The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [11]
Exercise
Figure out what the impact areas are in your business. 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, you may have many impact areas. To make identifying them easier, here is a list of 15 impact areas from another CEO I worked with:
Outside sales
Inside telemarketing team
Marketing activities
Customer ser vice
CRM (customer relationship management)
Purchasing and suppliers
Shipping and receiving
Inventory control
Accounts receivable
Personnel
Technology
Partner relations/vendors
Partner relations/affiliates
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.
The Six Steps to Great Time Management
There are six fundamental steps to great time management. Put these six steps into daily practice, and you won’t believe how much you and your staff can accomplish in a regular workday.
Step 1: Touch It Once
Tell me if this sounds familiar. 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 company 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 management. 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.” That’s how organized you need to be today.
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 company policy that insists on very descriptive subject lines for all emails. Another rule I absolutely insist on at my company is that when the subject of the email changes, the subject line on the email also changes. This is critical.
Say you send someone an email with the subject line “Upcoming Chet Holmes training event” and she writes back something that looks like this:
To: Sherry
From: Marcia
Subject: Upcoming Chet Holmes training event
Yes I’m going. 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