Once you understand the time man- agement secrets of running a multibillion-dollar company, you'll have no trouble managing your sales activities, if you're in sales, or getting your company or department to function at its maximum productivity. My Time Management Epiphany You've heard of the "one-minute manager. In fact, the en- tire company was run by got-a-minutes. Anyone could go to anyone else any time and a got-a-minute meeting would break out.
My employees were in a reactive mode all day long. Although I had successfully grown each of my divisions by at least percent within 12 to 15 months of taking them over, I was out of control and reacting percent of the time.
Even on vacation in Hawaii, I was receiving 15 faxes per day this was before email became the newest time burner. I had to have a strict agenda. I had to be on time and organized. Every meeting was highly productive and to the point. Then suddenly it clicked that I needed to take control of my time and my staff. So after a few years of working hour days, every Single day including weekends, I realized that in order to more successfully run and manage the divisions under my control, I had to get more organized and less reactive.
I put out a memo effectively ending my "got-a-minute" management style. The answer will be no. Unless urgent, hold all thoughts, ideas, issues, or nonurgent concerns until the weekly division meeting. Below is a list of when these meetings will be held.
Otherwise, I will post two times per day when I will take "got-a-minute" meetings. If your needs can't wait for the weekly meeting, write your name in the got-a-minute times allocated and I will take quick lO-minute meetings.
We broke the company down into nine "impact areas" and held weekly one-hour meetings in each area. An impact area is any part of your company that has a direct impact on the bottom line. Your impact areas may include sales, customer service, product development, and marketing, for example. In order to improve and perfect each of these areas you need to give them a dedicated one hour per week when every- one involved can focus exclUSively on improving that area.
Once I established weekly impact area meetings, my team learned to hold their ideas until the appropriate meeting instead of coming to my office to share their ideas as they got them. I even put out a pad that had the words "With Chef' on the top of the pad. My staff was then to write down on the pad the things they'd normally interrupt me with and keep that pad in their desk drawer until the weekly meeting.
The memo went out on Thursday, and I recall distinctly that on Fri- day no one came to my door. It was the first time in years that that had happened, and I did not know what to do with all this uninterrupted time. I had a whole new learning curve headed my way. No one came to my door on Friday, but, by Monday, the madness started all over. I had to have the pigheaded determination and disci- pline to train my staff to follow these rules.
When someone comes to your door with a "got-a-minute" meeting, you stop them cold and say, "Is this something that can't wait until the weekly meeting? And if you lack pig- headed discipline, you'll cave and jump right into it. So I had to disci- pline myself and the staff to hold almost everything until the weekly meetings.
And the best part? I went from reacting to the business 70 to 80 hours per week to proactively running and more effectively managing and grow- ing the business in only nine hours per week because I broke down my responsibilities into nine major impact areas. The meetings were way more productive than the got-a-minute meetings because these meetings were more formal, structured, and results-oriented.
The key stafffor each impact area attended their meeting together, so major progress could be made and everyone was there who then needed to take the next step or learn our latest breakthrough.
I kept nine pads one for each impact area , and on each pad I would keep notes of what we had worked on and who had promised to do what before the next weekly meeting.
Yes-to-do's, tasks, and deadlines must be assigned after every meet- ing. But the key is not to ask for too much to be completed. Make the gains small but constant. If you are having the meeting every week and you are making small incremental gains each and every week, think of the profound transformation you're going to have in 52 weeks. A year from now your company, division, or department can be massively improved. More on this later.
If you run a large company, you will have more impact areas. I helped one executive break down his company into the main impact areas and initiatives he was working on, and he ended up with which means 17 one-hour meetings per week.
That might sound crazy to a small- company owner or executive, but it is the way to take your company to the next level if you've got a lot going on. This particular executive was working 70 hours per week and getting less done than when I made him break down the company into 17 hours of meetings. Each meeting moved each impact area forward.
Everything of importance got ad- dressed every week. Everyone was happier. The employees in each area felt more important. Prior to this program, some of them had to chase the boss for weeks to get questions answered or issues addressed.
So break it down. Typically if you are running a department, your department is the impact area. But if you're a CEO or general manager of a medium or large company. To make identifying them easier, here is a list of 15 impact areas from another CEO I worked with: 1.
Outside sales 2. Inside telemarketing team 3. Marketing activities 4. Customer service 5. CRM customer relationship management 6. Purchasing and suppliers 7. Shipping and receiving 8. Inventory control 9. Accounts receivable Personnel Technology Export sales California initiative This last initiative was to attack a new market. What initiatives do you or should you have? Now list your areas of impact. Put these six steps into daily practice, and you won't believe how much you and your staff can accomplish in a regular workday.
