process Archives - Thinks, Inc.

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

Foundational HR

Many years ago, when I was in my first real job, I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. As was becoming the fashion but is now de riguer, employees were required to take training from human resources for employee interaction, needs identification and conflict resolution.

At the time, it consisted of getting a group of employees together to watch a VHS video coupled with an instructor-led discussion of the different scenarios involved and what could have been done better–initially, during and after the interaction.

One of these videos stands out even after all these years. I’ve tried to track it down online, but it has probably been shelved since the fashions were out of date even when I viewed it the first time. The screen resolution was striped and grainy from repeated viewings. What stood out then and still stands out in my mind though was how it addressed what I consider foundational HR issues and things like responsibility to oneself and co-workers.

In the video, a woman sitting at her desk picks up her phone and calls a person in another department. The co-worker is male and works in IT. With few pleasantries, the woman demands help. The co-worker, in return, is short with her. The conversation ends and the woman is upset and escalates to management. Management intervenes and basically coaches the pair on how to play nice.

The group discussion I was involved with focused on characters in the video, Fred* and Velma, and their method of requesting and responding. To make the HR point, the scene and its message were supposed to be cut and dried, so I don’t fault the video or its script writers for the intended message conveyed. What raised my eyebrows was how the people who viewed the video missed what I considered the Foundational HR flaw.

So, back to the scene: after Velma hangs up the phone (remember, this was before chat and texting), she turns in her chair and complains to her co-worker about Fred. What a miserable SOB he is, etc. The co-worker nods her head sympathetically. The scene cuts to Fred, who has turned to his co-worker and is complaining about Velma wasting his time. Then he states that THIS IS THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK HE HAS SHOWN HER HOW TO DO THIS.

After this, we, the observers, discussed how Fred and Velma should have handled the conflict. There were a lot of soft suggestions like “use a nicer tone”, and “apologize for behavior”. But something didn’t sit right with me, so I raised my hand and said, “Velma or Fred should have written down the instructions.” The discussion leader eyed me coolly and paused…and then went to another raised hand. Being young I allowed her stare to quell any further pursuit of my observation and we got back to what an SOB Fred was.

This baffled me, as the crux of the problem and what created the conflict was that Velma again needed information which was provided previously provided. The conflict was a result, but not the fundamental issue.

No wonder Fred was upset–he was just berated by someone who demanded help for a task he had already shown them how to do. The video focused on Fred and Velma’s interaction and response and how they should have handled it.

Now a few caveats. I understand the intent of the video was to demonstrate how to communicate with co-workers better. It is important as an adult to communicate our ideas and opinions without devolving into an argument and hurt feelings. People need to treat each other civilly in an office environment (and elsewhere!). And, learning better ways to express anger and frustration and avoid hostilities is important.

Some important information: First, being the monkeys we are, to quell our simian roots we begin training the our control of emotions starting at birth. Many parents call this “manners”. Second, many tasks need more than one walk through before they become fluid. Third, as the little aphorism says, “Your crisis is not my crisis,” so escalating it by screaming, yelling, arm waving, foot stamping, etc. will only make it your crisis with me responding to it with matching anger. Fourth, if the proper foundations were in place, then when this crisis appeared, its escalation would match its criticality–one does not yell “fire” in the movie theater if they see only the glow of a cigarette (not applicable today, but it was many moons ago). And fifth, if Velma had been shown the process earlier, then there should have been some documentation around to jog her memory when she was required to repeat it.

If you are familiar with six sigma and its brethren 5S, then an appendage to the 5S methodology is to incorporate a system to make information available when it is needed: right now, in a week or in a month. What Velma needed was not another explanation–that just pulls Fred away from his work and doesn’t guarantee Velma future issues–but an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), guide, tool or template to follow to get to a point where she can complete the process on her own. If that means further training with Fred, then that needs to be built into a plan. If it means Fred left Velma with instructions or Velma took notes, then that needs to be built into a plan.

