The death of a seller is when you let non-revenue generating activities rule your day.
Checking your inbox, going on 1:1s, or wasting your time sending recap emails at 10am is a surefire way to you miss your prospecting and pipeline generation goals.
You can produce 2x the next rep just by learning to manage your day. That means doing the right activities, at the right part of the day, for fully focused sprints.
So we'll breakdown the ideal sales calendar in four layers:
- 🛑 Inbox
- 🟣 Customer calls
- 🟢 Active prospecting time (calls, emails, tasks)
- 🟡 Passive prospecting time (admin work, account research)
Let's dive in.
Layer 1: The inbox (8-12-3)
Sellers think staring at their inbox all day and replying with a 2-minute SLA means they're going to close deals faster. That's complete BS.
Customers are in back-to-back calls just like you. This is purely an excuse for you to look for "good news" in your inbox instead of actually going and finding more opportunities.
Instead, tame your inbox (and Slack) in 3 windows at 8:30am, 12pm, and 3pm. That means you close it entirely (no notifications, no phone checking) in the gaps in-between.
Most deals wait 2 hours for a response with the rare exception of urgent redlines on the last day of the quarter. That also means you should send all recap emails in that final 3pm block -- not right after your call with them (again, they're in other meetings too).
Layer 2: Customer Calls
From there, customer calls start to hit your calendar. If you assume the average seller takes 2 hours of live customer calls per day (4 discovery calls or 2 deep dive demos), that looks like the picture above.
Try to stack similar activities in 1-hour blocks wherever possible. The biggest productivity killer is when you're context switching between a 30 minute call and a 30 minute prospecting block over and over. Ask your SDRs to stack customer calls next to other ones so that you can hit multiple back to back.
Layer 3: Active Prospecting
Your golden hours are from 8am to 3pm: that means all active prospecting and customer calls must be done during these hours.
Active prospecting is defined as live cold calls or live cold emails. Always do your cold calls first thing in the morning, then your cold emails, then reserve a spillover block for whatever's left in the afternoon (often PM cold calls to change up the timezone).
If a day ever gets too crowded, block prospecting time on your calendar the moment you see under 2 hours free. As much as I wish you could always block prospecting from 9-10 every day, you often need to keep your calendar open for SDRs meetings and automated demo bookings -- but close it up when it gets crowded.
This also further serves the benefit of 1-hour activity stacking because the demos that get booked on your calendar will be forced into the open spaces.
Layer 4: Passive Prospecting
Account research, finding contacts, and dropping them into sequences is not active prospecting. It's prospecting preparation.
These activities should not be done during the golden hours. Instead, I like to batch them at the end of the day per the principle of stacking similar activities to minimize context switching.
Instead of finding 1 account, pulling the contacts, and sequencing them -- find 25 accounts Monday, pull the contacts on Tuesday, and sequence them on Wednesday. This allows you to get into a flow as you research accounts and get your tabs setup so you can rip through 25 accounts quickly (LinkedIn > website > CRM > etc.)
What about everything else?
Unfortunately, there are tons of other things in sales. 1:1s, company meetings, pipeline reviews, and SFDC hygiene. Where do those go?
Wherever they fit after you do you daily prospecting and customer calls.
That means you might have to have the conversation with your manager asking to do your 1:1s at 3pm. Or you might need to work more efficiently in your 3-4pm because you need to add call prep and daily pipeline updates there too (that's what I did).
Don't make excuses. Feed your pipeline first.
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That's a wrap folks! And if you liked this, you'll love the episode we did on How to be a Machine a while back on the podcast. It's a fan favorite on being... a machine in sales.
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