How to Focus on Selling without Projects Suffering
In talking about mistakes my mentor pointed out, that fateful day 1996. He noted staff were running around 50+ hours a week, yet still taking 4 days to return calls from customers. I was working hard and still losing money, what could be done.
You may have the same challenge, busy on projects one day, then scrambling to find the next contract, back and forth with no end in sight. Everyone is pulling twice their weight, really earning their checks, but every week you dread payroll for cash flow is still tight.
That's exactly where I was, facing the roller coaster income syndrome. I've already shared solutions to receivable problems, length proposal processes, profitability and other issues I faced. At first I thought I needed more people but my burden rate was already very high.
My mentor showed me that while staff looked busy, they weren't really. The sad part was that I really couldn't tell my mentor what they were doing, but they swore they were busy.
While some of these ideas may be obvious to the successful manager, they were foreign to me. Here's what was suggested and it made all the difference to my business:
Divide organization into functional areas, each with weekly objectives. Functional areas include accounting, sales, marketing, production, service, and management. Each area depends on the other and to work together needs measures of performance.
Everything supports the sales effort and revenue growth. A fancy office, neat website, and meetings are great if they increase sales with profitable customers.
Each individual has a job category with specific daily objectives. As with project management, every position has critical path tasks that must be done. Help people know what is expected of them and what holds priority.
Focus first on marketing to drive leads to sales, then proposals daily. I was doing one thing a day as time permitted, when I should do a little marketing, sales, and creating proposals everyday. Business growth activities are your top priority.
Automate as much marketing as possible. This is where the lead qualification and marketing systems came from, they serve as ways to reduce marketing labor while increasing results. Now lower level staff can crank out proven sales copy to keep quality leads flowing into sales.
Work the honest 8 hours then go home. In America, the average office employee works just 30 minutes each day. My mentor suggested breaking each day into 2 hour segments, then having staff create specific tasks for each segment.
Document work flow and hand offs to facilitate common tasks. Each common task was documented, check lists created, and could easily flow around the office without delay. Each task had a stage that could be easily followed.
Use a common calendar, contact management, and tasking system. Implementing a single back-end email and calendaring system kept everyone on the same page. It also reduced time conflicts that otherwise caused delays.
An agenda and minutes for every meeting. This helped focus everyone on the most important objectives for that meeting and kept things on track. Minutes always ended with a plan of action.
Weekly staff meetings around tasking and project management. As a manager or team lead, it's important to identify tasks and resolve any resource conflicts early. Regular meetings helped identify challenges while focusing on clear objectives.
Sales goals for each functional area. Any area that contributes to overall sales production needs a selling related measure. Many of these goals cross functional boundaries but tie all units together for corporate results.
Reward performers, quickly fire those who slow things down. Spot bonuses are nice when used to reward positive behavior, however, corrections help keep everyone moving in the right direction. Make your objectives clear, everyone will participate.
Involve customers in productivity feedback loops. This is a fancy term for including your customers on employee reviews and incorporating this into productivity improvements. These systems also help you determine which staff members add value when working with customers.
Monthly individual growth and performance reviews. Each staff member needs to know exactly where they stand on the team. Focus on areas of improvement, positive feedback, merit raises, spot bonuses, and efficiency improvements.
Everyone on staff needs to use a "to do" system. When every employee has a way of knowing what to do next, prioritizing things on their plate, and they follow it, the whole office is more productive. It doesn't have to be the same system, but each employee will use something.
Encourage prioritization feedback at point of tasking. You don't know everything that everyone does in the course of the day, so encourage staff to feedback top priorities when you task them new work so you can redelegate if there are conflicts.
Periodically include staff in sales meetings. It's helpful when staff are familiar and appreciated by sales people. They aren't just there to get you coffee and type your letters.
Designate a secretarial pool for sales and marketing. You don't have to be a big shop to know where to send support work. Too often my administrative assistant would be tied up with filing sales reports instead of doing what was important to the corporate back-end.
Show a clear growth path from entry level to top performer. A clerk on staff could move to sales support, then sales person. Alternatively they could move from clerk to junior accounting to somewhere on the accounting team. Make it clear what needs to be done at each stage.
Have no extra staff, use contractors if necessary. For one off and infrequent activities I turned staffers into managers to use designated contractors. Large print jobs were sent out, instead of done in house. After my mentors advice, individuals on payroll all contributed to the company bottom-line.
Start with sales, marketing, accounting, production, and service. A business isn't much more than these 4 areas and with a solid foundation here I produced more profits in less time. Forget the fancy titles, it's these basic areas that create results for clients.
Involve everyone in goal achievement. Set and keep corporate goals open to staff to see and contribute. Reward them for their efforts tied to these goals so that everyone wins when the company wins.
Encourage good health and a productive lifestyle. I encouraged staff to be producers, not just consumers. If they were sick, I sent them home to rest (rather than infect the whole office). Don't wear out your staff.
Make every position replaceable. This is critical to growth, you need to be able to plug in another qualified person to start working right away. Reinforce tasking documentation.
Make measures transparent and easy to calculate. With everyone on staff having critical daily tasks an individual could measure their own performance. Roll up measures showed me who was working and who wasn't, while providing a way to find bottlenecks in the system.
Shutdown to catch up quarterly. One week each quarter, all phones were forwarded to the receptionist and everyone on staff focused on getting caught up. I'd often bring in contractors, but this made sure things didn't fall through the cracks.
Each staffer knew how to capture a lead. Make it search to turn a phone call into a lead, then into a buyer, no matter how they called into the office. We even had the receptionist at the office center we rented turning calls into leads.
Once a year review process. Having your processes and procedures documented lets you independently review their value against metrics. With this strategy I took leaps forward each year, staff provided feedback to eliminate unnecessary efforts, and everyone kept the system working profitably.
Hire slowly, fire fast. A process was in place to hire individuals through multiple steps, constantly interviewing, and providing clear position expectations. By removing those who don't produce (usually they would just quit), everyone stayed focused.
Now some of these ideas seem down right autocratic, but lets not forget that you're a business, not a charity. Staff come to the office to work and will if you provide clear guidelines. The problem is when your office is so unorganized that people are literally slaving away to catch up (or worse, frustrated and screwing around.)
You'll find that many employees will push back some of the ideas shared here. That's a real shame because after the second year, I didn't lose a single employee until the company closed in 1999. With this advice, I had a small core staff with contractors responsible for the bulk of my production labor.
My IT consultancy started out as a service shop, then transformed to a marketing company. As a marketer of IT consulting services, it seemed I had an unlimited supply of labor and could drive revenue more quickly. If you want to be a leader in your industry, you can own your market by outselling your competition. In effect, I owned my competition in 8 states because my firm provided most of their regular contracts.
After putting these ideas in place, I was able to maintain a staff of 5 who in turn managed 27 subcontractors, each with 10 to 75 technicians in the field. Margins were significantly improving as the company grew in size until the dot.com bust.
In future letters I'll share with you contract mistakes I made, errors in collection, and what happened when I forgot about our number one objective. Until then, your questions are welcome.
If you are facing a specific challenge in your company, reply with your comments. Just remember, we're not pen-pals, so keep responses brief and to the point.
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