You come into your office, and there on your desk sit three folders and two letters that you must respond to. You look at the first letter and read a few sentences. Dealing with it is clearly going to take more time than you have right now.
You put it aside. In one of your folders is another task. You handle that task and your phone rings. You answer the phone and get pulled in a new direction for 10 to 15 minutes. Then you go back to the folder, but, just as you do, an email comes in. You stop to read the email, which contains a task that must be dealt with but requires more time than you have right now. If you spend just 15 minutes per day to revisit, readdress, or reread documents or emails, you will waste 97 hours per year where no action is taken.
Many on your staff will waste an hour per day scattered throughout the day revisiting things on which no meaningful action is taken. That equates to six weeks of wasted time per year. Want to add six more weeks of productivity to every year? This simple touch-it- once rule and the infrastructure to support this rule within your com- pany can dramatically enhance the productivity of every person working for you.
If you touch it, take action. That's the first step to great time manage- ment. Don't open that email or letter until you're ready to deal with it. As you put this rule into practice, you will find that the more files you have for work in progress and the more organized you can be in that process, the more productive you will be. So, for example, suppose I open my email from my PR firm that requires me to approve a press release. I have a PR folder.
On my to-do list I write, "Approve press release. See PR folder. The touch-it-once rule is crucial for managing email files. Email is a tremendous asset, but it can also kill your time management if you let it control you. The key to great email management is to institute a com- pany policy that insists on very descriptive subject lines for all emails. Another rule I absolutely insist on at my company is that when the sub- ject of the email changes, the subject line on the email also changes.
This is critical. I already reserved my spot. And by the way, did you talk to Dave about the budget item I mentioned to you? The email goes back and forth again about the problem with Dave, but it still has "Upcoming Chet Holmes training event" in the subject line.
A week or two later, someone asks you what happened with Dave? One of these seven emails covers that important issue, but you have to open all seven to find that data point. So change the subject line as you change the content of the email. Every client and employee of mine has to adhere to this rule in order to interact with me. This way, everyone in the company can glance at an incoming email and make the decision, "Can I deal with this now if I open it now?
This can't be overstated: email can be the death of good time man- agement. Companies that have new-email alerts constantly sounding keep every person in a reactive mode all day long. If your computer sig- nals when you have an email, DO NOT go directly to read it and answer it at the moment it comes in. Email is there for your convenience. If it's not convenient, don't answer it.
Concentration is like a muscle and it strengthens as you concentrate more. If you stop concentrating every time an email comes in or the phone rings, you actually lessen your ability to concentrate and you become less effective in any situation that requires concentration.
Note: As you go through these six things, don't think about whether you've heard them before. Think about whether you're applying the discipline to implement them. Step 2: Make Lists Many people make lists as a way to keep organized.
If you don't keep a list, you are most likely a very reactive person. Lists help you stay focused on high priorities and highly productive matters. Keeping a list will double your productivity right away. Then I ask, "How many items do you usually keep on your list? The key to being productive is to stick to the six most impor- tant things you need to get done that day.
You'll find that when you have a long list, it becomes the management tool for your time. When you want to feel productive, you go to your list and just pick something and do it. It feels good. When you have a long list, you generally do the easier, less productive tasks just to trim down the list. At the end of the day, you find that the most important things on the list didn't get com- pleted because they are either the hardest, the most time-consuming, or both. Long lists also mean that you will never finish your list.
There is a negative psychological impact to not finishing your list. But there is an enormous psychological boost to crossing off that sixth item on your list, especially when all six of them were the most important things you needed to do that day.
So here's the rule: list the six most important things you need to do and, by hook or by crook, get those six things completed each day. That doesn't mean you don't keep a side list of running items that need to be done.
When you plan each day coming up in a moment , you can go to your long list and use that as a menu of items from which to build your list of the six most important things for that day. Exercise Do this exercise now and we'll build on it as you read the rest of this chap- ter. Take a clean sheet of paper and write down the six most important things you need to get done tomorrow.
Your list might look something like mine: 1. Work on client proposal. Fax contract. Schedule meetings. Conference call with Heidi. Review this month's marketing plan. Work on direct mail letter. Just determine the amount of time you will realistically dedicate to each task. This is an important step to make sure that the six items on your list can actually be accomplished in a day. If one or more of the items on your list is too big to accomplish in one day, then write down how much time during that day you will dedicate to it.
