Good habits to improve productivity
The term sales force refers to the group of people who play the role of liaison between the company and the customer and when it comes to increasing the productivity of the force sale refers to a series of interventions aimed at improving the management of time and activities of each salesman. Many of us want to learn how to become more productive sellers, use our time in the best way, and be able to finish the planned activities on time for that day or for the week and finally be able to enjoy our free time in peace.
The correct management of time (or time management) for a seller is always underestimated, because there is a tendency to give more and more importance to the moment of the actual sale, that is to say that of the negotiation during the meeting with the customer. Which is true, the meeting with the customer and the preparation of the offer are crucial for the success of the entire sales process, but understanding how to better manage time helps to optimize all those phases (and there are not a few!) including the ones that come immediately before and after the meeting with the client.
Just to give some examples, think of the time dedicated to planning visits, then used for reporting, then spent on training and finally time lost in other activities (such as social media, or the continuous arrival of e-mails and other sources of distraction) … the level of stress increases at the thought!
It is true that there are people who are more productive under stress, but for the most part, anxiety negatively affects performance. It is therefore necessary to plan one’s activities in the best possible way, to face them as calmly as possible and consequently improve the execution time.
To do this it is necessary to have clear our goals and the timing we need, work on our mindset to increase our personal productivity, then work a lot on ourselves so that our personal goals are clear and work to achieve them.
At the same time, to help us achieve these goals, we can exploit the potential of technology to be able to obtain a series of benefits, namely:
- learning to be more focused
- becoming less distracted
- learning to manage our time
- being more and more efficient
- having an idea of our progress and work on
Apps to be more productive
Let’s see which apps we can use to improve our productivity.
Rescuetime
Rescuetime is a very useful app nowadays. We spend a lot of time on our mobile, and let ourselves be distracted by lots of different items, we scroll through our social networks and we read a lot of news. Rescuetime analyzes the use we make of these tools, giving us an analysis and allows us to understand how much time we spend on them, giving us the opportunity to change our attitude and be more careful about how we decide to spend our time.
Furthermore, the app allows you to block some sites that distract us a lot, establishing focus time sessions (e.g. 30 min), setting daily limits on some apps and websites, or setting focus moments directly from the calendar.
In addition, it allows you to manually add offline activities to allow you to have a complete view of what you have done during the day.
Focus To-do
Is a tool for managing time and our activities through a to do list. It is based on the tomato technique, which offers 25 minutes of total concentration on an activity, with a 5 min break in between. These breaks will allow people to be distracted in a limited time and instead stay focused the rest of the time, avoiding procrastination.
You can add your own activities and indicate how long it takes to complete them. Further, it allows you to have statistics on the time dedicated to various activities.
Boomerang for Gmail and Outlook
A very useful app to avoid distractions in the constant monitoring of e-mails we do on a daily basis. It allows you to pause the reception of e-mails and only receive those considered important.
Trello, Asana
Trello and Asana are very useful for managing activities related to our personal and work projects. There are more useful tools for managing complex projects in a sales team for example, but in general Trello or Asana provides useful tools to save activities in one place, deadlines, monitoring the activities of other collaborators. Trello provides a kanban dashboard, while Asana allows you to view wok in the way that suits us best, from the simple to do list, to the calendar, to a kanban.
Evernote
It allows you to record all the notes we have scattered in one app, save screenshots, documents, e-mails, meeting notes, to-do lists, ideas, always having them at your fingertips wherever you are. A very useful app so as not to waste time looking for the sources of information we need at a given moment and to have reminders.
Language Tool
A proofreading software that allows you to quickly check text in some of the main languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, showing errors and suggesting an alternative. You can use it directly from your browser, or you can install an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice.
Noisli
Not everyone loves to work in total silence, or immersed in the sounds that the environments in which we work offer us, whether at work or at home. Noisli is an app that helps you find a suitable background sound to improve concentration and calm, such as the sound of rain, fire, sea, or birds. You can also create your own mixes and be inspired by existing playlists, including a timer.
Pocket is an app that helps to save content found on the internet that is interesting in one place and also add tags to help us catalog it. In this way, in a single click we can find all the contents we have saved, without wasting time looking for them again.
LastPass or 1Password
Thanks to these apps it is possible to keep all passwords in a single account and also to generate new ones. This will make it easier to generate new passwords and find them again, helping us to be more efficient. (LastPass - 1Password)
Conclusions
These apps are joined by others that are certainly more useful for the seller’s work, which also allow you to improve the actual sales activity.
These are all useful tools to try to understand how well they can work. However, let us remember that apps, like any technological tool, can act as a support, but they do not disregard a personal approach on which it is necessary to work in order to avoid procrastinating and becoming more productive.
