infrastructure Archives

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

What Day Is Laundry Day?

When you think about laundry, what comes to mind? Lost socks? The folding? Or maybe you simply don’t like to do laundry (like the 100+ year-old woman I saw interviewed on Johnny Carson many, many years ago. “What don’t you miss?” asked Carson. “Warshing Dey!” She exclaimed) . A lot of what I write about centers on lean thinking the application to Smart Sales Operations. But I’m not just about smart sales operations. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I think about efficiencies and how to get more efficient all the time—in every facet of my life.

And one evening when I found myself conversing about doing laundry with a fellow hockey player, I realized my obsession with cranking through laundry wasn’t only my secret obsession. He and I were both about getting laundry clean and put away as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It was our children and spouses who created our OCD, but the growth in our compulsion was through experience: things like finding mildewed wet loads left in the washer and our bedrooms and family members’ various pieces of furniture looking as if hit by a yard sale. Clothes laid on furniture instead of put away in closets or drawers–basically clean clothes left out for cats to sleep on and children to pile up dirty over clean. So, he and I discussed how we crank it out, getting from dirty to clean to put away in one fluid and very compressed event.

How does clean, folded laundry relate to Smart Sales Operations? First, let me clarify if any have concern about me doing the laundry versus my wife please understand that I have no issue. My dad and his generation might, but me? I just want it done. And since I work out of my house, I do most of the laundry. I ended up taking it over completely when I started working out of my home, and what clinched it was one of my past companies had a series of calls every Monday morning which were interminable. Since I was an hour ahead of the main office, by the time our calls ended it was usually noon my time.

To make better use of that time, I started throwing in laundry before the first Monday call and transfer loads in between the queue of calls, pulling clothing from the dryer so things wouldn’t wrinkle, and then when all the calls and laundry were finished, take it upstairs for eventual folding.

Now, don’t judge my parenting skills, but the intent was then to have my children (and sometimes my wife) fold their clothes. Or, what usually would happen is the clothes would sit in a chair in the bedroom and I would end up folding them— on the following Sunday.

So what really happened is clean laundry sat for week in the chairdrobe. Sometimes it would sit for more than a week depending on my travel schedule and what I had going on that weekend. There might be two weeks of clean clothing in my bedroom chair waiting for folding. My children would ask where particular items were and I would palm my forehead wondering if they understood where the clean clothes were and what they were capable of–that is, folding and putting laundry away as well me.

And then one day, many years after I had been away from the company where I formed this habit, I realized doing laundry on Monday wasn’t achieving what I really wanted, which was to get everything completed in one day. My habit created a situation that hung over my head. In the vein of David Allen, think Getting Things Done, I wasn’t getting things done or prioritizing so I could get things done.

The epiphany came one day when I had to do the laundry on a Friday. Per my usual, I finished everything and had it upstairs in a day, and then realized when folding it on Sunday I only had two days between getting the dirty laundry clean and getting the clean laundry put away.

Eureka!

If I were in manufacturing, this would be akin to combining assembly stations or cutting out a step where the next pick in line had to wait to add value to the product.

Do you see why this relates? Why I got excited enough about this to write about it? By rethinking what I was trying to achieve (clean, folded laundry) I had to change how I approached my timeline to get it done. I went from a process which could take up to seven days to one that takes only up to three.

Part of the struggle evangelizing Smart Sales Operations is there are two jobs to do: first is to educate what is “Smart Sales Operations”. Second is to point to the company’s sales operations and get them to see it could be better. The best possible outcome is they “get it” and engage to correct. Sadly, what I’ve come to learn is most companies and most people don’t realize they have a problem in their sales operations. Like my laundry, they just don’t see that gap of four days, because things work well enough that it isn’t apparent to them—so they don’t acknowledge the pain it is causing because the expected outcome has never been measured. Because no data has been applied to their process, the end users downstream live with it because it is all they have. It is very much like cutting the end off the ham.

