skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Have you gotten rid of clerical/administrative assistants and required your execs and sales people (and perhaps yourself)to handle their own correspondence, phone answering, order entry, etc.? That's now becoming "old school".
As email, voicemail and office automation swept through companies worldwide, many clerical and administrative jobs were eliminated with the thought that people could just do their own administrative work. Turns out, savvy business owners and CEOs are discovering that's not consistent with the highest and best use of their scarce resources.
A Chief Executive Boards International member has learned that he can increase productivity of his top sales producers by adding a "Sales Assistant" to help with the many time-intensive tasks of order entry, order acknowledgement, order changes, shipping information requests, etc. There are a lot of heartbeats and keystrokes needed to manage a customer relationship and many of those are not the best use of a sales person's time.
This is an easy return on investment (ROI) calculation. Just look at the incremental gross margin a sales person could produce by selling full time, rather than doing his own paperwork. Compare that to the cost of an assistant. For simplicity, if the assistant costs, say, $50,000 all in and your gross margin is 50%, it takes only $100,000 in additional sales revenue to break even. If you can split an assistant between 2-3 people, so much the better.
Take a look at your highest producers and see if they could run faster if you hired someone to carry their briefcases. You might find yourself part of a new "leading edge" of management thinking.
To forward this to a friend, Click Here
Terry Weaver
CEO
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
I came upon a business improvement strategy this month that surprised me. Drama eradication. It surfaced in a Chief Executive Boards International meeting, where a member was talking about an employee who has drama circulating around her most of the time, and he doesn't think he needs it any more. He's right.
My wife and I had a weird experience this past weekend. We went to our neighborhood Pak-Mail store to send off some Christmas packages. The store has recently been sold by an owner who was almost always there, was friendly, and seemed genuinely happy to see you come in. Kind of like my barber, just a casual, comfortable place to do business. Businesslike, efficient, and no drama.
This visit, however, two women were running the store. The one behind the counter was dashing between machines -- frenetically would have been an understatement. She actually tripped and almost fell once. Not like they were busy -- there was only one customer ahead of us. Now, the process of weighing and labeling packages and collecting the customer's money had never before been so dramatic, but this day it appeared someone had made one too many visits to Starbucks.
Her associate was at a counter, slaving over some kind of manifest with sighs and great animation, and stepped up the tension by dramatically announcing, "I'm not ignoring you, but I just have to get these packages ready for the postman, who's already been by once." These two seemed intent on feeding each other's drama to the point it was just plain uncomfortable being there. As we left, we looked at each other and almost simultaneously said, "I don't know if we'll be back in there." We've been shipping packages there for 15 years, but previously drama was not included.
Contrasting Scenario
I've had my second recent experience flying Southwest Airlines. Volumes have been written about Southwest, but I don't recall any focused on the lack of drama in the Southwest experience. What do I mean by that? The boarding process. First, there's no need to crouch at the ready to jockey for position when your boarding "group" is called. They give you a boarding number, designating your place in line. They have a well-signed queuing area where people just line up in their assigned order - 60 at a time. Then they call segments of the line onto the plane, by number, and people walk onto the plane. Simple, cheap, and drama not included.
On the plane, there's no drama, either. They don't charge for checked bags, so people are not attempting to stow small refrigerators in the overhead bins. As a result, there's plenty of bin space, just like there used to be on most airlines. With no assigned seats, people tend to distribute themselves down the aisle, filling windows first, then aisles. Nobody has to get up to let someone from a later boarding group into their assigned window seats. It's just an amazingly calm, orderly and swift process. Drama not included.
So, I'm wondering if drama might be an indicator to watch for and eradicate from your business. It's hardly ever positive, and if you can find the root cause, which may be a broken business process or, perhaps more likely, a person whose bias towards drama you just don't need.
I'm interested in comments on your experiences with drama eradication. Or maybe you have some metrics -- some sort of drama index?
To forward this to a friend, Click Here
Terry Weaver
CEO
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
There are marginal employees, weak employees, and problem employees. A drain on your business, and you'd be better off without them. Then there are toxic employees. These people are a cancer that's eating away at your business hour by hour. You have no idea how much these people are costing you, and they could cost you your company.
What's the difference between a lousy employee and a toxic employee? Intent. Most lousy employees are that way due to a benign disregard for what you want. Toxic employees, on the other hand are actively undermining you. Here are some examples of behaviors I've seen from toxic employees:
- Manipulation -- They consistently manipulate others into doing what they want or forgiving their misdeeds. They ask forgiveness rather than permission, and then cleverly avoid any accountability or penalties for their actions (see #3 below).
- Misrepresentation -- They spin communications to their benefit. They misrepresent the company to customers, and they misrepresent commitments they've made to customers. They say things like, "I didn't tell them we'd do that", when, in fact, they either did or they let the customer believe we would.
