Time, Money, and Momentum

Ever finished the day feeling like you’ve worked hard but achieved little?

In this episode of The Reality is Sales Training, Bob and Jeremy get straight into the idea that time really does equal money in sales – and how to make every hour count. 

You’ll hear practical, no-fluff strategies for managing your day, protecting prime selling time, and getting more out of every call, conversation, and opportunity.

They cover:

·      The Success Six: A 100-year-old method that still works today

·      Why ‘worst first’ frees your focus and builds momentum

·      How to block out prime selling time (and keep admin at bay)

·      Covey’s urgent vs important matrix (and how salespeople often get it wrong)

·      The Three D’s: Delay, delegate, delete

·      The two-minute rule that keeps small tasks from stealing your day

·      The end-of-day check: Accomplished or exhausted?

This episode is full of simple tools and sales productivity tips you can use immediately to sharpen your focus, boost your revenue, and finish your day with time and energy to spare.

Explore resources, insights, and tools tailored to support your team's success and strategic growth at realitytraining.com.

Transcript

Time Is Money in Sales

Jeremy Blake 0:13

You're listening to another episode of The Reality is Sales Training. I'm joined by Bobby Morel. And I am Jeremy Blake. So we are going to get into the topic of time. So we all have the same amount of time. It's what do you do with it? It's your direction. Now, you're working right now, or you may not be working right now. What is your plan? What have you set out to do within your day? Yes, Bobby, you were going to ask or say.

Bob Morrell 0:38

Time is money. You hear that said a hell of a lot. Now, if you think about it, if you earn a salary, then your time is definitely money. You're earning an hourly rate for the work that you're doing. And if you can sell a bit more, you're probably going to earn a bit more per hour. So your time is definitely money. And if we think about sales, it's all about the allocation of time on the different prospects, the different sales opportunities that we have in front of us. Let's see if we can find some ways to make this as effective and positive as possible so that each minute, each hour that we spend generates sales and income.

The Ivy Lee Success Six Method

Blocking Time and Handling Interruptions

Jeremy Blake 1:18

So if you're working solo, you could be selling to consumers, you could be selling to businesses. Regardless of what your role is, leading a team, running, and who is the buyer, this episode is for you because it will help you get more organized and get a better stranglehold of time. So a lot of people come to work, they might turn the computer on, they start prospecting, responding to emails without really a plan. And they just think, well, I've got enough hours in the day and I'll make up this stuff that I have to do. We'd like to tell you about something that Ivy Lee came up with many, many years ago in the 1920s, and it's called the Success Six. Now, it says to you that you can only do six tasks or six things effectively in a day, and you put them into chunks of two. You're going to do two things in the morning, then you're going to have a coffee break. You're going to do two things, then you're going to have lunch, two things, go home. Now, when we say two things, it isn't necessarily the number of two things. It could be that task number one, which is always your worst first, you're going to call back that disgruntled customer, you're going to make that longer drive to see that prospect. You're going to finish that presentation. You're going to follow up people who haven't given you their answers, whatever it might be. That's your worst first. Then you're into your second task, then you give yourself a reward, a bit of delayed gratification. Then you're going to do something else, a series of other tasks, something else, lunch, two more things, go home. Now you write this the night before, I would recommend. So you've got a proper plan when you come into work the next day. And you run to this. Now, the other thing you might want to do is you might want to block out a section. So it could be the one just after lunch, that when somebody rings you and says, Oh, hi, Jeremy, can you help me with this? You say, I can't help you now as I'm working on something, but I'm free to talk to you between two and three. So this is quite a nice way of building a bit of sort of, I suppose, a gap in your success six where things and irritations and interruptions that may be urgent, you have a way of managing them. Anything else to say about the success six, Bob?