Think about your company processes. Where are there forms, reports or reporting which are redundant or extraneous? Or where do expectations march along without too much question because management isn’t affected by them? Where are the places in your sell chain where you are unaware of the friction it creates for their sales reps? (This is a “known unknown” and will be addressed later.)

And, we all have the same thing going on in our personal lives. We have habits, and we have training, and we have our way of executing—it takes a lot for us to raise up our heads and look around with fresh eyes. We tend to do what we know, and judge from a our perspective

We are always capable of learning new things—and your company is desperate for change, believe it or not.

So, what are you going to look at anew? Better yet, when? The sooner the better.

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

Promote from Within or do Without.

What happens when a person from outside an organization is brought in for a higher level position, e.g. executive vice president, vice president, or first line manager?

Well, it depends…but I will say, based upon anecdotal evidence, that depending upon the level which the new hire is placed, it can be anywhere from transformative to strategic to downright disastrous.

And why? Because the lower in the food chain of an organization, the more important someone is who knows the company. Especially first line managers, since they are really “information encyclopedias” for their direct reports. That first line manager is there to help bridge that gap between company knowledge and company culture and the rep. If you place an outside hire in position as a first line manager, then starting the position they have two tasks, not just one: they have to learn the company culture as well as learn the company knowledge. And when it comes to making those in the trenches successful, understanding where to go to get things done is invaluable to the front line. If the manager has to go and find out how things are done and then report that back to the rep(s), then there is a delay and a burp in the process of getting things done.

Let’s set up a scenario. A small manufacturing company is looking to expand, and they decide to promote the current manager into an executive role, creating a new position, and now need to fill his or her role as a first line manager.

The company has had good people work hard for them for many years, helping to build the company to get it to this point. The employees have worked hard–people who have produced products, sold them, created marketing, balanced the books, straightened up back office messes, managed crises, and led the company to prosperity.

And then, because the company believes it needs to change, they hire someone from outside because they have “experience”.

What does that mean, they have “experience”? In some instances, it means the new hire brings skills to the table which the company needs and their current employees do not have. But in usually it means they bring in someone who’s managed people before. The owner/president/decision maker decides to bring in an outside party because s/he doesn’t believe anyone on the front line is capable of “managing”. But how did this person who is brought in gain their experience? Someone took a chance on that person, promoting them to a management position, and more than likely, from within their company. I have never seen a company hire a manager from outside a company who didn’t already have management experience.

As an example: in one company, they had gone through several marketing people. They had hired an intern who quickly proved her value, who understood social media, worked hard and had great ideas. She worked for the current VP of Marketing who had troubles not only with the fundamentals of branding and messaging, but also with the newer things like social media. Basically, the intern began to save the VP’s bacon on a regular basis. The president, realizing her worth, hired her full-time.

She then proceeded to lead their social media campaigns, e-marketing campaigns and anything else the VP didn’t understand. She continued to save his bacon and she was given a new title and a raise.

When the VP decided to leave, the president, instead of looking at who had helped the company and supported its growth–i.e. who was up and coming and understood the company’s needs–hired someone outside the company whose resume was impressive.

The new VP proved scattered and ineffective, and was replaced by another outside hire with an impeccable looking resume. Marketing foundered for several more years. And here’s where the wheels fall off the bus. The rising marketing star realized she would never be considered for the top job so she left. And suddenly there was a giant hole in the company’s marketing as all of that experience walked out the door. And not just her insights and understanding of the space, but her contacts and the relationships she had built for the company. The president, of course, groused at the lack of loyalty the ex-employee showed. That, sadly, is irony.

There are a few times when companies need to look outside their walls for talent. Ford was a good example when it admitted to itself it needed fresh eyes to look at the problems created by an insulated familial succession. But on the other hand, GM saw that hiring Mary Barra was the right move as she knew the systems and had proven herself while coming up through the ranks–which is what GM needed to straighten out the messes created by their siloed decision making.

