Recently I worked with my friend Sarah who said she needed help within her time management. Her frustration stems from distractions with other work that keeps her from her primary goal; selling more insurance.

When Sarah focuses on selling more policies, she grows her income as she is paid commission only on selling new policies. Her agency also wins when she sells a new policy. So why does her boss continue to shackle her with service calls and renewal requests that bring no additional financial value to the agency?

To be a successful agency, you have to produce new business. However, people keep their business with an agency because of the service and attention they perceive when insurance is needed. This is a classic urgent vs. important time management debate that seems challenging on the surface.

How much does this cost?

If we dig a little deeper and apply some metrics to the situation, it becomes easy to see that Sarah should be devoting more time to selling new policies than servicing existing work.

By dividing Sarah’s annual sales goal by the number of hours in a year she works, we calculated that her agency loses $117 per hour when she is tasked away from selling.

Or to put another way, every week she spends handling service calls, her agency loses $4,680. If 3 weeks of her year were taken up by service, the agency would lose $14,046.

The opportunity beyond Sarah

This example is just Sarah. The agency has 9 other sales people. If they had similar goals and similar requirements as Sarah, the cost of mismanaged priorities comes to $140,400.

I would hope Sarah’s agency could find a way to support their existing client base with resources and strategies that cost far less than $140,400 per year.

The Time Management False Positive

This story is an example where organizations align their efforts to items that are more urgent than they are important.

It feels like putting resources towards servicing clients is the right thing to do. Plus, it is expensive to hire a person to service clients so that sales people are free to sell.

However, the numbers tellvus that there is roughly $100,000 of pure profit sitting in Sarah’s agency if they choose to value the important work of selling new policies over the urgency to respond to existing clients.

What about you?

• How expensive are your priority choices?
• How can you measure the value of work that is not getting done in the name of something that seems urgent?
• What kind of benefit can you realize if you focused on the important task instead?
• Do you have $100,000 of profit or savings in your organization right now that is just waiting for you to make the right choice?
• What could you do with that extra $100,000?

If you can’t answer these questions or have a hard time seeing what you are missing, we can help.

Our Smart Time Management program helps you sort out the important from the urgent and make great decisions about your time and resources that can change your organization.

Contact us today to see how we can help you find $100,000.