Category: Transparency

Efficient E-mail Makes Everyone Efficient

If you are like me, you have a personal e-mail account in addition to your work e-mail. You may even have other e-mail addresses adding to those basic two you have to manage. When it comes to reading e-mail, keeping track of numerous different addresses has a fundamental problem: volume.

There has been a lot written about e-mail: etiquette, management, sending, receiving and bcc’ing. I’m not sayin’ what I’m sayin’ is original, but efficient e-mail came up in a conversation the other day, and I knew I had to tell my perspective…

First, the background. As I’ve mentioned before, I surprisingly have a lot of connections to hockey. I play hockey, my wife plays hockey, my son plays hockey and my daughter plays hockey. Only one child missed the hockey train, but since she is already out of the house and out of college, she is an outlier and gets removed from the data set. Because of all this hockey, I receive a lot of personal e-mail around scheduling. Scheduling for practices, workouts, games, meetings, films, etc. My youngest child, my daughter, happens to play for three different organizations, which means e-mail times three. In addition, one of the organizations she plays for has a house team and select team–the select team pulls players from the various house teams to form the select team. (Bear with me, I’m getting to my point). The coach of the select team has done us all a solid by coaching (if you have never coached hockey, it might just be the longest sport season of all the sports, starting in September and going until March–some claim longer than that).

The coach, while excellent and attentive, has one major flaw–he can’t write a succinct e-mail to save his life. Not only that, but within each tomes he types is vast and varied amounts of pertinent information. I mean A LOT of info. For instance, we had a tournament this past weekend in Pittsburgh. In one e-mail, the select coach listed 1) the dates 2) the times 3) the hotel information 4) the opposing team info 5) the organizing body info and more. It was three pages. It was dense. There were no bullet points. And, it was unusable from a smart phone because I forgot what I was reading by the time I scrolled down to the bottom with innumerable thumb swipes.

So I suggested to him, based upon my experience in business and coaching soccer, to get EFFICIENT.

What do I mean by efficient? Well…in marketing, they talk about “open rates” and “above the fold“. The first means did the recipient actually open my e-mail, and second, was the call to action within the first reading pane before the reader had to scroll down.

So there are two examples I’m going to use, and one shows this in action, and the other shows the chaos of reaction.

My sport growing up and through college was soccer. And then coaching soccer. And then coaching my children’s soccer teams. And in coaching soccer and communicating, I learned some lessons. In the beginning of the season, the first e-mail I sent was one big e-mail with all the pertinent info about where to find stuff, contact me, my assistant coach, schedules, venues, etc. And after that initial kitchen sink e-mail, then each week I sent basically one e-mail, and did it in a very specific way.

First, the subject line always spelled out exactly what this was about, e.g. “2016 Fall Soccer – Seniors – …” and I would fill in what it was concerned with, like “practice cancelled” or “game delayed”.

Why? Because it was incredibly easy to search for my e-mails when the Subject Line started this way, and the recipient could look at their smartphone and see in the subject line what the message was and to what it pertained.

Second, in the body of the message, the call to action came first, “Practice has moved to the adjacent field.”

Third came the detail. “Parents, we have been informed our senior boys are scaring the bejeezus out of the younger children as they leave the field so we are moving practice to an adjacent field.” It looked like this:

To: tom@soccercoach.com
From: tom@soccercoach.com
Bcc: mom@soccermom.org
Subject: 2016 Fall Soccer – Seniors – Practice has moved to the adjacent field

Please start practice on Filbus field starting this afternoon.

Parents, we have been informed that our senior boys are scaring the bejeezus out of the younger children as they leave the field so we are moving practice to an adjacent field on Filbus Fields.

Thanks,
Tom
tom@soccercoach.com
(555) 555-5555

The most important takeaway from this method is each e-mail addresses one (1) issue! Even if the parent or player doesn’t open the e-mail, they know what it’s about. And, it isn’t some directive without explanation, but I don’t give the explanation unless the reader continues reading.

Your mileage may vary, but I saw my rate of parent and player replies (which meant I would have to reply back) drop significantly once I implemented this. Communicating directives efficiently gave more time back to me.

Next, the chaotic business example, one around internal communication.

In most organizations, e-mails flow back-and-forth like a conversation. And when someone says, “Did you read my e-mail?” it comes off as a challenge, because of course you read their e-mail (right?). Then the conversation spirals downward to talk about time-stamps and swamped inboxes. So I’ll give you an example of something which happened to me where the use of efficiency would have eliminated a 100+ e-mail thread and two hour-long conference calls.

In a former company of mine, we were working to sell a training package to a company. I had outlined this to the training manager in an e-mail and he replied back, but included in the reply commentary and pricing on another deal we were working on. So, true to my beliefs, I created a separate e-mail thread addressing this new information and went back to handling the information I had requested for the initial client in a different thread.

Then, my colleague proceeded to reply to both e-mails the same, because he was trying to join the thread back together. I replied to him with separate e-mails because they were separate issues with separate customers. He called me on the phone to rant about my ineptness. I politely explained how he was talking about two different issues and they needed to be kept separate. He organized a call with my manager to complain and on the call my manager said, “You had a call to waste my time about e-mail?”

