Bill Rice Internet Marketing > gtd

Stop Collecting and Start Processing

June 11, 2010 By
HALLATROW, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 12: Book...

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Making new friends is hard. There’s a lot of anxiety in that first interaction. Will they like me? Do we have anything in common? Will I like them? How do I start things off?

I know, this is a blog about sales. Stay with me. We’ll get there.

The result of all this anxiety is that we often wait around for just the right moment, endlessly search or wait for someone to introduce us, or worse…simply avoid the introduction.

The result? No introduction, no new friendship, no new experience, missed opportunity for you and the new friend.

I develop customer relationships much like I build friendship. And the pitfalls are all the same.

So, now back to sales and what this little story illustrates.

The Amount of Stuff is Exploding

The Internet and social media has caused the amount of stuff you can collect on a people and companies to explode. You can literally lose hours of time running down all the rabbit holes people and companies create with their online behavior.

This is very dangerous to your sales performance.

All this stuff becomes a dangerous placebo for your sales anxiety. And just like a placebo, when you get right down to the real results you’re still sick (no sales).

Discipline Your Collecting

To avoid this peril I recommend disciplining your collecting or pre-sales research. A few of the tricks I use:

1. Follow the guideposts - Chances are your prospect is directing you to where they want your attention. These are the places and things they want you to know about them. You’re not a gotcha entertainment reporter. Stop researching like you’re trying to uncover a secret.

2. Get the basics - You don’t need research and find out all the details of a prospect’s life back to grade school. Not only is that a waste of time, but it’s going to freak your prospect out if you start ask them why they got a C in Art back in third grade. Leave some room for discovery at your first meeting.

3. You only need a couple of themes - You want to be as natural and free-flowing as possible when you start up a new relationship. However, it’s nice to have a couple of themes or commonalities that you can pull out of your hip pocket if you’re losing attention. But, you only need a couple–so get them and then stop.

Start Processing (GTD-style)

Hopefully, I have saved you time and made your stack of prospect research much smaller. Now the most important part: Start processing.

I think GTD for Sales. Nothing closes without contact. Be confident you have enough to start a conversation and start processing through your leads.

Your turn. This post was just a starting point. I know we all suffer from this endless collecting pitfall in sales. Help me and others…

What are your tips and tricks on knowing when to stop collecting and start processing?

Filed Under: Lead Management Tagged With: gtd, lead mangement, prospects, Social Selling

Are You Using Social Media or is it Using You?

August 11, 2009 By

It amuses me on how black and white the crowds are around social media. It seems you are either a cheerleader or a hater. Social media is either the road to riches or a big waste of time. I look at social networking from a slightly different perspective–you are either using it or it is using you.

Social media, in my humble opinion, is simply people producing and sharing content. That makes breaking the barriers to being a publisher remarkably low and at the same time makes the chances of finding fascinating and relevant things even more likely.

The challenge now becomes the frequency, which presents attention and capacity issues. These are two of you most critical resources for business success in any tool, technology, or endeavor.

This becomes the breaking point in most social media love/hate discussions.

Attention

Most naysayers of social media label it a waste of time. Certainly it can be. Of course, so can reading, writing, and arithmetic if done in an unproductive manner. The point is there are lots of things we do that can be done in a productive or unproductive way. That is not to say that reading a comic book on occasion isn’t a valuable experience due to its lack of productivity.

The real question is: Where and to what degree do you apply your attention to optimize your profits-to-life balance?

Social media can only be a waste of time if you allow it to be such. The smart social media user is mindful of their objective(s) at all times. Setting clear goals for your attention is an important success builder.

Here are a few general objectives that I set my social media attention towards achieving:

  • Tuning my followers into valuable content produced by others
  • Engaging experts and smart people in discussion (learning)
  • Scanning or searching for news and opportunities
  • Looking for examples and sources for my content production
  • Promoting my own contributions to my community
  • Brand building

To really get to execution you would need to take a list like this down to another level or two of detail. You should also specifically develop a process for efficiently doing the required tasks.

This new level of detail (tasks) leads you to the next step–capacity.

Capacity

How do you get it all done?

Well, the fact is there are only 24 hours in the day. The trick is using them, not burning them.

This is where tools can help. Again, find a couple that you like and increase you productivity, not too many. In this social media game he with the most toys just dies–no winners.

