yellow hours. So really simple to recap, there are three principles that we went through when it comes to managing your time in sales. The first is frontload the hardest thing first. The second is you want to make sure you time block certain tasks, aka Parkinson's law. And then the third is you want to stack similar types of activities together so that you can get momentum in them. And then we went through the four layers of the calendar. But the biggest thing you need to remember is like those green hours from 9 to 12, hit your prospecting goal. From 12:00 to 3, those are your yellow hours. Take your customer calls. 3 to 6. Those are your admin hours. Build your list in those blocks. And folks, if you do that, you will get massively more done than most sales people do. The way that I know you will be doing it right is at the end of the month, you will still be hitting your cold calling commit or when you get busy or when you get big pipeline, you will still be hitting your cold calling or your pipeline goal or your prospecting goal and everyone else will be saying, "I don't have the time to prospect." Don't be that rep. The reason that you are literally watching this video right now is because you are not one of those reps. So, go be the exception to rule and make it happen regardless.
Folks, if you like this one, I've got two resources for you. Number one, I broke down this entire topic in newsletter format and written format as well. If you just want like a hard copy with all these screenshots and then the second resource that I have for you is if you are making cold calls or you're making time in the morning cold calls, you might as well make sure that you're pretty damn good on the phones. And on this topic, our cold calling course literally has an entire section called how to be a machine where it goes in like 10x detail on all of these concepts of like how do I time block in my day when I'm cold calling? What should my layout be like? How do I get momentum in my dial blitzes? What do I do if I book a meeting? Do I set the meeting on the spot or do I go back to cold calling? As well as all of the cold calling scripts and everything else you could need to be successful on the phones. It's called Cold Calls to President's Club. And because you're watching this, there's like a special discount link somewhere here down in the show notes. Go check it out. It's the best cold calling resource that we have. And multiple teams are using it to literally book one and three cold calls every single day. And like that is the key to making it to President's Club is if you can book one and three cold calls, folks, you're going to go really far.
Alrighty, folks. We'll see you on the next one.