A new way to work from home…
For the last week or two, you likely have been working from home and balancing your children’s schedules and you may find home and work are colliding. Our work week will not be normal for at least the next few weeks, and possibly the next few months.
Yet, sales teams need to be productive to turn this economy around.
This is a time when we have to be creative and productive to take care of customers and children. Download our Creating-My-Ideal-Week-Template.pdf to map out a productive work week while working from home.
Strategies to Maximize Your Sales Time Working From Home
Here are a few key sales strategies to allocate your time to be productive:
- Reach out to your customers to take the best care of them
- Allocate time each day or week to identify & research new markets/industry who are buying or could be recession-proof
- Allocate time each day to improve your sales processes, such as your CRM or proposals
- Allocate time to develop new programs, promotions, and product offerings
- Work with your marketing team to develop marketing campaigns and stronger messages
- Allocate time to stay healthy – work out your body & mind
- Allocate time to review your sales goals, plans & alternative strategies during COVID-19 and to re-build business for the remainder of the year
Some of you may have to plan a better work schedule to also care for children, in addition to customers while working from home.
As a working Mom with a home office for over 17 years, I learned to balance when our girls were young. We created signals so the kids knew when I was on a call with a client and they knew they could not interrupt the call with a request to have a cookie or watch their favourite TV show. They loved to write messages to me on the whiteboard in my office like, “Do you want a grilled cheese for lunch, can we watch TV, can we go to the park?”
Strategies to Maximize Your Parenting Time
As salespeople and sales leaders, we need to adapt. Trying to work and keep a second eye on our children can be tricky.
The workday doesn’t have to be your typical 9-5 day. Working from home means your schedule can be flexible to accommodate children, a workout, or even a grocery run during the middle of the day.
Here are a few different ways to plan your day:
- Parent A begins their day @6am – 9am.
- Parent B begins their day @9am – 12 noon, while Parent A cares for children.
- Parent B takes lunch with kids, Parent A works 12-1 to check emails and respond to urgent requests.
- Parent A takes care of children or continues their workday from 1-4pm, while the alternate parent does the other.
- Parent A works from 4-7pm, while parent B cares for the kids and makes dinner.
- Or another option is each parent takes 1-2 hours shifts to balance work and children while working from home.
The way you decide to schedule your time work and family time, if working from home is new to you and/or your partner, it’s important to be creative and patient while everyone adjusts to new situations and especially to working from home.
In the meantime, stay healthy and hopeful that we’ll get through this!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.