3 Tips for Sales Agents Working from Home

BY Rachel Cagle
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You may have held out hope that working from home would only be a temporary state of being, one that you wouldn’t have to fully adjust to. But here we are, nearly five months later and there is still no definite answer on when life will return to normal. If you haven’t put a remote selling plan into action, it’s about time you did, or your productivity make tank.

Create a Routine

Rebecca Riserbato, writing for HubSpot, says that she used to burn herself out when she first began working from home because she didn’t establish and maintain a routine for herself. “I'd start at different times every day, and usually work late into the night because it was hard to shut off since there was no boundary between work and home,” she said. Don’t let that kind of burn out and stress happen to you, not during a year that's already stressful enough as it is.

Successfully selling remotely requires you to craft a schedule and stick to it. Make sure you start work at the same time every day like you usually would in the office, take a regularly scheduled lunch break around noon, and log off when you’ve wrapped up your standard workload for the day around 5:00 pm. That way, you have your evenings to yourself in order to unwind and have some personal time. Hopefully waking up early will also help you fall asleep at a decent hour, as well.

Assign Yourself a Working from Home Space

One of Riserbato’s main issues was that she had no feeling of separation between work and home. The easiest way to establish a difference between both parts of your life while working from home is to designate a space that is only used for work. Don’t choose the couch, your bed, or someplace you generally go to in order to relax. That will just contribute to the line between work and personal time being blurred. Instead, set up shop in a spare room or at the kitchen table; anywhere that doesn’t already have a mental connection to relaxation. Stick to working in this space and only this space and you’ll have a physical divide between work and home (as well as a space to tell your family or roommates to avoid during work hours).

Maintain a Calendar

Without the daily trips out of your home to the office, days can blend together, causing you to lose track of time. If that happens, you could subconsciously miss important deadlines or end up rushing to meet them, which could negatively effect the quality of the work you're churning out. But working from home doesn’t have to be this stressful. Set up a calendar, either a physical one you can easily refer to or a digital one that can give you task reminders. With a well maintained calendar, you’ll always stay on schedule and, therefore, be your most productive. If you calendar is digital and on a shared platform with the rest of your company, your coworkers will also be able to see when you're free to chat or reach out to for assistance and when they should give you your space to get specific projects done.


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