You will take care of bigger projects in man- ageable chunks of time. This book is a great example. I've been getting book offers for more than 10 years. But I looked at the book as a huge undertaking. Once I made the commitment, I put an hour a week on my calendar to address the book. Within three months, I had a solid book proposal that got me this book deal. What have you been putting off for years? Or what important initiatives are you just not getting to because they take too much time?
Do them in small chunks of time. Now your list might look like this: 1. Work on client proposal-. Revise and fax contract Schedule meetings-. Conference call-l hour. Work on marketing plan-l hour. Work on direct mail Ietter-2 hours. Add up the total amount of hours for your "productive tasks. I've done this exercise in many seminars, and there are always a few people who add up their hours and get 11 hours' worth of stuff.
Not realistic at all when you now must work these six things into the rest of your day. A good guide to go by is that your six most important things should take about six hours. I'll explain why later.
It must be specific and have a time slot for absolutely everything. This includes each of the six items on your list as well as time to check email and open mail. Remember, if you are following the first rule and only touching these items once, then you need to have a dedicated period of time each day when you can deal with them. Note in this fully planned day below that there are two periods of time for miscellaneous and got-a-minute meetings.
These miscellaneous periods are absolutely essential because we all know that your day might be interrupted. There are some things you will have to react to that will throw you off your schedule. If you have planned at least two half-hour slots of reactive time, then when you get off track, you've actually built in buffers so that you can get back to your schedule.
But, most impor- tant, stick to that schedule no matter what. Note in the plan below that this is actually a lO-hour day, but only 6.
Exercise Write a plan for your day tomorrow that would give you enough time to cross off all six items on your to-do list and stay on top of your email and other tasks. But, by the end of the day, there is rarely time or energy to take on this chore. Put the most important task first. This simple step will give you a tremendous sense of control and accomplishment. We've heard it again and again: only 20 percent of your effort brings 80 percent of your results. Many people drown in busywork that pro- duces few results.
They're so busy that they've lost their ability to priori- tize and concentrate. I call them "busypeople. But when you look at their actual productivity, it's very low. For these people this whole technique becomes critical. And you have to police it like a ninja master to get them to stop all the busywork and focus on productivity.
What would happen if 80 percent of your effort was focused on high- results-producing activities? If you started spending 80 percent of your time on results-oriented work and only 20 percent on everything else, you could conceivably get a fourfold increase in productivity!
All it takes is pigheaded discipline and determination. And that's for salespeople who have a full load of current clients. Salespeople who are not managing a large list of current clients need to do at least four hours per day of pure cold calling. I have a client who has software that tracks sales activity, but he never used the soft- ware.
To our shock, when we actually used the software we found that not one person on the staff was doing more than an hour's worth of cold calling in a single day. When surveyed, the reps thought they were mak- ing 40 to 60 cold calls per day. The reality: about 11 to 28 cold calls per day. For new salespeople, their entire day should be spent prospecting. If you are a one-person army or a very small company and you, as the entrepreneur, are the main person responsible for growing the company, then you personally must spend at least 2.
What if you're a reception- ist who answers phones or an assistant who has to react to your boss's needs all day. Even people in reactive positions should still plan realisti- cally for some proactive tasks that can get done each day.
You should have some proactive tasks that you do each day that move things for- ward or improve the company or your job. Plan time to improve skills, performance, work flow, and organization for you and your department or company. People in more reactive positions will simply have far less time dedicated to proactive tasks-but still have some proactive tasks in every day. If you are a receptionist and your main job is to answer phones, can you also be productive making lists of prospects for the sales team?
It makes me crazy when I go into a company and the receptionist is reading a book because the calls are slow. Can this person be doing some research on the Internet about your industry?
Or doing mailings? These questions also apply if you're in customer service. In your weekly meetings full design in Chapter Three , make it a point to address this issue and put reactive people to work in their down time or slow time. Before the advent of the Internet, I would go around the office and check how people were planning their day.
I did that for months until every person in the com- pany was doing their plan every day. It took me six months of pigheaded discipline and determination and constant inspection before my employ- ees followed the six steps religiously. I am so intent on having great time management among my key executives, and they from their staff, that I even built an Internet program where employees log in and plan their day.
The boss gets an automatic email alert each time an employee com- pletes his or her day's plan. With or without a program like this, instituting this kind of inspec- tion on how employees are planning and prioritizing will increase their respect for time management and dramatically increase their productivity.
At the beginning? In the middle? At the end? So why hold on to it? To determine whether or not to keep something, ask yourself, "Will it hurt me to throw this away?
If you're a boss, the answer is usually yes. Throw it away. If I don't speCifically keep an email, it's automatically thrown away by my system after 45 days. Maybe twice per year there's one that I wish I could get again. And I usually can. One of my staff recently had trouble in that her email was working slowly. The technician looked at her email account and discovered that it had stored some ridic- ulous amount of old data because she kept every single email.
