What's your time really worth?

The secrets of effective time management

By: Jason Miller

Use this calculator to help determine your hourly wage. Before you can work to attain your target wage, you must first quantify the value of your time.

This article by commercial tire sales expert Jason Miller is the latest installment in a multi-part series about how to land and keep commercial truck tire accounts. In the October edition of CTD, Miller discussed the fundamentals of customer retention. In this installment, he discusses time management. Miller’s book, “Selling by the Numbers,” is available from Amazon.com and other on-line booksellers. For more information about Miller and his company, TheTireConsultants, visit www.thetireconsultants.com.

No series on selling would be complete without discussing time management. In fact, it’s my most requested seminar topic. Can you actually manage time? You can manage people — adding some, subtracting some and telling them what to do. You can manage money — saving it or spending it. But time is not easily managed. You can’t get more, you can’t save it for later and you can’t tell it what to do. Each day, each person has 24 hours and must decide what to do with them. Your competitors have the same amount of time.

Modern time management

Modern time management methods can be compared to the popular computer game, Tetris. If you’ve never played Tetris, here’s a brief overview. You start with a blank screen while blocks of various sizes and colors descend from the top. You move these blocks as they drop, trying to leave no open slots. Once you fill an entire row, the row disappears. It’s an easy game in the beginning because the blocks are falling slowly. As the game progresses, the blocks fall faster. Eventually they drop so quickly that you don’t have enough time to position them without leaving open slots. At that point, the row does not go away, the screen fills and it’s game over.

Does that sound familiar? On your first day as a commercial tire salesperson, you had plenty of open slots; you made sales calls, hoping to make something happen. Customers began calling to ask questions, check prices and order tires. At first, the calls came in slowly; it was easy to fit them in your available time slots. As you signed more customers, calls started coming in faster. Eventually some assignments did not get done and were carried over to the next day. You started the next day with a list that was too big to handle. Meanwhile, the calls kept coming in faster and faster. Before you knew it, you were out of time.

Effective time management is not about staying busy; it’s about your goals. You must spend your time working on those things that are important to you. When you over-schedule, you miss important opportunities.

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Related Topics: commercial tire sales, Jason Miller, time management

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