Nancy: There are two parts to getting organized. The first is getting your organizational skills developed. The other is getting technology on your side. Let’s look at them separately:

Part One: Get a system set up. Categorize all your time and all your prospects. You should break the selling process in your specific organization into segments. For instance, you may have a category of “prospects who have been sent intro e-mail” and “prospects who I’m attempting to follow up with after intro e-mail” etc. In this way, you can clearly see what the required actions are for each category and it also allows you to filter out the “unlikely” time-wasting prospects more easily.

By the way, did you know that the average salesperson wastes 30 minutes per day simply looking for stuff on their own desk? That’s equal to three full work weeks a year! To help prevent this from happening to you, clear your desk and mark down in your agenda which category you are going to work on in a given block of time. This way, you won’t seem overwhelmed.

Part Two: Once you have a system set up, get a CRM product like Salesforce.com, ACT! or even Outlook and put every prospect and all actions taken in the system. Each time you “touch” a prospect by connecting with them by e-mail, phone or other means, ask yourself, “What’s the next step to take with this person?”. Once you’ve answered this, plug it into the date that you want to do it. This will cut down your future thinking time dramatically and give you a greater feeling of being in control. If you would like to learn more about managing your time, check out Northbound’s Goal Aligned Time™ program.