I’m not saying “never”, as absolutes simply don’t exist in our world. But I am saying look closely at your people. Step outside of how you see them, and see how they could benefit the company. Many times building a mentoring program is a great step so that someone is prepared to step into a role that needs to be filled. In sales especially, I see this as an extremely important step, as most small companies promote the best performing sales rep to management. This will be addressed in another post, but two things here: 1) Just because a rep sells the most doesn’t mean s/he should become or is qualified to become a manager and 2) if you take your biggest producer out of the field, what have you done to your sales?

In the end, promoting from within provides continuity. It enables culture building and a sense of safety to the employees. And, ultimately, it allows for employees to grow.

If you give them the chance, they will succeed.

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

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Clean Data

How many times have you received a piece of mail at your work or residence, and the address is correct but the recipient isn’t? The addressee ranges from someone who’s name is close to yours with the typos creating new and interesting aliases to people who sometime in the past lived or worked at the address. The most entertaining these are riffs on the names of people who may have lived or worked at that address combined with some sort of database which creates new people that never existed possibly living/working there. Then there is the case of my mom is receiving retirement home solicitations at my home address (in another city) although she’s never received a piece of mail there.

For a while I sold database and database tools and one of the most fascinating was one which cleaned up address lists. While this may seem a mundane exercise in data de-duplication, it is important and very common for contact lists, and this particular tool had broader application. For example, one company which was considering buying it was a natural gas provider. Of the hundreds of thousands addresses, they had a percentage of their customers who would move, not pay their bill and reappear at another address and sign up for service and use a variant of their name–different enough not to be flagged, but correct enough to allow them to sign up for service. They would have an address which might be a multi-family unit and have several people sign up for service at that address, and if they were all “P Smith” but actually different people, they had a billing problem.

Also, when the gas company would go to mail bills, if they had correct customer name information but incorrect address information, then the bill wouldn’t get to the address and the customer would be correct in not paying as they had never received notice. And last, incorrect recipients and addresses created waste (i.e., lost dollars and trash entering the waste stream) in the thousands of unneeded or possibly duplicate mailings.

So why does this matter for Sales Operations? Even though this was many years ago when snail mail was the predominate form of billing, correct information was at the crux of getting paid. Clean data is the foundation of smooth sales operations. And where clean data starts is the first time a prospect, company or customer is created in your CRM.

There are a few schools of thought in how to build prospects into a database–whether someone should be able to create an individual or be required to create a company in the CRM, but it is my opinion that the first thing is to create the company, and all data flows from there.

Believe it or not, this very activity is fraught with challenge. When the rep goes to create a company, have they done their due diligence? Is this prospect a subsidiary or the corporate HQ? and does the CRM have a process for creating parent/child businesses? Does the business have to have an address? And does this address have to be a corporate address or can it be local? Is the address a billing address or physical address or both? It goes on and on.

And while a lot can go awry in the entry of a new company, there is a step which should never be skipped and which should have penalties associated with it for skipping or for willful avoidance. And that is CHECKING FOR DUPLICATES. Why yell this at you with all caps? Because if a rep enters a company in a second (or third, or fourth…) time, it can throw off billing, accounting, quoting–a whole host of downstream issues which many times cannot be corrected later, corrected easily or corrected at all. And you may ask, why a penalty? Because many times I have seen where a rep has created a new account because the prospect they are working with is listed in another rep’s name. So instead of going to their sales manager about switching the account into their name, or possibly split/give up some money to the current account owner, they simply create a new account in the CRM. But in creating a new account, they create also create confusion and a new burden for smooth operations.

The burden lies with the information owner. If it is the sales rep’s responsibility to prospect and enter new companies into the database, then they need to follow specific guidelines to ensure the foundational elements are put in place the right way. Also, I have heard many reps say they don’t have time to enter all the information right then, which is fine, but they have to enter the minimum CORRECTLY. Here is my list of basic, correct info which should be entered:

Company name, spelled correctly, with proper capitalization and punctuation
- “Vern’s Pig Farm” vs. “verns pig frm”
HQ Address
Location Address of the customer the rep is dealing with.
Contact (customer or prospect) name, spelled correctly with proper capitalization and punctuation and a correct e-mail address.
Billing info (I’ll cover all required for this in another post)
Delivery address (see the above comments about “correctly”).
Correct phone numbers (again, I will cover this in another post).

