• Use a weekly planning diary. There are plenty around, including the popular Sales Activity Management, Inc. (SAM) and OCS (National Underwriter Company) planners as used by many Ohio National associates.

  Try this! In Roger's Rules for Success, time-management expert, Henry C. Rogers, suggests planning each day before it begins by making your schedule into a daily "to-do" list, with "must-do" items at the top.

• Be efficient, as well as effective. Being effective is doing the right things; being efficient is doing things right. Using the telephone is an effective way of setting scheduled meetings. However, calling prospects during their busiest times of the day, or when they're seldom in, is not very efficient.
• Know when to call prospects/clients in different types of businesses. For example, the best times to call small-businessowners are before 10:30 a.m. and after 3:00 p.m. But it is usually better to call doctors late in the afternoon, or at home in the evening, than to try reaching them at the office during other times in the day. See "When to Phone?"

  Try this! Many advisers, brokers, and other sales-people who do a lot of phone work limit calls to three minutes, using a stopwatch or timer. If they can't get a scheduled meeting or spark interest in their services in that time, they go on to the next call. Get a time and reason to call back before ending the contact, so you can recycle the prospect, if he or she is on-profile.

• Organize your day so you're marketing and selling when people can see you, and doing the non-selling parts of your job when they can't! Whenever you do paperwork or run a personal errand when you should be seeing prospects or clients, you're wasting time. Is this fatal? Not in small doses!

  Try this! Market in the mornings and sell in the afternoons.

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