Time management is always an issue, and with everyone. We leverage tools, techniques, technologies that are supposed to make us more efficient and to free up time. But we still struggle. I wrote about the challenge high performers face in “The Conundrum Of Freeing Up Time, Part 1.”
This post focuses on how we look at this issue with medium and low performers.
In the past two decades, we have been overwhelmed with technologies that focus on improving the efficiency of our people. In the past two years AI tools have accelerated this. We can generate more emails in a few minutes than we could in hours without these tools. We can reduce the time required to research, or to write a piece of content, or to develop a proposal, to seconds, instead of the hours it used to take.
We have a massive focus on efficiency—getting more work done in less time.
But the challenge is, what are we doing with the time we are freeing up?
Intuitively, one might think, “We use it for the things that aren’t getting done….” Alternatively, “We use it to do different things…..”
So one might think, “We automate prospecting so our people can spend more time with the opportunities that are discovered….” Or freeing up time spent on administrative tasks, enables them to spend more time with customers.
The problem is, unless we address this up front, unless we set the expectations and prepare our people to shift their behaviors, what normally happens, is they continue doing what they have always be doing, they are just doing more of the same thing (I won’t address the effectiveness of any of this, that’s a separate issue, but it’s stunning to see that as our efficiency increases, our effectiveness tends to decrease.).
For example, if we leverage AI to do more prospecting outreach, perhaps better, our people tend to fill up that freed time with doing more prospecting. But because that’s where they have focused their efforts, unless directed otherwise, they tend to respond by simply doing more.
Some years ago, we worked with a very large industrial products company. We discovered a “time available for selling” challenge. After some surveys, the leadership team discovered their people only had 9% of their time available for selling (defined as preparing for customer interactions, conducting them, following up on them.) We looked at the other 91% of their time. It wasn’t sloppiness or laziness on the part of the sellers, it was their time was getting sucked up by others in the organization doing their jobs. They sold very complex solutions, so a lot of their time was spent on configuring those solutions, pricing, getting legal approvals. They were a very customer focused organization so marketing, customer service, product management spent a lot of time trying to learn how to better serve the customers.
Everyone was doing their jobs, but in the end it left sellers with only 9% of their time to do the most important part of their jobs. So we did a lot of redesign of processes, restructuring, introduced new tools. We helped them develop a plan to raise time available for selling to 40% within 12 months.
As we started putting the plan in place, we found something we hadn’t accounted for. A large number of sellers didn’t know what to do with that time. They had been so conditioned to doing work a certain way, they didn’t know what to do with all the time we freed up for them.
As we free up our people’s time, it’s important that we and they know, “How do we want them to spend that time?” And then it’s important to make sure they have the skills to do those things we expect them to do.
This also requires us to be rethinking our fundamental GTM and scaling strategies. Too long, too many have been focused on simply doing more. And regardless how much we’ve increased our ability to do more, we discover these things are producing less and less. What we are doing isn’t working, we have to fundamentally rethink what we are doing, than redirect our people who are already very busy. We have to make sure the work our people are doing is the work they need to be doing, the work that produces the outcomes we need, and that they are doing it as effectively and efficiently as possible
If you missed the first part, The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 1.
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