The struggle is real.
As a sales leader, the demands on your time often seem to outnumber the hours in a day.
It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of your individual sales rep needs and urgent customer issues, leaving little room for strategic thinking and long-term planning.
While addressing these immediate concerns is crucial, it’s equally important to recognize that every minute spent firefighting is time taken away from initiatives that could have a broader, more significant impact on your sales organization.
Here are five tried and true actionable tips to help you find more time in your day and drive lasting improvements:
#1 Make Strategic Thinking a Priority
- Block off at least 45 minutes to an hour each day to disconnect from the daily grind and focus on long-term goals, opportunities, and potential challenges.
- During this time, silence your phone, close your email, and create a distraction-free environment to foster deep thinking.
- Review sales data, customer feedback, and market trends to identify areas for improvement and strategic opportunities.
#2 Identify and Address Systemic Issues
- When sales reps or customers raise concerns, step back and look for recurring themes. Are these isolated incidents, or are they symptoms of deeper, systemic issues within your processes or policies?
- If you identify systemic problems, focus on implementing global processes or policy changes that address the root cause rather than just putting out individual fires. This can significantly reduce the volume of recurring issues and free up your time for more strategic initiatives.
#3 Delegate Effectively
- Identify tasks that can be handled by others, whether it’s an administrative assistant, a sales operations specialist, or another member of your team.
- Provide clear instructions, set expectations, and offer ongoing support to ensure delegated tasks are completed successfully.
- Freeing up your time allows you to concentrate on high-impact activities that only you can do, such as strategic planning, coaching, and building key relationships.
#4 Shift from Solving to Coaching
- Effective coaching starts with observation and truly understanding your team’s behaviors and needs – without direct observation, coaching is driven by guesswork and assumptions.
- When a team member approaches you with a problem, resist the urge to immediately provide a solution. Instead, guide them through the problem-solving process (at Carew we refer to this as our GROWTH Coaching Model), helping them develop critical thinking and decision-making skills.
- Coaching not only solves the immediate issue but also equips your team to handle similar situations independently in the future, reducing their reliance on you and fostering their professional development.
In our newly revamped Excellence in Sales Leadership™ program we identify coaching as one of the four branches of leadership alongside managing, guiding, and developing.
Our program provides a clear coaching framework, proven practices to accelerate your team’s growth and development, strategies for managing coaching interactions and conversations, tactics for building competence within your team, and dives deep into our GROWTH Coaching (problem solving) Model.
Coaching is:
- Ongoing
- Developmental
- Participative, collaborative
- Empowering, supportive
- Honest
- Mentoring
- Asking powerful questions
As a leader, your value is now based on your ability to help others develop and apply their own strengths. That ability is referred to as coaching.
– Carew International
You can learn more about our Excellence in Sales Leadership™ program here.
#5 Empower Your Sales Team
- Review existing policies and procedures to identify areas where you can empower your sales team to make decisions and take action without requiring your approval.
- Eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks and bureaucracy that hinder your team’s efficiency and autonomy.
- Encourage your team to take ownership of their work, make informed decisions, and proactively solve problems.
Effective leadership is solving problems and empowering your team, fostering their growth, and creating a culture of continuous improvement.
Remember: Your time is your most valuable asset. Invest it wisely.
