7 Steps to Achieving Your Highest and Best Use

  
Experts in innovation agree that the most innovative ideas -- those most likely to be game-changing -- come from outside your industry or vocation. At a recent CEBI Summit, member Chuck Smith applied that principle to business ownership and leadership. Chuck invoked the core principle of real estate appraisal, the highest and best use (HBU) of a real property.  A Wikipedia article cites The Appraisal Institute of Canada:

Highest and Best Use: The reasonably probable and legal use of property, that is physically possible, appropriately supported, and financially feasible, and that results in the highest value.

So, let's restate that idea to describe the highest and best use of a business owner's or CEO's time. That might sound something like:

Highest and Best Use: The reasonably probable and legal use of the owner's or CEO's talent, that is physically possible, appropriately supported, and financially feasible, and that results in the highest value for the enterprise.

How might you determine that? Here's an interesting exercise that may be helpful in finding your highest and best use(s).

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper
    
2. Draw a horizontal line across the center of the page
    
3. Above the line, write "More of", and list those things that you should be or wish you were doing "More of" for the benefit of your business.
    
4. Below the line, write "Less of", and list things that you're doing now that you should be or wish you were doing "Less of". These are things that you may be doing for several reasons:
• There's no one else who can do them
• There's no one else to do them
• You're the best qualified to do them
• You like doing them (despite the fact they may not be HBUs)
   
5. The "More of's" are your HBUs. Pick the one most likely to benefit your business, and write 2-3 sentences on how you'd accomplish that strategy
    
6. Beside each of the "Less of's" write in ideas for how you could off-load those things. The idea is to free up time you're now spending on "Less of's" so you'll have more time to focus on the HBUs above the line. Pick one of those things and write 2-3 sentences on how you'd get that task offloaded to someone else (or perhaps just stop doing it).
    
7. Put the list in a followup file for 2-4 weeks from now, then revisit steps 5 and 6

We test-drove this exercise in several recent CEBI Local Board meetings and several members discovered a lot of clarity in their HBUs as a result. In one case, a member said he knew he was not operating at his HBU, but just didn't have a way to identify what he needed to be doing and what he could stop doing to free up the necessary time to accomplish his HBU.

Perhaps there's a minor epiphany in here for you. If that's the case, please click "comments" below and share your experience with others.

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Terry Weaver

CEO
Chief Executive Boards International
http://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com

 

8 Key Success Factors in a CRM Implementation

  
An earlier article, 5 Reasons A Spreadsheet Is Not A CRM, we gave an overview of CRM selection attributes and a partial list of available vendors. So, by now you've evaluated and chosen a CRM. Considering that your CRM could (and should) become the backbone of your selling system and the center of all your ongoing customer interactions, what's important about your implementation? That you get it right, and get it right the first time. Resurrecting a failed system implementation is at least 5 times as hard as getting it right on the first pass.

Here are some ideas and suggestions for a successful CRM implementation:

1. Don't delegate this. In a mid-sized company, this is important enough to have the full attention of the CEO, COO and VP of sales. Notice I didn't mention IT. CRM projects led by the IT staff are the single largest group of CRM implementation failures. This is a business system, not an IT system. The underlying IT challenges are minimal - almost nonexistent.
    
2. Decide in advance what you want to accomplish. Hopefully you did this before making a product selection. Write (or bulletize) a set of requirements that you expect from your CRM. Look out a ways -- 2 or 3 years. Get past the initial implementation and visualize what a "real" e-marketing company's backbone data platform would look like.
    
3. Include the "thought leaders" of your company in the planning. Get the key influencers invested in the project. They'll help you through the rough spots and they'll help you promote usage.
    
4. Define exactly how you expect your employees to use the CRM. Just collecting contacts? Logging phone calls? Tracking quotes and proposals? As an E-marketing campaign database? As a long-term customer relationship history? As a project workflow tracker? A retrievable company-wide knowledge base? The possibilities are almost endless. Your CRM can, in fact, become the hub of many of your business processes.
   HOT TIP: Survey your workforce, asking for a list of every spreadsheet they're keeping themselves that contains information about customers or prospects. You'll be stunned at the number of invisible "information silos" you have. If that information about customers is worth keeping, it's worth keeping so everyone has access -- not just spinning around on 1 user's hard drive.
    
5. Break old habits -- One of the hardest habits to break is getting people (including yourself) to use the enterprise-wide contact directory in the CRM vs. your own directories. Mandate that Outlook or Email client address books are to be used ONLY for personal contacts. All business contacts and contact information should be stored (and shared) in the CRM's contact database (and only there).
    
6. Use it yourself. Clearly demonstrate that you're doing what you say everyone else is supposed to do.
    
7. Incentivize -- Hand out some $50 Target gift cards to people who jump onboard early and use it the way you want it used, or perhaps in ways you never imagined. (see:  How Much Employee Motivation Can You Buy with a Car Wash?).
    
8. Recognize and reward -- When you see someone doing something great (you'll have to be looking at the data), such as an extraordinary call report, send a company-wide email blast recognizing the accomplishment (and don't forget the Target gift card).

CRM implementations are notoriously stalled by lack of top-down leadership. Once they stall, it takes at least 5 times as much energy to get them out of the ditch and back on track. Your CRM implementation can be the best thing that ever happened to your company or your worst nightmare. The way you approach it on the first try will make the difference.

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Terry Weaver

CEO
Chief Executive Boards International
http://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com

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Crafting the Perfect Job Description

  
Are you struggling with a job description for a new position? Or trying to figure out a reasonable set of roles and responsibilites for a new hire? Perhaps you're creating a new role for someone you're intending to promote. In any of these cases, it's a daunting task to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and create a job description from scratch.

You'd really rather start from a similar job description that someone else had sweat his way through, wouldn't you? But where would you find it? A Chief Executive Boards International member offered a great idea in a recent meeting.

Go to the big job boards -- http://www.monster.com/, http://www.careerbuilder.com/ -- and search job postings as if you were a candidate for the job you're intending to describe. Geography, of course, isn't important at first. Perhaps you'd want to put some query parameters in like your industry and allied industries, to get an idea of what's typical in your line of business.

This approach has some huge paybacks. First, in surfing through a couple of dozen other companies' job descriptions you'll likely find one that's at least a 75% fit with what you're looking for. What about the job title? That's important too, since you want the title to be as descriptive and intuitive as possible when you start advertising your job.

Look also at educational requirements and salay ranges if those are posted. How do those align with what you were thinking? This is also a bit of a "market survey" for competitive salaries. As you home in on the appropriate job title, then neck down the search to your own geography. This gives you an idea of who your competition is -- who else nearby is looking for essentially the same person. If you're well networked, you might actually find a non-competitor who's looking for a similar talent and be able to compare some notes or candidate referrals.

Another good day at a CEBI meeting -- an idea that's portable across almost any type or size of business, and almost cost-free that will give you a huge leap forward in what otherwise would have been a daunting task.

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Terry Weaver

CEO
Chief Executive Boards International
http://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com