How High Performers Structure Their Weeks — And Why Most Don’t

Most salespeople don’t have a motivation problem.

They have a structure problem.

In this episode, we break down the weekly architecture that consistently separates high performers from the rest. Because elite sellers don’t rely on energy or urgency — they rely on deliberate design.

You’ll learn how top performers:

• Prioritise revenue-generating activity before admin
 • Block protected time for prospecting and strategic deal advancement
 • Schedule thinking time — not just meeting time
 • Review pipeline risk before it becomes panic
 • Build skill development into their week instead of hoping experience improves them

We also unpack why most sellers resist structure in the first place. Reactive work feels productive. Inbox activity feels busy. But without a deliberate weekly framework, pipeline volatility and stress become inevitable.

High performers don’t wait to feel organised.

They design their week in a way that makes performance predictable.

If you want more control over your pipeline, your time, and your income, this episode gives you a practical blueprint you can apply immediately.

🎧 Listen now and audit your calendar honestly — because your week reveals your priorities, and your priorities determine your results.

Welcome to the podcast!

Transcript

Signs Of An Unstructured Week

Why Structure Feels Uncomfortable

Prospecting Blocks And Pipeline Protection

Advancing Strategic Deals

Stakeholders, Objections, And Alignment

Weekly Skill Development Routines

Reflection, Metrics, And Risk

Four Reasons Reps Resist Structure

A Sample High-Performance Weekly Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:07

