I know. You had a tough week. You made tons of sales calls, or you attended a lot of client meetings. Maybe you just got back from a conference. You feel drained. You’re tired. Now with the weekend here, you want to kick back, relax, and watch sports or that movie you promised yourself to see.

It’s time to chill.

Or is it?

Should you completely spend your time relaxing? While your guard is down, your competitors may be working behind the scenes to undercut you and steal your clients.

While most experts agree that you should take time to relax during the weekend and clear your head, in sales you must constantly upgrade your skills to remain competitive.

Here are 5 things you can do during the weekend to remain in your A-game –

1). YouTube – watch some YouTube videos on sales. You will find plenty. According to my count, there are more than 345,000 sales training videos alone on YouTube.

2). Paid online courses – or if you are more ambitious, you and enroll and take paid online courses. Here are three websites to check out –

www.lynda.com
www.udemy.com
www.smei.org

And don’t forget, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (which I’m a member) has a lot of resources you can review anytime.

3). Read – there are plenty of sales books to read. But if you don’t want to spend your hard-earned commission money on books, you can read free articles and blogs online.

Blogrank has a list of the top 50 sales blogs.

Alltop also includes several sales blogs.

And SalesEngine has a list of the 18 sales blogs that you should be following.

(My blog isn’t on any of the above lists. No hard feelings).

4). Practice – are you still stumbling over your opening pitch, your presentation or getting tongue-tied handling objections. Relax – it’s the weekend – practice always makes perfect. Maybe spend time with your significant other and do some roleplay (no, not that roleplay, I mean roleplay in sales).

AGsalesworks has a good article on “5 Tips for Better Sales Role Plays.”

And Intelligent Conversations offers “Five Rules for Effective Sales Role Play.”

5). Study your competitors – Go to your competitor’s websites – what are they doing better than you? Are they offering new products or services that you should be offering? Review the list of clients they have on their website. See any clients you like? Good, now go after them.

Darren Dahl wrote a great piece in Inc. on “10 Tips on How to Research Your Competition.”

Derek Halpern wrote an interesting article in DIYthemes on “How to Learn From Your Competition (and Steal all Their Best Ideas).”

Yes, we all need to relax. And while the labor movement should be congratulated for giving us the 40-hour workweek and the weekend, you shouldn’t use all your leisure time to relax.