After the technician had her clean out all the files she didn't think she would ever need again, her stored email went from 2. Conclusion As you can see, there are not 4, steps to time management and there is no need to track your time for three months before introducing time management into your life and your business.
Implement them companywide and you will be operating at maximum productivity before you know it. Of course, even if you stick to these six steps, events and people will interfere and your schedule will be disrupted. Emergencies will come up that will take an hour or even two hours out of your day.
As long as you've scheduled some flexible time into your day, some blank spaces in your schedule, you can accommodate those detours. The key is that when something interferes with your schedule, deal with it and then go back to your schedule! The other 90 percent of the population will not look to improve their skills unless they have to as part of their job requirement. Today, most professions-real estate brokers, accountants, financial planners, stockbrokers, lawyers, healthcare pro- fessionals, masseuses, and so on-have mandatory continuing education because they found that, without it, people wouldn't keep current with the information necessary to be accepted as a professional in their field.
What if your doctor wasn't required to keep up to date with medical advances and hadn't looked at a medical text in 20 years? He or she might be prescribing medicine that is now known to be harmful or doing procedures that we've proven ineffective. Yet in most companies there's little or no training and there's rarely mandatory training.
Some managers view training as an interference with "work" to be done. But think of the tale of the woodcutters: Woodcutter A cuts wood all day. Woodcutter B keeps stopping and sitting down. At the end of the day, woodcutter B has three times more wood than woodcutter A. Woodcutter A asks: "How could this happen?
You were resting all day! I was sharpening my saw. At Joe's Bank, they use what I call the "tribal method of train- ing," where information is passed from person to person by word of mouth, like cavemen might have done. Sam is told to watch Betty for two days, and then he will be ready to do things himself. There is no for- mal methodology, no classroom-style training, no training manuals, no role playing.
It's all just one person sitting with another person and watching what that person does. Just watch and learn. If Betty has a bad day, a bad attitude, or bad habits, Sam might think these are acceptable as well. This is the worst kind of training you could possibly have. On the other hand, banks like Wells Fargo, Banker's Trust, and Citibank-all former clients of mine-have classroom-style training programs with policies and procedures for everything.
At one of these companies, Sam goes through extensive classroom training before he ever sits to observe another teller. When he finally sits down to do so, he can actually spot when she's doing something wrong. Sam has learned his job, but the training shouldn't stop there. Improving and advancing the skills and professionalism of every person in your company is an ongoing process, and formal training sessions should be regular and nonnegotiable.
Your industry and competitors might be advancing, but, without mandatory continuing education, your team isn't. In this chapter you'll learn how to set the standards of achievement in your company or de- partment. You'll learn how to implement mandatory training programs and how to make them fun, interesting, and stimulating so your staff loves them.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-person army or a Fortune firm; you need to be working on your skills. I had an original equipment manufacturer OEM client who was trying to penetrate the biggest manufacturers in her market using a method you will learn in Chapter Six.
A key element to this process was that her sales staff had to toughen up. The grim reality is that without great training, the majority of salespeople will never call a prospect back who rejects them even once. Few salespeople will call back even twice after a prospect has said no.
This was definitely the case with this OEM company. Its salespeople would have given up after the first rejection from those manufacturers. We knew that it would take a coordinated and highly monitored ef- fort to solve this problem.
We had call reports that the salespeople were required to fill out that showed what their activity was, and then every week, I personally selected salespeople for what I call "the hot seat. Because they knew we were going to be doing this every week, it slowly raised the bar of performance in the whole company. This was not easy or immediate. Every salesperson started off not really doing the required activities. But when they were put on the hot seat by me, with all 50 of the other salespeople as well as the president of the company, the vice president of sales, and their sales manager all listening, they quickly realized they had better respect what we were go- ing to inspect.
For the first three months there was barely any progress and, on their own, this company and its sales team probably would have given up. But after three months of steady marketing to the executives at these manu- facturers and more or less forcing the sales staff to keep calling the same prospects who kept saying no, we started to make nice progress. Every week we would go over what the salespeople were saying and what the prospects were saying.
In each case, I'd tune up their skills. Within six months the sales crew had gotten in to see 54 percent of those they targeted. With consistent, relentless, and organized training on just this spe- cific concept, we raised the standard dramatically and then policed it throughout the organization. These salespeople learned that consistency in their approach-no matter how many times they were rejected- results in a tremendous conversion rate of prospects to buying clients.
