In order to truly gauge your sales team today and where it is heading tomorrow, you will need to have a full understanding of your sales staff and their accounts. Territory planning is a critical area of your team as well as for you in order to manage for the right results. Here, once again, many skills will be necessary for both you and your staff. None is more important than time management.

Since account planning plays such an important role in sales, it should only be with right skills and mind-set that the team goes into this process. Time management is most critical. Think of time management as being to territory planning what listening skills are to communication. In other words, you cannot even attempt to realistically, let alone strategically, analyze your accounts without understanding the value of time. What also makes time management so important is that it so often ranks as one of the poorest skills of not only salespeople but also managers.

In order to best maximize your use of time, there is a critical starting point- desire. By wanting to manage your time more effectively, you will be able to bring many of the tools and techniques to follow into your repertoire. Your time is affected by many influences:

1. Corporate demands ( senior management )
2. Your manager’s demands
3. Your sales team’s demands
4. Other departments’ demands
5. Customers’ demands
6. Your family and friends’ demands
7. Other personal demands

What you should notice is that these all are based on the demands from others of you. This is commonly how we think of the forces that affect our time. However, if you look at them differently, in terms of your demands of others and your demands of yourself, you could begin to see time in a different way. In a moment you will see more relating to “Your Demands of Others.” The latter, “Your Demands of Yourself,” relate to where you are today and where do you want go tomorrow.

For an effective time management, you need to be comfortable with some basics.

• Make a daily to-do list.
• Organize your paperwork and projects and rank them by priority.
• Break down large projects into smaller parts.
• Set aside certain times during the day to check e-mail and phone messages.
• Set aside time for just yourself