Why a Sales Manager Without Access to Their Salesperson’s Calendar Served Neither Party, Until They Recognised the Value of Transparency
Calendar transparency is the thread running through this whole story – even before anyone had a name for it.
It was the mid 80’s and back in the day where our diaries were bound in A5 black leather and imprinted in silver writing in the lower right-hand corner of that embossed cover were the words ‘Rank Xerox’ – long before anyone called it calendar transparency.
Calendar transparency starts with the small stuff. This mini ring-binder was filled with double facing, customised pages, eagerly waiting for each salesperson to write out their daily activities before tallying the numbers and submitting the weeks activities at our Friday afternoon sales meeting.
The details on those pages were then collated by our manager and used for forecasting purposes, analysing ratios and holding us accountable to the following:
🎯 Activity – what new clients were we contacting for lead generation and how many?
🎯 Activity – who were we seeing and how often were we meeting clients or new prospects?
🎯 Activity – how many demonstrations did we do and with whom?
🎯 Activity – who were we giving proposals to and how many did we deliver?
🎯 Activity – how many orders did we sign?
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 – 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐬!
Times have changed and whilst we don’t have those paper diaries anymore and our managers don’t manually collate our ratios, the concept is still super important.
Yet access to activity can still be a tricky topic.
The Calendar Transparency Question
🧐 Should my manager have access to my calendar and for what purpose?
🧐 Or how do I get access to my salesperson’s calendar without them thinking I’m micro-managing?
Unbelievably, I have heard both questions asked, and the discussion served neither.
Monitoring the activity of the sales team is a key responsibility of any sales manager’s role and whilst some salespeople need more monitoring than others, those that resist transparency, regardless of how experienced they are or how long they have been in the job, are the ones who have something to hide – a lack of activity!
Measuring results at the end of the month, high-fiving the achievers whilst performance managing the underachievers, can be a complete waste of time if you aren’t measuring the key performance activities that lead to those outcomes.
And without transparency through the simple and basic practice of calendar access [something so many leaders and salespeople take for granted as a given], then the manager who hesitates to do so, or the salesperson or debates this level of accountability, will certainly sabotage their potential for future growth and success.
If you want every day to count and make it the best you can as a sales leader, then book a FREE 15 minute SCALE-UP Session with me. Write SCALE-UP in the comments and I’ll sort it asap.
The writing’s clearly on the wall…
#3RedFolders #Sales #Leadership Jack Daniel Distillery
Calendar transparency isn’t about control – it’s about coaching. If you want to build that kind of trust with your sales team, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations and coaching show you how.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
