Work-Life Harmony: Setting Boundaries… AND Performing
As a sales rep, you know the challenges and rewards of your job. You’re constantly chasing leads, closing and losing deals, and coping with the pressure of meeting quotas and high expectations. That’s the life you chose, but it can also take a toll on your personal life. You may end up working long hours, checking emails at night, and neglecting your health and well-being. You may have trouble balancing your professional and personal duties, and feel guilty or stressed when you fall short.
If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Many sales reps struggle with setting boundaries and achieving work-life balance. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can be a successful sales rep and still have a satisfying personal life. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
Here are some tips to help you set boundaries and achieve work-life balance as a sales rep:
Have a Hobby Outside of Work:
To properly set boundaries, start by having a reason in the first place. A hobby is something that you enjoy doing for yourself, not for your boss, your clients, or your quotas. Make time for yourself and the things that make you happy. Whether it’s exercising, meditating, reading, or playing an instrument, find something that relaxes you and recharges you, and do it regularly. It gives you a reason to disconnect from work and focus on something else. It also helps you develop new skills, express your creativity, and relieve stress. By having a hobby outside work, you can create a clear distinction between your professional and personal lives, and protect your time, energy, and well-being.
Prioritize your tasks:
Some tasks are more important, urgent, and revenue-generating than others. To be more efficient at work, prioritize your tasks and focus on the ones that matter most. Don’t waste your time and energy on tasks that don’t contribute to your sales goals. You can’t please everyone, and you don’t have to.
Your revenue generating activities are the ones that directly impact your sales results, such as prospecting, qualifying, presenting, and closing. Your busy activities are the ones that don’t, such as administrative tasks, research, and meetings. To prioritize revenue generating activities over busy activities, you need to:
Identify and list your revenue generating activities and your busy activities.
Allocate a specific amount of time for each revenue generating activity, and schedule them in your calendar. And more importantly - stick to it.
Do your revenue generating activities first, before you do any busy activities.
Delegate, automate, or eliminate as many busy activities as possible, and only do the ones that are essential.
Minimize distractions:
Distractions can ruin your focus and productivity, but professionals with work-life harmony are efficient, focused, and productive. We have a recruiter at SalesFirst who has been with us for a while. She is the least distracted employee I’ve ever seen. She is kind and friendly, but she doesn’t engage in idle chatter. She doesn’t waste time on our chat boards. And she politely tells people she’s too busy to talk. It’s impressive, and she’s consistently a top performer for us. To avoid distractions, she turns off notifications on her phone, email, and social media apps when she’s working on a task. She also sets boundaries with her coworkers, and lets them know when she’s available and when she’s not.
Avoid Multitasking:
Multitasking may seem like a good way to get more done in less time, but it’s actually counterproductive. Research shows that multitasking can reduce your productivity by up to 40%, impair your memory and concentration, and increase your stress and errors. To be more efficient at work, avoid multitasking and focus on one task at a time. At SalesFirst Recruiting, we batch similar tasks together and do them in one sitting. You might consider grouping all your calls, emails, and follow-ups together and do them in a designated time slot.
Automate Repetitive Tasks:
Repetitive tasks like data entry, scheduling, and reporting can take up your time and energy, and distract you from your core activities. To be more efficient at work, automate these tasks as much as you can, and free up your time for more valuable work. Here are some ways to do that:
Use tools like Zapier, IFTTT, or Microsoft Power Automate to connect different apps and automate workflows. For example, you can use Zapier to automatically add a new contact to your CRM when someone fills out a form on your website, or to send a follow-up email when someone opens your proposal.
Use tools like Calendly or Doodle to automate your scheduling and avoid the hassle of finding a suitable time for a meeting or a call.
On another note, while we don’t recommend sales automation, we also don’t recommend ever apologizing for sending out a link to schedule a meeting. We’ve seen some pushback to it, but we think those folks should check their egos.
Summary:
The most important thing we want you to take away from this blog is this: create boundaries for a life outside work. It will make you more efficient in the workplace. And then… if you want, you can follow our tips to work smarter and achieve more in less time. You can balance your work and personal lives, and enjoy both while excelling at your job. You just need to be intentional.
