As a sales leader, do you find yourself working seven days a week, trying to keep multiple balls in the air so your business will succeed? If you’re constantly on the treadmill of the daily grind, you may be spinning your wheels and setting yourself up for burnout.
Don’t get me wrong. Weekends are the perfect time to make a significant impact on your business, but they need to be used the right way so you can maximize success and take care of yourself in the process. Great sales leaders know that Sundays, in particular, provide great opportunities to set your business up for success the following week.
But before we get to Sundays, here’s the thing. Great sales leaders always take one day off per week. Take me, for example. I’m an extremely busy executive, and between Monday and Friday, I typically work between 60 and 70 hours per week. By the time Friday rolls around, I’m exhausted. So I make it my mission to recharge my batteries every Saturday. This means I don’t answer emails or phone calls, and I unplug for the day and recharge.
But on Sundays, I’m back at it, and I’ve created an extremely effective routine that has helped me grow my business. What’s my secret to making Sundays a critical part of our success?
1. The Rock System
At Sales for Life, we’ve adopted the Franklin Covey Rock System. This means that we set quarterly “rocks” or milestones that we need to push every 90 days. Every quarter, we focus on three or four major rocks—this might be a large revenue target or coaching milestone.
Every Sunday, I think about those rocks. I plan what I need to do to be accountable for pushing the rocks forward, and remind myself every week that I’m going to be accountable on my Monday morning call with my sales professionals, where I’ll also be asking sales professionals what they’ve done to push these rocks forward.
When it comes down to it, you need to focus on the three or four rocks, because everything else is noise. On Sundays, I look at all my emails, social media messages, meeting invites, and ask myself a fundamental question: Does this align to one of those three or four rocks?
Anything that’s not aligned with the rocks is purged. In other words, I’m purging out the non-essentials, a principle that is the focus of the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
2. Align the Pebbles
Once I reflect on the rocks, I take the next step, which is aligning the pebbles—all the things I need to respond to or do in order to make my business successful. I answer emails, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, meeting requests that can move those 3-4 rocks forward.
Everything else is deleted.
How can your sales force cut through the noise to focus on the essential tasks that will move your rocks forward? Sales professionals need to understand that one-time emails, one-time LinkedIn messages won’t cut through that noise. Sales professionals need to act like a digital newspaper. They need to be there as a constant reminder of education and insight every week, even though leaders will be purging the non-essentials as I do. So only a portion of that will be consumed by leaders. But inevitably, there will be changes in the business or process, and these leaders are going to go forward with people who are top of mind. If you continue to provide them with great content that provides value, that will be you.
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