They are now the masters of selling in their industry. What kind of music is your organi- zation creating? All employees perform each aspect of their job with a high degree of excellence and consistency.
Results are somewhat predictable because training and skills are consistent. Each supervisor would give a similar answer for each question or problem. Each employee would give a similar answer for each question or problem. Client treatment is similar, no matter who the client deals with in our company or department. All staff members know what is considered good performance or attitude. If you answered false to any of these statements, you aren't serious enough about training.
Without training, employee activity will be inter- mittent, inconsistent, moody-maybe even indifferent or rude-because you have not set standards.
With proper training, every employee will know the ideal procedure for initial contact with a client, the questions they need to ask every single client no matter what, and the follow-up procedures that you absolutely insist upon. The more proactive training you have, the better the This book will take you very deep into all these issues, but the purpose of this chap- ter is to emphasize that the most important thing you can do is to insist upon mandatory and regular skills training.
Training Sets Standards Deliberate and constant training radically improves employees' under- standing of company objectives and helps to raise and set standards of performance. If you don't train, you can't expect people to get to the next level. That's why most companies stay small or have to continually waste time addressing the same issues and problems over and over again.
Training Makes Money Quality training is guaranteed to make you money. With consistent training it experienced a dramatic and much-needed increase in sales. Your sales team knows what to do and can handle any situation with ease because you've covered it in your weekly sessions together, right?
It's the same with customer service which you will learn more about in Chapter Three and every other area of your business. When clients experience consistent top-notch service no matter who they are dealing with in your organization, they will keep coming back. Without training, you'll lose clients that might be saved if you proactively address issues as they arise. Standardized client interaction and follow- up procedures mean that you are constantly building better client rela- tionships that will lead to repeat business and referrals.
Again, this book will give you a full formula for all these things in subsequent chapters. Training also saves you money because it reduces employee turn- over. When employees know exactly what to do in any situation, they have the tools to thrive in your organization.
Training boosts confidence and reduces stress. Because training also sets a clear path for perfor- mance, it will be easier to measure and reward employees for exceeding performance standards. With organized and regular training programs, your company or department will be a better place to work. Train or Be Derailed The health ofyour business is not so different from that of your body.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you were choking, would you rather your friends try to learn the Heimlich maneuver right then and there or would you prefer that they already had training and practice doing it? Training is proactive.
It keeps your company healthy and pre- pared no matter what crisis arises. If you don't train, you force everyone to be reactive, so your chances for survival decrease dramatically.
Training can save lives. I taught self-defense in New York City when I was 25, training many top executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. I remember presenting to a major oil company when the chief of security said that he thought self-defense training was a bad idea.
He had a year-old and an year-old daughter. I asked if he remembered the story. He did. The girl had the attacker's skin under her fingernails, showing that she had made a gallant fight. In a life-threatening situation, you're in one of two categories: either you have no training and you're guessing, or you've had training and have very specific ideas of what you can do. I asked the executive which category he'd rather his daughters be in: trained or untrained.
He said, "I see your point. When your employees confront any situation, they're in one of two categories. Either you've addressed it and trained them and they have the information they need to deal with it, or you haven't addressed it or trained them and they're going to be guessing.
Which category would you rather your staff be in? Some people fear that they won't remember things when they're in crisis. But your brain has a crisis scan function that kicks in during those situations. When adrenaline is pumped into your system, your brain speeds up, searching for what it has available to get you through the cri- sis. Over the years of teaching self-defense, I heard many examples of this-where someone in a crisis would not just remember what to do, but would even remember me teaching him the move.
Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you.
Some of the techniques listed in Sell It Like Serhant: How to Sell More, Earn More, and Become the Ultimate Sales Machine may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url.
We use your LinkedIn profile and activity data to personalize ads and to show you more relevant ads.
You can change your ad preferences anytime. Upcoming SlideShare. You are reading a preview. Create your free account to continue reading. Sign Up. Like this presentation? Why not share! Embed Size px. Start on. Show related SlideShares at end. WordPress Shortcode. Next SlideShares. Download Now Download to read offline and view in fullscreen.
Download Now Download Download to read offline. Canny Digital Follow. Chet's Quotes. Strategy vs. Inflation and its effects on investment.
Made to Stick. Great By Choice Review and Application. Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Propaganda Edward Bernays. Related Audiobooks Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Inside the Tornado Geoffrey A. Unleashing the Idea Virus Seth Godin. Cialdini, PhD. Dan Ariely. Conservpro, Inc. Reetika singal , abc. Chaunda VanTassel. Darius Johnson , Owner of DaSolution.
What Sets You Apart? Monica Hurt. Paris Faraji Kluba.
0コメント