The result of this was a very soft and perfunctory reprimand from my manager (“Make sure Bob knows in advance before you split the e-mail into separate threads.”) and my realization how I needed to deal with Bob in the future–call him. It was more efficient than e-mailing him and convoluting the topic I wanted to cover and it was the best channel of communication to work with him. (A topic for another time.)

In summary, in business communications–not marketing–keeping e-mail threads simple and specific creates efficient conversations.

Oh, and the good news? My daughter’s hockey coach and took my advice. Now if he could just cut it back from two paragraphs to one.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

 

Transparency

Physics question: What is the difference between transparent and translucent? Opaque and clear? Iridescent or luminescent?

We use descriptive “clarity” words in our everyday speech. But in business, if you talk about “clarity”, i.e. being transparent, there is a difference. It is supposed to mean nothing is hidden: all the financials and agendas are open and known, and the path which has been chartered by executive leadership is easily accessed, followed and understandable by all.

Now, let’s stop laughing and dry the tears from our eyes as we discuss what really happens in business–obfuscation, misdirection, subterfuge, and outright lying. I’ve held off posting for a couple of weeks as I was observing some first hand obfuscation at a client and dealing with it. Management, in this scenario, was opaque and misdirecting with its policies and procedures. Personal agendas seem to trump corporate agendas, and covert strategies appear in hindsight to have been executed to maximize some individual’s leverage and pay.

I know this sounds jaded, but sadly, many times it is true.

First, a couple of stories around the good and the bad.

The good first. My friend owned a business which started off from nothing. Three partners came together and started a recruiting firm. They did what most startup business owners do, they hired sales talent and paid with highly leveraged compensation plans, and as the reps hustled and the company grew, the reps watched their commissions come in. The commission plan worked for the first few years, but as the company’s original business shifted and it became apparent the original commission plan didn’t fit the new path, the partners knew they had to make a change.

My friend came to me for advice. He explained where they started, where they were going and what the company needed to do to remain profitable. (In a nutshell, they were a permanent placement firm which had shifted to predominately staff augmentation in a niche market.) He did some mild railing against some of the biggest abusers of the comp plan and told me about the partner’s plan to roll out new, individualized comp plans to each rep. Their focus was on crafting plans for the senior reps which didn’t completely destroy their current commissions and shaft the newer reps with a greatly reduced commission structure–a kind of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” scenario.

When I asked how they arrived at that, the essential answer was they formulated their plan in a vacuum. The partners had met with each other and hadn’t asked for any input from their sales reps, nor were they planning on discussing the roll out with them.

What I recommended was transparency. First every rep got the same plan. Second, was a disclosure of the company numbers on sales, revenues and margins. And third, an explanation to all the reps why the company had to change the plan.

My emphasis, more than anything, was to use data to justify the “why”. If three years ago permanent placements made 90% of the revenues and that commission structure made sense but now only 10% of the revenues were placements, then that is a change which has to be addressed. But to simply move the bar on the reps without explanation creates distrust and paranoia. “What are they going to take away from me next?” I told him the reps would say. And things like, “I heard the company is in trouble.”

Surprisingly, (but happily for me) he took my advice. They gathered all the recruiters together and showed them the numbers, the trends and the future path of the company. They presented a new compensation plan which was fair, focused on the new direction, and still allowed for equal income as before by incenting the desired sales path. And they promised a transition period during implementation. After three months, only one of the senior reps had left. And the company transitioned to their new model. In the end, they survived the transition to go onto their next phase which catapulted them from a boutique to a medium-sized business.

The bad story. I’m changing some of the details around this so as not to identify any business in particular.

A company I consulted for had been holding more and more closed door meetings. The president and the VP of Sales, or the Controller, or the VP of Marketing. Individual meetings, sometimes with some different combinations of the aforementioned people, but more and more meetings. Prior to this, the company had been relatively open about its numbers and direction. A new VP of Sales had been hired, and its executive team began having more meetings with themselves than with the employees.

Soon, territories were being realigned. Specific accounts were shifted from one rep to another. Commission plans were changed and private commission promises were made. “Covert” was the operative word. I was brought in to analyze their sales operations but found (and reported–ahhh, the beauty of the consultant…) that sales operations weren’t their dysfunction.

So, what happened? Implosion. When the level of secrets met with the growing dissatisfaction of the sales force, there was a screeching halt of productivity. Why, the reps grumbled, would they work in this uncertainty? And so they started leaving.

As I’ve stated before, there are a lot of individuals which make a company run, but sales is the engine. If you don’t have any sales, you don’t have any revenue. And without revenue, you don’t have a business.

This particular story isn’t finished yet, so I can’t wrap this story up with a bow on how the company had its happy ending. It is a work in progress, and I’m watching them closely.

So, these are anecdotes, and maybe you’ve seen something similar. But my point is, no matter what the size of the company, transparency matters. If people know what they are working for, and feel valued providing value to the company, then magic happens. If people work without trust, then they will always have one foot out the door. Which do you want? Which would help your company be its best?

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com