The Enterprise Seller's Guide to Mastering Time

The Enterprise Seller's Guide to Mastering Time

Each morning, you wake up to a flood of emails, a calendar full of meetings, and a long list of leads. Your phone buzzes with notifications, your colleagues need your input, and amidst all this, you're expected to meet your sales targets. Time, your most valuable asset, often feels like your biggest enemy.

The million-dollar question for B2B enterprise sellers becomes: Where should you invest your time and effort for maximum impact?

This is where the concept of Return on Impact comes into play. For each task on your plate, ask yourself:

1. How much time will this take?

2. What effort is required?

3. What's the potential outcome on my sales goals?

4. What resources do I need?

5. What’s the most efficient utilization of these resources for the greatest impact?

By evaluating your activities through this lens, you're strategically investing in your time. Informed decisions will align your time with the activities that truly drive your sales objectives forward.

To help maintain a balanced focus on the elements that drive your success, consider organizing your work into four key buckets. For many in enterprise sales, the pipeline is the North Star, guiding daily priorities. However, if you don't review it regularly, opportunities can slip through the cracks, lost in the shuffle of systems and tasks.

There's always another call to make, another email to send, another relationship to build. But which actions will truly move the needle? By following this guide, you'll learn how to master your time and maximize your impact on enterprise sales.

Bucket 1: Ruthless Prioritization

Enterprise sellers aren't lazy; world-class ones are extremely efficient. The first step in mastering your time is what I call ruthless prioritization. Hyperfocus on tasks that require the least effort but have the highest impact.

1. Distinguish between urgent and important: Not all urgent tasks are important. Learn to differentiate between immediate demands and long-term value creation.

2. Leverage your tools effectively: During non-peak hours, use CRM, task management software, and other tools to categorize and prioritize tasks efficiently.

3. Focus on high-impact activities: Identify what moves the needle most in your sales process, such as nurturing broad stakeholder relationships or guiding compelling next steps in their buying process.

4. Minimize low-value tasks: Automate, delegate, or eliminate tasks that don't contribute significantly to your sales goals. Reducing the labor intensity of your work is a definite contributor to your time value of money!

5. Review and course-correct priorities regularly. Sales landscapes change quickly, and so should your prioritized pursuits. Make this a consistent and non-negotiable habit.

Bucket 2: Surgical Goal Setting

For most enterprise sellers, the revenue target is crystal clear; the path to get there may be opaque. Unlike product launches or marketing initiatives that may shift, the revenue number remains omnipresent. World-class enterprise sellers are incredibly precise in dissecting this target:

1. Annual to quarterly breakdown: Transforming the yearly target into quarterly objectives requires astute market analysis and Ideal Relationship Profile (IRP) customer segmentation. Understanding historical performance to identify trends, seasonal patterns, and conversion rates in each stage of the sales funnel allows them to set realistic quarterly expectations of performance.

2. Monthly milestones: Dividing your quarterly goals into monthly targets must be aligned with the company’s objectives and ideally honed through collaboration with other go-to-market (GTM) motions. This is where predictive analytics and pipeline assessment, such as the quality and size of your pipeline and net-new opportunity identification and management, become critical.

3. Activity alignment: Next, identify specific activities, behaviors, and efforts that directly contribute to reaching these goals. This must be done in the context of the competitive landscape by utilizing benchmarking and a set of differentiation strategies to separate yourself from the abundance of market noise.

4. Constant awareness: Keep these broken-down targets at the forefront of your daily work. Sales team capacity and elevated capabilities will help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your available headcount, applied skills, and experiences to determine what is achievable.

5. Adaptability: While the end goal is fixed, be prepared to adjust your approach as needed. Qualitative factors such as customer insights, market trends to adjust targets, and considerations for external factors such as economic conditions, buyer industry trends, and the pace of tech adoption will help here.

This granular approach to goal setting provides a clear roadmap for your b2b enterprise sales journey. With your revenue target broken into manageable chunks, you can align your daily activities to your overarching objectives, ensuring every effort counts towards your ultimate goal.

Bucket 3: Selfish Scheduling and Rigorous Time Management

World-class B2B enterprise sellers adopt an almost selfish approach to scheduling - strict, structured, and leaving nothing to chance when it comes to their desired outcomes. They realize that every hour of everyday matters and that wasting it can never be recovered. Here's how to master this aspect of time management:

1. Finisher’s Planning: 

   • Plan your month, and break it down to each week, and each subsequent day with extreme precision of primary, secondary, and additional tasks to be accomplished

   • Use timeboxing and habit tracking to ensure limited distractions toward the desired outcomes.

2. Minimize Any Prime Time Away from Selling:

   • Help others understand that time out of the field or away from engaging and influencing buyers (e.g., for sales meetings, kickoffs, QBRs, enablement, etc.) is painful and dilutes your chances of achieving your desired outcomes.

   • Stay connected with your most valuable relationships, even during internal commitments.