If you're not hitting your numbers at the moment, then I'm going to suggest that you may not have a performance problem, but what you may well have is a structure problem. And this is pretty fundamental, and a lot of pretty average salespeople they actually lack structure. And there's a reason why they do it, and I'm going to go into that in this podcast. So please remember to like and subscribe, and let's get into it. So a lot of salespeople are just busy, but busyness doesn't equate to effectiveness, and this is a really important thing to understand. So higher performing salespeople are not only willing to step back and design how they're approaching things, but they regard it as essential. So let me talk about what happens when you have an unstructured week and see if this see if you recognize any of these characteristics. Is this what you're doing? So what we're looking at here are things like reactive inbox checking. So basically, whenever something pings, if you've got that set up on your inbox, you immediately have a look at it. Back-to-back telephone calls with people with no preparation, no stopping, going back over previous contact notes and planning the call. What's the outcome? What's the reason for the call? It could be that your admin gets squeezed into evenings or just any time that you can find time to do it. There's no proactive build uh pipeline building. So, in other words, it's all very reactive, you're simply reacting to inquiries coming in and um emails coming in, whatever it is, but you're not consciously putting time aside to build your pipeline. And you're well, I'm gonna say you're certainly not putting time aside to build your skills, but on the other hand, if you're listening to this podcast, then I would say that you are. So well done on that one. But if this very much reflects what your week looks like, then I'm gonna suggest that it's time to make a change. Because the bottom line here, as I said, being busy, it feels like you're doing things. So chaos feels like being busy, and that's fine, but structure by contrast feels intentional, and there's a huge difference once you start to move into it. So if you're busy, it certainly does not equal being effective, and in many cases, possibly the majority of cases, I would say that you're definitely not being effective. So, why don't people structure? Why don't people put structure in place? Well, there's a few reasons. Uh, first of all, it will tend to expose weaknesses that individuals have, and one of the issues with salespeople is very easy to feel very vulnerable, particularly if things aren't going well. And what tends to happen as a result of that is people go in and get even busier, um, make more calls without prep, um, make more visits that they haven't properly qualified. You get into this busyness uh cycle, and it's almost like doing the numbers game. If you make enough calls, then you're gonna you're bound to eat your numbers, but this rarely works. So putting in structure will tend to expose those kind of weaknesses, it will also force prioritization, which is really important. I can't over-emphasize that, and it takes away the comfort of being busy. Once you step back from this busyness, which is a kind of comfort blanket in a way, it means you've often got to face maybe some harsh realities about exactly what you're doing and how you're going about it. And as I've said, it will expose weaknesses, but on the other side of that, the other side of exposing those weaknesses is that you can begin to identify areas that you need to develop. And that, and in doing that, some of the areas that contribute a lot to the stress that goes on in a sales job can actually be remote removed. So exposing weakness often is not a problem. It's not something that should be feared, but something should that should be welcomed if it's done in a strategic planned way. So I'm going to dive into this a bit more. I think the thing to remember from all of this, though, if everything is urgent, certainly nothing is strategic. And I would argue that nothing's urgent. Um, I remember a guy, this is going back years ago now, when we um that where I worked, we would, as a sales rep, it was my first job, uh, doing that work, and we would have to send in paper forms to the office to get quotes done, anything like that. Um lots wrong with that system. Uh, but one guy would always write urgent on top of his, which meant that all of his stuff got treated the same. So it is really important to get clear about what's important and what isn't. So let's look at how top performers set up their week. And this is um something I would do with my sales guys when I was in sales management, uh, particularly guys who are struggling with performance. We'd really sit down and plan the week. So the first thing is to look at prospecting blocks. So, what do I mean by that? It's putting time aside every week, and and this is blocking out times in your diary to look at prospecting, whatever that means for you. So it might be cold calling, it might be knocking on doors, it might be going online, whatever that means for you, how do you find your clients? Where do they come from? You may have a marketing department, and that's fine, but if you just put everything onto your marketing department and say that's their responsibility, and your numbers are not there, then you need to step up. You've got to find another way of finding clients that might be talking to existing clients, asking for referrals, it might be door knocking, it might be going to um businesses that are similar to existing companies and just trying to find contacts. There, there's different ways you go about it, but you really need to have that prospecting time built into your week. The next one is strategic deal advancement. So, in other words, these are deals that are really important that can make a big difference to your numbers and to your overall revenue, they have to be handled as a priority. And also executive level outreach. So, in other words, this might be meaning senior managers, senior people in businesses that will give you a real edge. If you can meet with senior people, you can understand their strategies, you can understand what's important to them, where they're placing priorities, and that can really change your whole forecast. For example, if you are chasing a deal that they regard as low priority, the chances of that happening, at least happening soon, are pretty remote. In which case you need to look at is that a priority to continue with? So, another way of looking at this, another term that um I that came about with um a training program I used to use for some of my guys was what are the high revenue activities that you can do. If you look at the old adage that 80% of business comes from 20% of activity, and that number could be different, um, I've heard some people talk about it's actually 10% of their activities generate 90% of their revenue. So you really need to understand what that 10%, that 20%, whatever it is for you, you need to understand what those activities are, and they're your priorities. So it's very, very simple. And if you haven't scheduled in time to do those activities every week, then what are you doing? Because you're missing out on most of your business revenue. So let's go