In today’s episode, we unpack one of the most powerful—yet often underdeveloped—performance drivers in Sales Leadership: effective time management for sales teams.

Even though it’s one of the most talked-about skills in the professional world, time management remains a major challenge for both salespeople and sales leaders alike. Drawing on principles from Atomic Habits and the Ford Motor Company’s process-efficiency revolution, this episode equips Sales Leaders with practical, actionable steps to sharpen their team’s focus and eliminate the day-to-day chaos that drags down performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Time management fuels Sales Growth, consistency, and customer experience.
• Sales teams MUST use their calendars as non-negotiable planning tools.
• Power Hours create deep work blocks that move deals forward faster.
• A CRM should guide workflow—not just store information.
• Every active deal needs a scheduled next step.
• These habits create clarity, structure, and 1% daily improvement.

Time Stamps:

0:00 Intro

0:57 Time Management

2:33 Calendars

3:56 Setting Up Power Hours

4:40 Making the CRM Non-Negotiable

6:35 Action Items

7:33 Outro

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Episode Transcript

Ben Wright: 

By the end of this episode, you will have learned three time management hacks that will help your team be more consistent in sales to increase your close rates.

Intro:

Welcome to Sales Process Made Easy, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.

I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.

Ben Wright:

By the end of this episode, we will have gone through the importance of predictable sales team calendars, how to leverage power hours into your weekly repertoires and why CRMs have become important not just for recording customer data but keeping your sales team on track. Time management is a topic that is spoken about relentlessly and across the hundreds of leaders I’ve worked with and thousands of sales people I’ve worked with over the last 25 years, it’s rare that I meet either a leader or a sales professional that says they are impeccable with their time management. At the same time, I unfortunately find that time management becomes a beast for teams to want to improve and when they do training on it, they find that they really struggle to implement effectively the outcomes that come from it.

Now, unfortunately, time management is really important. If we get it wrong and our teams are not focused on what is important, we will often end up with sales experiences that just don’t land for our customers. Follow-ups being slow, key pieces of information being forgotten, customers not being engaged in the times that suit for them rather than those that suit for us as a business.

Really methodical follow-up that just doesn’t generate excitement and emotional connection from customers. So, getting time management right is really important but I certainly recognise that it can be difficult to change habits that are ingrained into people for so long. Now, James Clear is a great authority on this around atomic habits.

He talks a lot around making habit change obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying and I’m going to very loosely follow some of those approaches from James Clear today. I’m certainly a huge advocate of his one percent better framework but when we think about the lessons from Ford Motor Company that we profiled on Wednesday in episode 150, one of the pieces that came out of it was how do we streamline our sales process to make sure that we’re delivering that excellent customer experience. Okay, so there’s three areas that I’d love you to think about out of today.

Number one is calendars. Using calendars for your sales teams as a non-negotiable way to be constructing their days. Focussing on when and how we meet.

We have a very effective four ways of meeting framework you can download at strongersalesteams.com forward slash resources. It is the best meeting frameworks that I have ever worked with across my 25-year career but above that what we need to be doing is making sure that our teams are using their calendars to diarise the important repeat events of their days and their weeks. What happens unfortunately is that when we don’t do that what’s urgent and noisy rather than necessarily what’s important tends to get prioritised.

For sales people of course we need to be responding to customers with those urgent requests but if we are not focussing on our pipeline and moving it forward, continuously stepping deals forward, then we end up with a very weak future pipeline right and I say to sales people that future Ben would be very annoyed with current Ben if we’re not able to do that. So they’re the types of important tasks i.e customer follow-up that often get missed when urgency prevails. So setting into your calendars specific events across the week is the most important aspect of time management that I see move the dial with teams.

The second most important is setting up power hours within calendars. So these are dedicated times for either prospecting and or deal follow-ups. Where I see teams use this really effectively is generally three lots of three.

So three days a week, a three-hour power block in each day where they focus solely on lead generation or working the active pipeline. I’ll often see teams do one day which is focused on prospecting and another two days focus on their existing pipelines or sometimes I’ll see teams do prospecting for the first hour and then focus on their existing pipelines for hours two and three. But what is really impactful and for me unequivocal in high-performing teams is that they are diarising power hours into their calendar each week.

The third part of being more consistent in sales and thinking about that Ford Motor Company lessons around optimising your processes is making the CRM non-negotiable. I hear a lot of sales leaders say yes we got a CRM yes we use it but I very rarely hear them say it’s non-negotiable. And the most impactful non-negotiable part of a CRM that I can recommend you think about is using tasks to manage workflows.

And that simply comes down to if you have an open deal it must have a task associated with it. So that any time a sales leader jumps into a deal we can see what the next steps are scheduled for the team member. So here in essence what we’re actually is combining all three time management hacks into one smooth flow.

We’re using our calendars to include what’s important but of great importance there is power hours are being scheduled in and the CRM is dictating where our focus in those power hours come from. So our calendars our vehicle the power hour is the focus time and the CRM are all the details that we need to be rolling into that focus time. Super impactful quite easy to roll out.

Now of course there’s some behavioural change needed there so making it attractive i.e finding ways to really encourage the team to do it can be something that I’d suggest you think about. But I think the most important part here is that when we have our time management calendars into power hours and using the CRMs to task guiding what we focus on it can be really satisfying because teams do close more deals they are more consistent in their sales processes and in general they come to work with less uncertainty but more structure and clarity in how they need to approach their days. So they’re the three key takeaways from today for effective time management focussing on sales team calendars power hours and the use of the CRM.

If you’re taking a call to action out of today the key focus I’d be recommending is to be setting up first of all your power hours in your calendar three lots of three start two weeks in advance to allow teams to have their calendars clear out so there’s no immediate pressure you might even start with two lots of three hours for the first couple of weeks and then build into three but certainly schedule it two weeks down the track build your power hours in all right and start the teams using tasks in your CRM. This may mean clearing out all your old tasks but if your calls to action can be power hours into your calendar and tasks being used by the team that’s perfect. Now we’re really grateful for everyone listening thank you it’s 25 years of sales experience that we love sharing we’re dropping episodes every Monday Wednesday and Friday ready for you when you start your working day a focus between each of our episodes for you and your teams is around how you can be one percent better each and every day because without question it does make an impact. Bye for now

Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you’ve reached the sales ceiling, are involved in every deal or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that’s you, that’s exactly why we created the Sold Out Sales Teams programme to help you get month-on-month sales growth with less stress. 

In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25% to 30%. That’s just week one.

For the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we’ll offer you a bonus one-on-one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster, which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. 

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