Analysis & Comments on Chet Holmes’ #1 Priority for Sales Leaders
Time Management: The Discipline That Separates Good Sales Leaders from Great Ones
Part 1 of 6: Applying The Ultimate Sales Machine to a Career in Institutional FinTech & Digital Assets
Chet Holmes opens The Ultimate Sales Machine with Time Management, and I used to think that was an odd choice. You’d expect a sales book to lead with prospecting, or pipeline, or closing. But the more I’ve worked in sales and business development at firms like BackBayFX, CMAP, oneZero, FX Primus, Oneiro NA, Circle, and Kiln, the more I think he got the sequencing exactly right. None of the other five disciplines I’m covering this week work if you can’t protect your time.
Holmes’ core argument is simple and brutal: there are certain roles that are by definition, reactive. In general these roles are external-facing. But anyone in a leadership position needs be pro-active which means they need to control their calendar. Unfortunately, many people in sales leadership roles spend most of their day reacting; likely because they came up through the sales teams but have not recognized the needed change in process to be a leader rather than an independent contributor. Even as a sales leader the react to emails, messages, meetings that didn’t need to happen, requests that felt urgent but weren’t. The result is a week that felt busy but moved nothing forward. I see it too often in sales leaders.
Chet Holmes’ fix is equally simple: identify your six most important tasks each day, ranked by priority, and don’t let anything knock you off them until they’re done. That’s it. No complex system, no app. Just ruthless prioritization, repeated daily until it becomes automatic. While I agree with this aspect of time management (maybe its 6 things, maybe its 4), I also believe that everyone has their own rhythm to each day. Times when they are in flow state and should not be interrupted, times when they are efficient at multi-tasking. Leaders need to find the communication method(s) that work for their team and business culture so they are not interrupted continuously. They need to efficiently set goals, allocate resources, and plan each campaign, then measure results and incorporate that knowledge into the next campaign. They need to be available as a coach for the team members. But they also need time to think strategically.
WHERE I’VE SEEN THIS BREAK DOWN & AND WHY SLACK IS A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM
The Time Management principle still works. But the environment it has to survive in has gotten significantly harder.
When Holmes wrote this book, the interruption problem was email and walk-ins. Today it’s Slack. And Slack is, in my experience, one of the most misused tools in the modern workplace. It has become the open-plan office of the digital age; constant ambient noise that fragments attention under the guise of collaboration.
I’ve mostly worked with global teams and client bases. In the last few years Slack was running 24 hours a day, where every channel felt like it demanded a response, and where the implicit cultural norm was: if you don’t reply within 20 minutes, you’re not engaged. That’s not collaboration. That’s just a faster, more fragmented inbox.
The problem isn’t Slack itself. The problem is that almost no company installs Slack with a clear set of rules for how it should be used, and actually enforces them. A few principles I believe every team needs to agree on explicitly:
– Not everything belongs in Slack, but if it is going to be in Slack, use Channels. Complex discussions, decisions with nuance, sensitive feedback those require a call or a proper document, not a thread.
– Response time expectations need to be stated. “We don’t expect Slack replies outside business hours” sounds obvious. Most companies never say it.
– Channels need owners and purposes. A Slack workspace with 200 channels and no governance is just noise with a search bar.
– Thread management: Once a thread has been started, the responses need to be kept as responses to the original thread.
Holmes would recognize this problem immediately. His entire chapter on time management is about building a fortress around your high-value hours. And Slack, as most companies use it, is a battering ram against that fortress.
WHAT I ACTUALLY DO
I block the first 60 minutes of my day for high-priority work before I open Slack or email. I check messages from all sources three or four times per day. My direct reports have my mobile and know that a phone call gets my attention for anything critical. (More on “critical” later in this series). Not every day goes perfectly. But on the days I hold the line, I get more done in that window than in the next few hours of reactive mode combined. I’ll block another 90 minutes of time in the early afternoon for more high-focus work. Finally, I keep internal 1:1 calls towards the end of each day.
I also keep a running short list (Holmes’ “six things” discipline) of what I need to move forward that week. Not a sprawling task list. A short, prioritized, honest accounting of what actually matters. When someone asks me to jump on a call or join a new initiative, that list is the filter.
Much of the above can seem obvious but if you really track your time over a few weeks, most will realize they do not have the pig-headed determination to build their week to be most efficient. Yet most of the salespeople and business development professionals I know, myself included, don’t actually do this consistently. That gap between knowing the principle and executing it daily is where Holmes’ book earns its place on the shelf.