in a little bit deeper. So we've looked at basically protecting your pipeline, that's essentially what I've just been talking about. So, how can you now schedule time? What are the things to do? Let's look at how we we do this in practice. So, the first thing would be to review your top five deals. Where are they at? What's are you have you got clear objectives? Objectives, are you on top of them? Do you know what the next actions are? But where are those top five deals? And it's really important to make sure you understand exactly where they are. And what do you need to do to take them to the next step? Another one is stakeholder mapping. So do you understand, particularly with your top deals, who the stakeholders are, who are the influences, who are the decision makers? Have you got a good handle on all of that? Because if you haven't, you could well be getting a really positive vibe on a deal and it's going nowhere. Another thing is objection preparation, which I fact I'm going to talk about, excuse me, in the next episode, and I'll come back to that later. But you can actually work things so that objections don't come up at all. And I cover that in my course, um, consultative selling. We go through a whole process where you can pretty much eliminate objections, but they do come up, and the chances are you're having to deal with them right now. So, what preparation have you done to handle objections? What are the mutual actions? So, do you have a mutual action plan alignment? In other words, your perhaps your coach within a deal or other people within the deal, is your action plan the same as theirs? Have you discussed with them how you move things forward? Are you all on the same page? This is really, really important because you need to be working with your client to bring the deal home. So you need to be on the same page about where you are and where you're taking things. And the salespeople who are not delivering, they basically hope that deals move, but they're not managing and engineering that movement. Now, the next thing to look about look at is skill development. So if you're listening to these podcasts, hopefully these are helping you. Uh, but they're definitely um these are really skimming the surface, so they tend to give you pointers, but for real development, you need to be going much deeper. So, the kind of things to do, and you can regard this as like the same way you would a gym routine. So, every week, first of all, you need to be reviewing the calls you made. Uh, I think it's a good idea to just after each call to just give yourself 10-15 minutes to just debrief yourself on that call and how it went. What did you learn? What could be what could you have done differently? What changes can you implement so that you're more effective next time round? But do those call reviews because if you give yourself an objective review on how you did, that's where you highlight areas of improvement and you can then work on them. Look at how you handle objections. So typically, in in most bit for most businesses and for most um salespeople, you're going to tend to get between three and five objections, will tend to come up much more regularly than the others, which could be time frames, it could be budget, whatever it is for you. But just review those and write them down and look at what the counters are to those objections, to how do you manage those objections when they come up? Look at your discovery questions. So, how can you improve your qualification questioning process? What are your what are the questions you're asking? What are the ones that really reveal the things that are likely to trip you up later? So, again, in the the online course, there's a whole sequence of questions I'll give you there and a whole routine to help you to do that. And then if you have a mentor, which might be your sales manager, if if you're working for somebody, it might be a sales colleague who's got a lot more experience. Uh, but whoever your mentor is, and and please find one if you can, have conversations with them, just bounce ideas, um, just sanity check what you're doing, and that is really invaluable. The thing is, most salespeople think that experience equates straight to improvement. It doesn't. You really need to have these review sessions, this self-coaching program in place, and that's where you build real improvement. This is where you highlight problems and then you work out a strategy to resolve them. That's where you move forward, not just doing the same old thing. It will get you nowhere. So, the fourth thing on the list is reflection and metrics check. Um, so what's about that? Well, it's basically just a short weekly review, maybe beginning of the week, but just have a look at what moved, what stalled. Where did you avoid discomfort? Remember, discomfort is a sign that you're about to push through something that's limiting you at the moment. So, really, discomfort, as strange as this sounds, as probably as unwelcome as this sounds, it's actually a good sign and it's a thing to embrace rather than avoid. So, where did you avoid it? And what's your biggest risk deal, the highest risk deal that you're running with, because that allows you to look at where the risk areas are and look at what you can do to mitigate those risks, to minimize them so that you have the best chance of moving forward. What we're doing with each of these four steps is to build clarity, and once you have clarity, you can then be much more effective in the steps you're putting in place, the changes you're making to your approach, whatever it might be. Okay, so why don't most people do this? And there are some very simple reasons. I'll give you four. The first one is that structure can feel restrictive. And I remember having a guy work for me, and he was he was uh massively enthusiastic, had a huge amount of energy, but really was nowhere near as effective as he could have been. And it was one of the big reasons was he really didn't see structure as a positive thing. And the way I like to think of this, if if you think of structure as something like um something holding up a building, you know, you've got this framework, you can either be within the framework and restricted by it, or you can be standing on top of the framework and really getting the benefits and getting a better view of what's going on. So I encourage you to look at structure that way. The second problem is that it does force uncomfortable outreach, whether it's speaking to a high-level manager who you might be uncomfortable with because of their status, or just your discomfort with it might be with speaking with any kind of person. But basically, it's forcing you into or forcing these people into an uncomfortable situation. The next thing it does as well, which is absolutely vital, is that it exposes weaknesses in the pipeline. And the the harsh truth about this one is that if you do not expose those weaknesses in your pipeline, they will come back and they'll come back. You'll be putting out forecasts that are nowhere near the reality. You will be chasing deals that you have no chance of closing. So it is absolutely vital to the business that you expose weaknesses on your pipeline, and then you can do something about them. And then finally, it just simply removes that