Last, the one thing which can be the biggest impedance to getting correct data entered can be how the company has structured what data is required to create an entry. What do I mean? At some companies, when a prospect is created, the creator is required to enter specific information to create the record. For instance, if I am entering “Vern’s Pig Farm” I might be required to enter an e-mail address as well as a phone number. If that information isn’t handy, then many people will enter filler information, like “212-555-1212” (don’t get me started about formatting…) or an email which is “xyz@vernspigfarm.com”. Can you see the problem? Right away, I’ve entered bad info which quickly propagates into a cascade of bad actions. E-mail marketing campaigns, telephone prospecting and follow up, etc. It is my opinion the minimum information needed to create a company should be a business name and a business phone number. And before that rep (or whomever) can create that company, there is a mandatory duplicate check.

This topic, essentially Data Hygiene, can go on ad nauseam, but always keep this one fact about data in mind: it is easier to start with the correct information than to go back and fix it.

Measure twice, cut once.

What are you doing to keep your data clean?

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

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Smart Sales Operations

Well, it happened. I finally had enough and decided I had to take out my frustrations by hammering tiny little keys with my angry fingers.

“Enough? Enough of what?” you may ask. Enough of letting the small things become the big impediments which ruin my sales and my ability to sell. Things which companies can easily control that affect the sale, but most of the time never try to correct or even identify.

I’m talking about Sales Operations.

This blog will deal with using Smarts to produce operations which enable sales. Processes, process, progress. The infrastructure of selling. I have been a vocal proponent of sales infrastructure long before things like CRM became mainstream. And before I attacked my keyboard, I did a little research on the current state of Sales Operations and the information available for Sales Operations. There wasn’t much. If there was some it was usually tied to a product. While it would be great if I were to be hired to consult, my real goal is to make you, the reader, really think about the operations which are in motion behind the sales person and a sale.

This will not deal with any selling methodology, that is, the how, the why, the close or the cold call and various topics around sales methodology. That topic has been and continues to be covered by a lot of individuals and companies–some who are right, and some who think they are right. Although some methodology might creep into my noodling, my focus is concerning the administration and tracking and enabling which goes hand-in-hand with sales; I rarely see it given a proper nod in acknowledgement of its criticality.

I liken it to architecting infrastructure. We are incredibly dependent upon background services like plumbing, electricity and climate control. These pieces of physical infrastructure work in the background and our expectations are very high for up-time, with little tolerance (emotionally or physically) for downtime. These conveniences run in the background of our life, and we rarely think about them, but when they go down or are impeded in some way, we know. A stoppage makes us realize how interwoven these services are in our life, and how one hiccup creates a cascade effect of issues.

So, to further extend the analogy…

Without really realizing it, people worry a lot about pooping. Not everyone is having outright conversations about pooping, but there are commercials for toilet bowl cleaners so one has a clean potty to poop in, the Squatty Potty so they can be more effective at pooping, commercials for laxatives, fiber boosters, constipation relievers (to start the pooping process), and lots of marketing for toilet paper–the finale to the pooping process. We all know a lot about toilet paper. The brands, the textures, the softness, their roll sizes. The sales and marketing for toilet paper brands has been memorable, plentiful and pervasive. But toilet paper matters for naught if one cannot get the effluent out of their house. All of this peripheral conversation around pooping means nothing if when you flushed, the poop didn’t leave your house. You really wouldn’t be too worried about how clean your toilet was or what brand of toilet paper you used if you couldn’t flush it away. You would really be worried about how to get rid or your waste–or become acutely aware of the build up pretty quickly.

So it is thinking like this which I realize makes me The Infrastructure Guy. I like to think about the “how” — How do we make things better by refining, streamlining and studying issues to provide solutions. Similar to Six Sigma in manufacturing, but for sales and selling. And this blog will provide my thoughts, insights and experiences on how to enable the sales force to achieve more sales by implementing Smart Sales Operations.

What is one thing a business can do to streamline its process? First thing: on-boarding.

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.