When you’ve had a full on sales day and are ready to rest, the last thing you want to do is start planning your next day’s routine.

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Does that sound like your sales reps? It can be easy for reps to let a couple days slip by without planning their next day. However, before they know it, easy problems - like sending off a quote - turn into ugly challenges - “Yikes, I was meant to send that damn quote 2 days ago, I don’t have time to get that written…” Cue the emergency planning!

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It’s not worth the slip up and wasted time. Because we’re all about simplicity at Numerik, here’s a rapidfire personal planning routine your reps can use to plan their next sales day in 10 minutes.

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The 10 minute personal planning routine to help reps plan their next day

Step 1: Reviewing the ‘who’

Kick the debrief and planning off with reviewing the ‘who.’ Your sales activities revolve around customers and the personal sales debrief is the same.

• Who do I to followup with?
• Who needs a quote sent?
• Who do I need to visit?
• Who do I need to contact?

Bullet point the answers to these 4 questions down into your plan for the next day. Bam. You’ve got 4 actions for the next day ready to go.

Step 2: What do I need?

If you nailed step 1, you’ll have at least 4 client actions points ready to be achieved the next day.

Now you’ll need to pin down the resources you need to execute those 4 actions properly.

• What content do I need to prepare to support myself?

You might need to write up a quote, have promo materials made up for a client’s shop floor, graphics for a rebate, or a new product pitch deck. Whatever you need, you’ll have to book in to get sorted for the next day.

Note it all down, and proceed to step 3.

Step 3: Booking your time

Now it’s time to take those client actions from step 1, and the resources required from step 2, and organize them into tomorrow’s schedule.

• When am I going to try to get these achieved in my day?

Use time blocking on your calendar to carve out a moment for each task. E.g. “followup with the East hub store - 9am-9:15am,” “Request rebate graphics from marketing - 10am” “Write quote for Mid city customer and send it - 10:30am-10:50am.”

What makes these questions, and having a planning routine, so good?

Look at it this way. Imagine you’re holding a glass of water. 

If you hold it for one minute, it’s not a problem. You’re just holding a glass of water. Trivial.

Now imagine you’ve held that glass for 2 hours. Now it’s a pain. The glass of water is a problem.

Having a daily planning routine is like the glass of water. If we review our tasks, and do a little bit each day to prepare for the next, we aren’t going to feel pressured. Like holding the glass for 1 minute.

However, if we skip a few days, our tasks pile up, and we’re suddenly overwhelmed. That’s like holding the glass of water for hours. To get back to normal, you’d need to jump into emergency planning which’d waste time. That’s a problem.

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The short

Save your reps the grief by helping them get into a daily planning routine. Start with client actions, resources required, then booking in time. Give the planning routine a go for a couple weeks and see how the team feels. 

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It’s a breezy 10 minute task which can save sales reps hours of stress. After all, without a plan, they’ll have to get used to doing work one handed - that glass of water won’t hold itself. 

Coming up…

Next week we’ll be launching our newest feature - perfect for doing a 10 min planning routine or getting a view of your tasks at a glance. Stay tuned!

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