3. Efficient Use of Technology:

   • Streamline CRM usage - too many fields can be counterproductive, and you shouldn’t need a PhD in Astrophysics to navigate tools intended to help you. Fight for tools you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

   • Advocate for next-gen options such as voice integration or AI in tools to save time on data entry, searching for the right digital assets, or anything that could eliminate buyer friction, prolong selling motions, or limit optionality.

   • Choose tools that enhance, not hinder, your selling time and efforts. World-class enterprise sellers become the CEO of their success and often pay out of pocket for resources that will hyper-elevate their efforts to impact.

4. Create SMART and FAST Goals for Relentless Focus:

   • SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. World-class B2B enterprise sellers also include FAST goals: Frequently Discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent.

   • Create an environment that minimizes interruptions – “Do you have 5 minutes” multiplied by ten requests a day, is how many sellers reach 6 PM and wonder what they accomplished all day!

5. Continuous Monitoring, Growing Edges, and Adaptability:

   • On the First Friday of each month review your performance against your targets, and identify critical gaps and growing edges.

   • Continuously monitor the return on invested time for the efforts produced. World-class B2B enterprise sellers learn from every interaction.

   • While maintaining a disciplined structure, be prepared to adapt and adjust targets based on changing market dynamics, customer demands, and other factors outside your control.

Bucket 4: Relationship-Centric Time Management

The most successful enterprise sellers view their capacity through the lens of relationships, maximizing every interaction to drive their objectives forward.

1. Prioritize strategic relationships: Focus on cultivating connections that directly enable your goals. Identify key stakeholders who can accelerate your progress and allocate your time accordingly.

2. Master the art of trade-offs: Time is a zero-sum game. Every hour spent with one contact is an hour not spent with another. Continuously evaluate and invest in relationships offering the best return on your time investment.

3. Harness internal alliances: Don't overlook the power of internal relationships. Strong connections with finance, RevOps, and other teams can streamline processes, saving you valuable selling time.

4. Embrace peer collaboration: Use your fellow sellers as sounding boards. Regular check-ins to share strategies, tools, and experiences can spark innovative approaches to common challenges.

5. Optimize one-on-ones: Approach meetings with your manager strategically. Come prepared with an agenda to align on priorities and secure the necessary support.

10 Common Time Wasters in Enterprise Sales

Even the most efficient enterprise sellers can fall prey to time wasters. Recognizing and eliminating these productivity killers is crucial for maximizing your sales performance.

Here are the top time wasters to watch out for:

1. Unqualified Leads: Spending time on leads that do not progress is a major drain. Focus on leads that show genuine interest and alignment with your solution. Don't be afraid to disqualify prospects early if they're not a good fit.

2. Administrative Overload: Excessive paperwork, data entry, and expense reports can eat up valuable selling time. Look for ways to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your CRM usage.

3. Poorly Managed Meetings: Meetings without clear agendas or objectives are productivity killers. Ensure every meeting has a purpose and the right attendees.

4. Interruptions and Distractions: Frequent interruptions from colleagues, phone calls, or notifications can derail your focus. Create dedicated time blocks for focused work.

5. Lack of Prioritization: Without a clear sense of priorities, it's easy to spend time on less important tasks. Use the SUG method: Serious (must do today), Urgent (becoming serious soon), and Growth (nice to have).

6. Ineffective Follow-through: Simply following up isn't enough. Develop a process to ensure your follow-throughs are prompt, effective, and impactful.

7. Procrastination: Putting off difficult tasks or conversations only makes them more challenging. To maintain momentum, tackle these head-on.

8. Imbalanced Preparation: Find the right balance in your prep work. Avoid both under-preparing and over-preparing for calls or account planning.

9. Skill Stagnation: As buying behaviors evolve, continually update your skills and knowledge. Regular training and role-playing are essential.

10. Inefficient Travel: For enterprise sellers, poor planning of travel can waste significant time. Cluster your meetings geographically to minimize "windshield time."

Time Is Your Ultimate Weapon

Your most lethal weapon isn't your positioning or your product—it's your time. Every second counts, every interaction matters, and every relationship can be the key to winning your next big opportunity.

So, what's your next move?

1. Ruthlessly audit your time: Where are you wasting precious minutes? Is that unqualified lead worth another call? Is that internal meeting really necessary?

2. Build your army of allies: From the legal department to your top clients, cultivate relationships that will fight your battles when you're not in the room.

3. Embrace the Ruthless Focus approach to scheduling: Structure your day with military precision but be prepared to pivot when opportunity knocks.

4. Pick up the phone: Stop hiding behind emails and AI-generated reports. Real insights come from real conversations.

5. Be the example: As a sales leader, your team is watching. Show them what elite time management looks like in action.

Time is the difference between closing that career-defining deal and watching it slip through your fingers.

Now, take a hard look at your calendar. What's the one change you can make today that will improve your time management? Whatever it is, do it now, because the clock is always ticking.