We all have the same number of hours in a week. The same golden hours. Yet so many sales reps do a poor job of protecting them.

I have a customer who sells into manufacturing. One of their top reps, Sarah, crushed Q1 and Q2 and was top five in the entire company — and she’d only been there two years. She’s full of energy, knows her product, connects well with prospects, and can close deals in her sleep.

But after slipping in Q3 and rolling into Q4, she found herself in complete fight or flight mode. Her sales had slipped. Prospects weren’t responding like they used to. Her manager was concerned.

When I met with her, she told me she was working harder than ever. Helping customers with all of their issues. Turning things around in record time. She just couldn’t figure out why she was in a slump.

When I dug into what her day actually looked like — how she was allocating her effort, her energy, and her time — it became completely clear. The problem wasn’t that she stopped working hard. The problem was that she wasn’t working on the right things. Sarah had fallen into the “I’m busy” trap.

The Three Types of Hours

There are three ways you can spend your time in sales: golden hours, platinum hours, and silver hours.

Golden Hours

Golden hours are the single most important dollar-producing activity in sales — and that activity is prospecting. Filling your pipeline. Whatever prospecting looks like in your organization, make sure you have a clear definition of it.

My definition of prospecting is that it is the art and science of getting a meeting with a qualified prospect that meets your ideal customer profile. It’s that simple. It could be a new prospect, a former customer, or even an opportunity to expand business within an existing account — new locations, new products, grabbing additional wallet share from a competitor.

How do you get those meetings? Through a multi-channel approach. Phone calls. Emails. LinkedIn. Face-to-face conversations. These are golden hour activities.

Platinum Hours

Platinum hours are earned through your golden hours. These are your customer meetings, your deal advancements, your demos, your negotiations, your closes. High value work — but it’s reactive. It only happens because you successfully executed your golden hours weeks or months prior. Platinum hours generally live in the middle of the day or afternoon, when clients are available for scheduled meetings.

And when you’re suggesting times to meet with customers, protect your mornings. Don’t give them carte blanche and ask “when can we meet?” — because if they say morning, you’re going to say yes. Don’t even give them that option.

Silver Hours

Silver hours are the administrative backbone — paperwork, CRM updates, internal conversations, pre-call planning, returning non-urgent emails. Necessary work, but passive and low value. It supports everything you do in your golden and platinum hours, and it needs to be scheduled around your high-value activities. Early morning before golden hours, or late afternoon. Some people use Sunday. Whatever works.

The danger is letting silver activities creep into your golden hours. It happens all the time. The easy, comfortable tasks fill the void when you haven’t protected your time. 

When Should You Prospect?

I get asked constantly — what’s the best time to call? What day of the week works best?

The honest answer is: it depends on you.

Most reps are fresh in the morning. They have great energy. They’re more likely to actually do the prospecting and to do it well. I recommend first thing in the morning — before you open email, before you move pipeline opportunities, before internal meetings.

And here’s the thing — your prospects are probably fresh in the morning too. They’re not buried yet. They have time to receive a call and actually answer it.

Mark Twain said it best: If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. If it’s your job to eat two frogs, eat the biggest one first.

Prospecting is most sales reps’ frog. The longer you stare it in the eyes, the less likely it is to get eaten. Eat your frog. Every day, without fail.

Protect Your Golden Hours Like Drew Did

A manager called me a couple months after a prospecting training. She said, “Brad, I tried to call Drew during one of his call blocks. He didn’t answer my call, didn’t answer my text until he was done. And then he told me you said to ignore everything during his call block. I’ll be honest — I was a little miffed.”

Then she said, “But when I thought about it, here was one of my best reps doing the thing that made him so good. Diligently and relentlessly prospecting. And I was mad that he didn’t answer my call, even though what he was doing was more important than my call. I’m calling to thank you. Thank you for resetting my team’s focus on golden hours, and for resetting my priorities too.”

That’s the mindset. Protect those hours at all costs, just like Drew did.

The Real Goal of Golden Hours: FTAs

The ultimate goal of a golden hour isn’t just to make calls — it’s to book a First Time Appointment. An FTA.

At Sales Gravy, we believe FTAs an incredible leading indicator of your future success. Salespeople ask me all the time how many calls they should make, how many emails, how many door knocks. Those are good questions, but the number we really need to be focused on is how many FTAs we’re booking every week.

Do the math. Figure out your average deal size. Figure out your conversion rate. Back it down to how many meetings you need to book every week, every month, every quarter. Then do whatever prospecting it takes to hit that goal.

If you do that month over month, year over year, you will always hit your number. FTAs and golden hours are your insurance policy.

The Question to Ask Yourself This Week

Are you truly prioritizing your golden hours? Or are you letting comfortable, easy administrative tasks steal money from your future self?

Block the time. Eat the frog. Hit your FTA goal. And be fanatical about protecting your golden hours.

When the day is over, and you’re ready to go home, always make one more call.

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Want to go deeper on prospecting and protecting your golden hours? Explore Brad Adam’s courses on Sales Gravy University.