How Your Superstitions About Monday Calls Ruins Your Results

Or, an alternative title: Never Give Up Your Monday. Or Any Other Day.

I overheard a salesperson explain why they didn’t call the client with whom they are engaged in a rather serious sales conversation. This salesperson’s prospective client has a real and compelling need around a result that is nothing if not strategic. The reason the salesperson offered for not following up with their motivated prospect is that it is a Monday, and they didn’t want to be all over them right after the weekend. It is Monday, after all.

You have five days a week, and it doesn’t make sense to give one or more of them up.

Bad Days to Call

Some sales professionals are not too different from the salesperson in the story above. They share this superstition about Mondays being a “bad day” to call people, as they are just getting back to work. I’ve always wondered what these salespeople do at work, if not work-related things like taking calls about work, having meetings about work, and talking with people about how they might improve their results.

If you believe the reason your dream client says no to your request for a meeting because it’s Monday, you’re not looking at factors that weigh more heavily in their decision, like the value you offer in trade for their time, your confidence and conviction, your ability to successfully resolve their concerns, and your persistence.

It is a mistake to give up on Mondays. But other people give up enough hours that it equals giving up Monday.

Bad Hours to Call

Some are superstitious about certain hours. They’re infected with the belief that you can’t call too early because that would be too aggressive. Maybe it’s rude because your contact hasn’t had time to get coffee and settle in. And, you don’t want to seem desperate, do you? Instead of having client conversations in the morning, they fritter away their time on non-opportunity creation and non-opportunity capture activities. The hours they spend avoiding calling clients and prospects are hours they can never recover, in an endeavor in which you are working with the clock or against it.

Naturally, some salespeople are uncomfortable calling their prospects and their clients right before lunch. The thinking is that they are winding down, and they aren’t going to be focused enough to take a call from a salesperson. Right after lunch isn’t a good time to bother people either; they just got back from lunch and probably have a full email box to contend with before they can focus on something else.

Monday isn’t the only day that people waste and the early hours aren’t the only ones that are not put to good use.

Not Enough Time to Call

How about the remaining hour at the end of the day? There isn’t enough time for anything substantial, and your clients and prospects are winding down, trying to get out of their office and on their way home. It doesn’t make sense to do sales-related work when everyone else is checked out or soon will be. And then there is Friday. A day unlike any other day. With most of the week behind you, you check out. You might be at work, but you are not there to work.

Giving Up Too Much Year

In a working year of two-thousand eighty hours, giving up one hour a day is to eliminate two hundred and twenty hours or ten and a half percent of your entire year. Deciding to remove two hours from eligibility for sales-related tasks, duties, and outcomes is to all but ensure you lack the time you need to reach your goals.

I have a theory that more salespeople would make their quota, reach their goals, end up in President’s Club, and improve their financial position if they would spend more time doing the very few things that result in winning a new client. Many of us dream about salespeople who aren’t account managers and who aren’t asked to spend their time doing the work that rightfully belongs to someone else in a different role.

But many of us also dream that salespeople stop clinging to their superstitions, like Mondays being bad days, that certain hours are off-limits, that they should send an email before making a call, that they should connect on LinkedIn first as a way to warm up the relationship, or that they should answer their email first thing in the morning.

Time is your single, finite, non-renewable resource, which means you should treat it like your second most valuable asset after yourself.