So…a few years later, different company, same video, and another instructor led discussion with a different instructor. When it came up as to what Fred and Velma should have done differently, I raised my hand and stated my same premise as before. When the instructor paused with her stare this time (they must be coached this), I continued with my observation that the solution was to make sure either Fred had left enough information with Velma or Velma had enough information from Fred so that both could go on their way and neither would have had to have angry words. Even if planning to meet again at another time for more training was better than demanding someone help you. This time I only got a little sigh from the instructor.

The moral is if you have incorporated a plan, procedure or SOP for foundational activities and information, then you won’t have to deal with Fred and Velma and their bad interaction. You could probably even hire Shaggy and Scooby to do the work for mere snacks because you would have such a great plan in place you could hire just about anyone–even a talking dog–and they could figure out the work because of all your wonderful documentation.

In the end, planning and documenting should be part of any process. When you onboard someone, you have a plan, right? Right?

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.

*My apologies to Hanna-Barbera

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.

Onboarding – Smart Sales Operations

Onboarding is the set of processes companies have in place to bring on new hires. In the computer and networking world, this includes provisioning and access to necessary systems. But there is more than just getting the new hire an e-mail address. For instance, what happens when a new sales rep gets hired? Do you have a rigorous process? or do you wing it?

What happens at your company? And what happened to your new hires in the past? And after reading this, what are your plans for future hires?

Apple is famous for its user friendliness, whether it be hardware or software, and Apple receives praise for the simplicity and functionality of its designs. And because people at Apple think about how something is or will be used, a lot of problems which an end user would potentially have encountered are circumvented. Through use testing, glitches are identified and eliminated. The burrs which would blister the experience are smoothed.

One story I remember* regarding Apple was their packaging strategy for their early systems. When the end user received their new computer and opened the box, Apple led them through it using a string. Yes, a string. Once the lid was open, the top sheet had a string attached to it, and as the user pulled things out of the box, the string connected each piece sequentially so that the owner set up the monitor, the power and the CPU in proper order, and when completed, turned on a fully functioning system. Even if the end user had no idea what each part was or where things went, Apple’s system eliminated the guesswork of putting together the computer.

That string is really a kinesthetic checklist. And I’m a big believer in checklists. If you have the chance, I recommend reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. It is a great guide to looking at situations where checklists can be implemented, and in many of Gawande’s examples, save lives.

So back to onboarding. Is there a checklist in place? One which describes the steps which should happen as a person is brought into a company? A series of checklists can and should be in place for all aspects of the new hire process, such as interviewing, first day, first week, first quarter and first year.

For example, interviewing:
Have they filled out an application?
Spoken to the correct people in the area which they will work?
Gotten rubber stamped by the hiring chain of command?
Been tendered an offer letter?
Have they accepted?
Set a start date?

Once they’ve set a start date, does the company have an internal checklist to get things done? Most companies think of obvious things like health benefits and payroll, but what about laptops, cell phones, and business cards? What about training? In our current era of “faster, faster”, many times companies leave out things because they believe it only takes up time, but what they are really doing is increasing the ramp up time.

How? Because they aren’t giving the new hire the tools to be successful internally. What makes someone become part of a company? Is it because they are given an employee ID? Or is it because they interact with HR, engineers, other sales people and admin.

One company where I started many years ago, I sat for three weeks without a working laptop. When I got my laptop I was told to order business cards–and I didn’t know how to do that and no one had taken time to write it down. All processes were tribal knowledge–and I wasn’t part of the tribe quite yet.

Action item for the week: look at your onboarding process and determine if you take a new hire completely through your company’s processes–with no assumptions of “they should know how to do that”–because many won’t.

You don’t want your new hire to be waiting around for three weeks to start becoming one of your team.

*I say remember because I can’t confirm it’s true–please correct me if I’m wrong!

More on onboarding later. Next week we begin Front Office v. Back Office.

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.