It’ll be no surprise to hear that one of the biggest cultural shifts that the UK workforce has faced in recent years is that of flexible working, and the sales industry is no exception. Not only do sales executives not want to be bound to the 9 to 5, but they also recognise that even the smallest changes to working hours can improve success rates, targets and profits.
It doesn’t matter whether you have family commitments or simply want to steal a march on your competitors, flexible working is becoming an integral part of sales survival.
The joy of working flexibly is that it comes in many guises. The most popular options include:
- Flexi working, where you choose when to work as long as this includes a core period of hours
- Part-time work
- Annualised hours, where your hours are calculated over the duration of a year
- Compressed hours, where you work agreed hours over fewer days
- Staggered hours, where starting and finishing times differ
- Job sharing
- Term-time hours, where you have the option of not working during school holidays
“It all depends on your definition of flexible,” says Jeremy Malindine of Finesse Sales Training. “It can be anything from being based at home through to being field or phone-based. It also means that you can flex your day to calling patterns. For example, if you have a client audience that isn’t readily available during the usual 9 to 5 hours, then it makes sense to work when they are available. It might be that weekends and evenings suit the project or product you are working with, and that’s when flexible working has to become a part of the way you operate.”
It’s worth understanding the business and your statutory rights, too. Any employee can ask their employer for a flexible working scheme. Plus, you even have the right to request a change if you are:
- An employee rather than agency worker;
- Have worked for your employer continuously for 26 weeks; and
- Haven’t made another request for flexible working during the last twelve months.
That’s not all. You can then ask to work flexibly if you have or expect to have parental responsibilities for a child aged under 16 or a disabled child aged under 18 or if you are the parent, guardian or foster carer of either of these. The same option is extended to anyone who cares for an adult.
Employers are legally bound to consider seriously any such request, and how they do this is regulated by law. There are statutory requirements for meetings and time frames, and requests can only be rejected on the basis of sound business decisions. That’s when the vagaries of the sales world come into play.
“Some sales sectors can be very rigid depending on the field in which you work,” explains Jeremy Maladine. ”Yet if you can demonstrate an analytical approach to your market and understand why and how the customer is more responsive at different times of the day, week or even month, it makes sense to work according to those patterns.
“For example, I’ve just been working at a call centre where they were having problems with sales because they never got through to the people they were calling. They couldn’t work out why this was happening. The problem was that their sales were based on personal finance, and they were calling people while they were at work – when people simply weren’t able to talk about personal issues. The call centre was obviously better off contacting people outside working hours instead.”
In securing flexible working, it helps if you can prove your case to your employer, especially if they are culturally resistant to change. When the norm has been 9 to 5 for decades, transformation rarely takes place overnight. So do your homework. What proof do you have that changing your hours will yield better results? Have you got anecdotal evidence from clients and customers themselves or does the recent sales data tell the story? If you have a particular working pattern in mind, how will this impact upon colleagues and the way they work? Will a change in working patterns save time or money? And can you show that the result of change will be relatively immediate?
All of these help convince employers that flexible working could be the answer to not just improving sales but also boosting motivation, productivity and even morale.