- Misappropriation -- They use company funds in inappropriate ways. A recent example given by a member of Chief Executive Boards International was an employee's use of a company credit card to charge a personal vacation. He then came in and said, "You can take it out of my pay over the next 3-4 pay periods." Imagine that, he wrote himself a personal loan out of company funds and expected (and got) no consequences from it! I once saw a toxic employee vote himself a raise by writing down unapproved overtime. I think he was in cahoots with the payroll clerk, who never called it to the attention of the owner.
- Inciting discontent -- They start rumors or twist facts to pit other employees against each other, against their supervisors or against you.
- General mischief -- They're troublemakers, sometimes not for any obvious reason. It's not that there's something in it for them, they just have a pathological need to stir things up.
You may be thinking, "Yeah, that sounds like Joe, but I'm working with him on it." Forget it. You can't fix these people. They've been operating this way since childhood, and it's a deep-seated psychological problem that you're probably not qualified to fix (if indeed they want to be fixed).
If you have one of these folks on your payroll, his antics have become a spectator sport. All the other employees are in the bleachers watching to see what you're going to do about it. They know. They know you know. They're just waiting to see how long it will take for you to get rid of the toxic employee. And then the REAL fun starts when all the other stories of misdeeds and toxic behavior come out. You won't believe some of the stuff you'll hear.
To forward this to a friend, Click Here
Terry Weaver
CEO
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
President Obama recently said, "Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people." That statement applies to business owners, as well, although not in the context the President intended. Fact is, hard work alone never "paid off" - for anyone.
Working hard is a virtue. It's a survival tactic. It's not a strategy. It's something you have to do when your business (or life) strategies aren't working.
A Chief Executive Boards International member once said, "The real measure of the value of your business is how much time you can spend away from it."
Think about it. If the route to improving your business by, say, 20% is working harder, what do you do if that "works"? How do you get the next 20% increase? Work even harder? Visualize 2 or 3 or 5 more iterations of that. Sooner or later you run out of gas. You're burned out and depressed, perhaps divorced or, worse yet, you're disabled by a stroke or heart attack. Working harder is not a strategy -- it's a downward spiral to an eventual unraveling of the company, created by yourself.
Here are 8 Alternatives to Working Harder -- ways and places to get some better strategies that reduce, rather than increase the amount of work you have to do.
Think about it.
To forward this to a friend, Click Here
Terry Weaver
CEO
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
You want to contact a prospect by phone. Perhaps he's even expressed an interest in your product or service. You know you can't get an order by email -- it's going to take a conversation to get the selling process to the next step. You try to catch him answering his own phone - no success. You try leaving voicemails, asking him to call you back -- he doesn't.
You need a better plan, and here's one that's worked for me.
- Send an email a day or two in advance, with a short (no more than 2-3 paragraphs of a couple sentences each) description of what the call is about or why you want to talk to him. In the first or second line of the email, usually in bold font, say, "I'll call you next Tuesday morning to fill you in on this. If there's a better time for you, just reply to this email or give me a call at 864-527-5917 to let me know." Use a subject line something like, "Can we catch up Tuesday morning?"
- Build a process for sending these. You can send 10-12 of these for a single morning or afternoon of prospecting phone calls. Use a merged email generator like Worldcast, your CRM, or "Resend this message" in Outlook.
You'll be amazed at how many people respond with a better time -- in one recent morning, I had that happen on three out of five prospects. Then you have an email dialog going, with no gatekeeper in between, where you can make an appointment that suits you both.
- Many, of course, will not respond to you email, and you'll call them on the appointed morning or afternoon. Some of them will take your call. For others you'll get an assistant or voicemail. Voicemail is probably preferable, because you can leave a message something like, "Hello, this is Terry Weaver calling from Chief Executive Boards International. My phone number is 864-527-5917. You've been receiving our newsletter for business owners and we hope it's been useful to you. As you know, CEBI is a membership organization of business owners and CEOs who meet to help and advise each other. It's been hugely valuable to our members during these times of economic uncertainty. I'd like to take a few minutes to fill you in on how this works, and I'll call you again on Thursday morning. Please give me a call at 864-527-5917 if another time would work better for you. That's Terry Weaver, Chief Executive Boards International, 864-527-5917."
- Pull up your earlier email about the Tuesday morning call, and forward it to the prospect, with a subject line like, "Can we catch up Thursday morning?" That email body is something like: "I'll call you Thursday morning to fill you in on this. If there's a better time for you, just reply to this email or give me a call at 864-527-5917 to let me know."
- Call again, as promised, on Thursday morning. You can, if you wish, repeat steps 4 and 5 one or more additional times.
This has worked remarkably well for me. First, I do on occasion hear from someone proposing a different time for the call. And, interestingly, having sent the email just recently seems to increase the hit ratio of my call getting through - as if the prospect was actually expecting it. If you have some other telephone prospecting means that work for you, please click Comments below and share them with others.
To forward this to a friend, Click Here
Terry Weaver
CEO
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.com
.jpg)