Urgent vs Important: Minimising Distractions

The Three D’s: Delay, Delegate, Delete

Bob Morrell 3:14

No, but I think it uh helps you to prioritize. That's what's important. And that brings us into um a series of key questions, which if you ask yourself, will help you manage your time more effectively. Now that first question is am I spending more time on what's urgent or on what's important? Now, this comes from Stephen Covey's um seven habits of highly effective people, his time management quadrant, four different parts. Now we don't need to go into all of them in detail. The key points here are if you're spending lots of time on things that are urgent or appear urgent, you may not be managing your time effectively enough. Because if you have a sound when an email comes in or it ghosts onto your screen, or a sound happens on your phone, a text that comes in when you're in the middle of writing a valuable proposal for a customer and it distracts you, you are gonna spend more time on those distractions and it's gonna get in the way of you doing that valuable, important work that you are doing. So, from a salesperson's point of view, minimize distractions. And if you're using the success six, you can think, okay, for the next hour, I'm gonna be phoning new prospects. So I'm gonna take get rid of all those distractions and I'm just gonna focus on that one task. You will do that task more effectively with more energy, you'll be more successful because you're not having those distractions. Now that's a really simple thing that anybody can do. If you're a manager, if you're a salesperson, whatever your level, you can turn things off so that you can work more effectively and more successfully. So that is a really, really good tip. Beautiful. The next one is which tasks could you delay, delegate, or delete without a negative impact? Let's have those three D's again, please. Delay, delegate, or delete.

Jeremy Blake 5:08

Lovely.

Bob Morrell 5:09

So let's imagine that you've sold something to somebody and you think, right, I'm delighted I've sold something, I'm gonna fill out the order form for that sale. And that order form could take you 15 minutes because there's a lot of different things and details in there for you to put in there. Now, of course, that's really important work. However, if it's at 10:15 in the morning, prime selling time, and there's lots of people sitting at their desks or working from home and taking calls and receiving emails. Do you want to do that administrative task in prime selling time? You've got all the details, you know what the sale is, put that to one side, carry on selling. Fill in the form later, okay? Because that form isn't going to add anything, it's just the details. That's just an administrative task. So you can delay that.

Admin vs Prime Selling Time

Jeremy Blake 5:59

Yeah, I think that's so interesting that you you do one good thing and you start to over-reward yourself. Back to the sex uh success six, easy for you to say. You're not at your tea break there, are you? So you should be cracking on.

Bob Morrell 6:13

Now, the other thing is that um if you've watched films like uh Wolf on Wall Street, in that uh scenario, when he makes his first sale uh in the um in the investment club, in the investors club, um, he passes the sale to his secretary to do the admin on. Now that's really interesting. They do that a lot in America, where they value the salesperson's time more than the person who's doing the admin. They'll pass the administration to somebody else whilst the salesperson makes more sales. All those minutes add up.

Minutes That Compound into Results

Jeremy Blake 6:47

You know, if you think of you say, but it's only a few minutes, but if it's five minutes per sale and you were going to be making 10 sales a day, then that's another 50 minutes, nearly an hour. And then that a week, that's five hours a month. Do you see how it adds up? Whereas I think people just don't get a handle on minutes. There was a writer called it's a bizarre name, Orrison Sweat Marzen. What a stupid name is that. And he simply said, uh, you'd be very surprised at what you can accomplish in a single minute. And it's quite interesting. Sometimes when I've been multitasking, like boiling a kettle, I can literally uh you know do something within that minute while I'm waiting rather than just sort of lounging around. Sometimes you can get a hell of a lot done in a minute. And that comes back to your two-minute rule, doesn't it? That two-minute rule you shared at the beginning.

Bob Morrell 7:32

If you can give somebody a little bit of coaching in one or two minutes, then that's a good thing to do.

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Accomplished or Exhausted? End‑of‑Day Test

Bob Morrell 8:00

Have we got a final question? Yes, the last one is at the end of the day, do you feel accomplished or exhausted? Now think about that. If you're exhausted, that's probably because you're stressed. Okay. You are, you know, operating at 100 miles an hour, juggling things all the time, doing meetings, reports, doing lots of different stressful things, which are not necessarily contributing to the success of what it is you're doing. If you feel accomplished, it means you are absolutely fulfilling the time of your day in the best possible way. And if you are selling things, that means you're mostly speaking to and dealing with customers and finding new customers and generating that pipeline of business which is going to make you and your company successful.

Act Now: Own Your Time

Jeremy Blake 8:50

Now, depending on when you're listening to this, you've always got, you know, the the best time was years ago, the next best time is now. So if you really haven't got a handle on time, stop saying I should have done this years ago. The next best time is right now. Get on with it. Start changing the way you manage your day, maximize your time as a salesperson or as part of a sales team. And if you're running a sales team and listening to this, then maybe look at your team. Who's got a handle on time? Who's lazy? Who's weak? Who's, you know, using too much time, who's not using enough time, what's important, what's urgent. There's plenty for you to digest in this very short episode.

Bob Morrell 9:28

So manage your time, make more money, and we will see you on another episode soon. But in the meantime, thanks for listening. Please share, edit, review, whatever.

Jeremy Blake 9:38

Pass this on to somebody who can make more of their time. Cheers for now.