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Sales Leaders – Cut $5/hour tasks for $500/hour Value Creators

Time management: it’s either a manager’s strength or Achilles heel.

Weak managers confuse the act of ‘management’ with value creation. Management is “to forecast and to plan, to organise, to command, to coordinate and to control” (Source: Henri Foyal, creator of the original definition).

Focusing on too many administrative or operational tasks will prevent you from realizing your full potential as a value builder.

Value creation comes in 3 forms:
1. Make someone money.
2. Save someone money.
3. Mitigate sizable risk.

In our sales leadership world, your value creation comes in 3 forms:
1. Help your team win. Coach to winning actions.
2. Save your team time. Cut noise, and focus only on winning actions.
3. Mitigate the team from losing. Advise against valueless tasks.

While this sounds simplified, it’s easy for us to drift from value creation to administrative tasks. A study conducted by TOPO found that for 83.4% of sellers who failed to hit sales quota, the single largest determining factor was ineffective time management skills (Source: TOPO Research). Time management is a lead-by-example skill.

As the CEO of your market, understand how the best-in-class CEOs prioritize their time.

There are 2 types of actions:

1. $5/hour Tasks – this is a stand-in for “administrative” tasks. These are operational management tasks. They are called “Tasks” for a reason. While they keep you organized, prepared and allow you to administrate, they DO NOT create value for your team and your customers.

Managing by spreadsheets is the most common fallacy to effective leadership. If the task feels operational and internally focused, it probably is a “$5/hour task”. These tasks are still important for corporate growth, but there is massive risk if they comprise more than 20% of your total weekly time investment.

2. $500/hour Value Creators– this is a stand-in for tasks that yield maximum revenue. World-class CEOs have mastered this concept. They understand where their time is directly contributing to enterprise value. This is now your focus. You are a builder. Again, you will focus the majority of your time on:

a. Helping the team win.
b. Saving the team time.
c. And mitigating the team from losing.

Be relentless with your time. Build a calendar with your team that focuses >80% of your week on $500/hour Value Creators.

Here are three parting things to think about and focus on:

1. Clear, constant communication of goals, objectives, milestones and daily habits.
2. Master resource allocation. How do you acquire the People, Processes and Technology you need to grow? Fight internally for the resources you need to create enterprise value.
3. Skills are a rock that needs constant polishing. Introduce your team to the Japanese method ‘Kaizen’. These are small continuous improvements that become meaningful over time. Your weekly ‘Coaching Moments’ will polish skills that translate into behavioral change and positive habits over time.

Focus on what you can control. You can control your ‘Coaching Moments’. We believe your time spent on coaching is the single biggest contribution you can make to value creation.

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Sales Leaders – You are the CEO of your Market!

You aim to be a world-class sales leader. The first step in your journey is to reframe how you see yourself, and clarify your roles and responsibilities. You are the CEO of a market. This market can include territories, specific customer accounts, verticals or industries, it really doesn’t matter. You are the leader that can coalesce the resources at your disposal.

And therefore, you are ultimately accountable for the success of your market. You are a builder of enterprise value, not a manager of administrative tasks.

As a builder, there are 3 roles and responsibilities that you can focus all your time and attention:

1.Effective Communication– being able to clearly articulate the corporate GTM strategy and your required business outcomes, into digestible information that is meaningful for your team.

2. Resource Allocation – you deploy capital in the form of People, Process and Technology. You also align resources, both internally and externally, to create value for your specific market.

3. Talent Development – you shape and mold your team to maximize their performance potential. You in essence are an advisor and coach.

World-class CEOs also develop simple, yet effective methods to tracking progress. The easiest way to think of effective goal tracking is to break down goals into:

a. Leading Indicators – your controllable actions that highly influence milestones or objectives.
b. Current Indicators – actions that have been influenced over time to become habits. These habits achieve milestones. These milestones are ‘mile markers’ that align to your goals.
c. Lagging Indicators – your destination, your goals.

An important mindset you must instill in your team is clarifying WHAT ultimately are key leading indicators to success? We believe the most important leading indicator you can instill in your team is learning. Learning as an ultimate leading indicator provides your team with the skills, competencies and knowledge to make objective, structured decisions that highly influence great daily habits. Habits over time, reach milestones that align to goals. Let’s get started on our journey to creating strong habits.