dopamine of random activity. You know, you feel when you're rushing around being busy, you can cross a whole load of things off a list if you have one of those. And um, I must admit I'm guilty at times of writing things on the list that I'd forgotten about, so I could cross them off. But if you if you get addicted to that, are you actually crossing off the things that matter? And the chances are that you're not, certainly if you're not hitting your numbers. So remember, reactive work feels productive, but proactive work can feel very risky. But the point is that people who are high-performing salespeople they will tolerate that discomfort. In fact, they'll welcome it, they recognize it for what it is, that without that discomfort, you can't move forward. And this is not only in your day-to-day sales, but also in your career. So I've spoken about structure. Let me suggest a structure to you. Now, it may or may not be um useful depending on what you're doing and what you have to do every week, but I really recommend that you uh sit down with um just a piece of paper with every day on, split it into two-hour blocks, and put some sort of plan in place. So on Monday, that might include your pipeline review, it might include strategic deal planning. So looking at what's coming up for that week, maybe that month. So again, doing a monthly plan, even a quarterly plan regularly is also really important. Tuesday meeting, have prospecting blocks, and so that's where you may be cold calling or following up on referrals, but whatever it is, have time in there to find new clients yourself. And then also Tuesday and Wednesday, you want to have your key meetings. It's good to have them fairly early in the week so that you can you've got time to get action, follow-up, all that kind of thing. Maybe you need to do proposals, whatever. Thursday, definitely make sure your follow-ups are executed and also building some executive outreach. So, who do you need to contact for to maybe move deals forward, or maybe for other purposes that will help you? Friday is a good one for skill development. Uh, particularly I used to find uh Friday afternoons usually were times where people wanted to wind up their week often, so it wasn't a good time for meeting with clients. Um, but it was a great time to do things like skill development and then just look at the week, look back on the week, and again, do it if you haven't done it, make those strategic observations about what went well, what didn't, what can you focus on to develop next week? So this is about scheduling, it's about doing it with intention, and I'm sure there are other activities that you have, but the thing I I really do strongly recommend is that you just on a piece of paper write out days of the week along the top, and then hours down the side, and just set up one or two hour blocks where you get things done, and you write and you schedule those blocks, and you don't put anything else in those time blocks unless they're absolutely urgent. Okay, so this is really important for a couple of reasons. One is it will help you in your regular sales activity and help you hit target consistently. Secondly, though, it will really help you in your career development. Because what happens when you start building in a weekly structure? It helps you with income stability. So revenue bonuses have you get paid. The chances are your likelihood of promotion if you're employed by somebody will start to increase because suddenly you're becoming much more effective at what you're doing. The other thing is that you may well be showing measurable improvements in what you're doing. This might be not only in revenue that you're booking, but your call your um conversion rates, all that sort of thing. If you understand your metrics, this is where getting an effective structure in place can have a big impact on those. It will build leadership trust for the people who, as sales managers, we're always looking at new leaders coming through because sales teams evolve like everything else. So any good employer employer is looking for where the next leadership is coming from, and that means that your sales manager will begin to put more trust in you. It will reduce your stress levels, frankly, because now you are you're at far more control of things than you were before. If you're just running, chasing uh whatever's popping up next, whether it's an email or a telephone call or whatever, you're in a if you're reactive, you're in a high stress environment. When you're proactive, you're calling the tune. So the stress is is much more manageable. And also you're increasing your skills. You'll as you improve your skills, you get far more effective. So again, your conversion rates go up, you become much more aware of which deals to go after and which to walk away from, which means that you spend your time in much more effectively. You're working on deals that are much more likely to happen. So another way of looking at this is your calendar reveals your priorities, your priorities determine your outcomes. So in closing, um, just remember that high performance don't wait to feel focused, they design the focus. So, my suggestion to you is to block 90 minutes this week for review first. Activity, uh sorry, revenue first activity. So these are your big deals that are coming through, the the really important ones. So make sure that you have time to whether it's meeting with people or planning or doing background work or putting proposals, whatever it is, but make sure that you put that time aside for those big deals. Audit your calendar honestly. So look at what you're doing, where you're spending your time. And if you're not sure, maybe over the next week, just make a note, keep a note in a diary of what you did each day, where you're spending your time. That's really valuable because I think for most people who do this who haven't done it before, they're going to be quite horrified by just how much time is wasted in a week and how simple it is to turn this around. And just share this episode with um a teammate who's busy, but maybe stuck not getting the numbers. They're always really busy, but they're just not getting the results. So please check it, share this episode with them. Okay, so that's it for this one. I hope you found that useful. Um, next week I'm gonna talk about objections. So what I'm gonna one thing that I've noticed in most sales training, it teaches you how to handle objections, and obviously we speak about that, and it's a big deal for a lot of people. But the the thing to remember is that the top salespeople rarely get them. It's something they very rarely have to do. So, what we're gonna do in the next episode, we're gonna unpack why objections aren't a closing problem, they're a discovery problem. You're gonna learn how top salespeople surface these concerns early. These concerns turn into objections later, and essentially you just neutralize these things before they um become a problem, and you run conversations so clearly, and that's around what the buyer needs, that they don't feel the need to push back. So that's coming up next week. Um, please like and subscribe or join my mailing list, and um good luck with your selling, good luck with your planning, and I'll speak to you on Monday. Bye for now.