Here are some of the social media tools I use to manage my capacity:

When you are selecting your tools look for reliability and ones that let you leverage your time. This is one of the reasons I like things like Google Reader and HootSuite. They allow me to capture and process large quantities of information in a short frame of time. Then I can schedule an orderly time-release of that information.

One last parting remark on time-release before we move to flow, because I think the objective is often missed. Most of you community is consuming social media as a flow (the next topic). Therefore, if you release valuable information all at once, say 7:30 a.m. with your morning coffee you will disadvantage a big majority of your worldwide community.

That’s right, time-release is about appropriately serving your community–NOT just looking busy.

Creating a Flow

Now for the hardest part. You have to learn to switch from the typical “processing to done” that many of us learned from the GTD paradigm to a working the flow approach.

For more great reading on working flow you have to check out Stowe Boyd who narrates on /message. Here is one of my favorite relevant examples: 3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles.

It is critical to structure your social media attention and capacity in such a way that your are simply dipping into the stream (like a river flow) to listen, engage, and add value. Your social strategy should not require you to capture and process every item. It should be designed to leverage the ebbs and flows of conversations.

How are you managing your social media strategy or is it managing you?

Other great articles on structuring your social media strategy:

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Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: flows, gtd, Social Media, twitter

Sales Pipeline Management, The GTD Approach

August 28, 2008 By

Getting Things Done (GTD), the powerful efficiency concept from David Allen, is often applied to our task list and our email inbox, but rarely to more complex processes like our sales pipeline. However, the principles are the same and the effects could be staggering.

Sales is an Art, Not Really

Sales as an art form is the lead myth and barrier to consistent sales performance. Sales is a process that is performed. Granted some better than other. Just like an Olympic athlete–the technique is consistent, some just get better at it.

Unfortunately, for our sales organizations somewhere along the way we got the impression that there were a variety of better ways to swim the 100M freestyle. Rubbish!

Sales is about making efficiently making contact, delivering value, and collecting money. Most of those you can’t control. I have said it before, but it boils down to this: If the product sucks–you don’t need sales. If the market sucks–you don’t need sales. So, lets figure that out as fast as possible by contacting more people more efficiently with GTD.

Collection

Get all of you stuff in one place. That means all of your contacts, leads, people. Whatever you want to call them–you need them together. When you start calling you don’t want to be hunting for names, phone numbers, or who they are. Dial–Hang-up–Dial.

This means you need a database, spreadsheet, or contact management software that lets you efficiently move from one contact to the next. I suggest contact management software with a robust lead management database. This is going to allow you to scale and make a lot of notes. Hopefully you are building a rolodex for the ages.

Processing

You need a system. Calling fast and frequently is great, but you need to know what to do with each contact based on the results of the call. GTD has a nice 5 choice process. Make your sales lead management process just as simple:

  1. Trash it
  2. Close it
  3. Transfer it (hand it up or down)
  4. Schedule it
  5. Nurture it


There is nothing else.

Organizing

When you organize your sales pipeline manage it in the same way as GTD. Set-up the right buckets and make sure your processing system gets the right contacts into the right buckets.

Here are the buckets I use:

  1. Attempted
  2. Contacted
  3. Proposal
  4. Closed
  5. Withdrawn
  6. Scheduled
  7. Bogus


The nice thing about creating buckets in your contact management software is you can use it to automate your contact flow, lead prioritization, and any lead nurturing campaigns you have. Manual or automated–organizing into predefined buckets makes sales happen faster.

Reviewing

No system is perfect. Review it. See what is working and what is not.

This is again where a good lead management database comes in handy. Look at your reports and do some quick analysis. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutae–eyeball your reports for oddities.

I like to look for what I call–”slowing and heaping” in my reports.

What processes seem to be happening slower or less frequently than expected? Try something new to speed them up.

Where are leads piling up? Try something to process them out of the log jam.

Doing

Want to know the number one cause of most poor sales performance? Ssssssh, come close for the secret…NOT DOING ANYTHING!

That’s right. Just doing something even without a contact database, or a system, or a process, or organization will yield more than standing around organizing sheets of paper, counting your pencils, or labeling your folders.

As Nike says, “Just Do It!”

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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Filed Under: Contact Management, Lead Management Tagged With: contact management software, gtd, sales pipeline, sales pipeline management, social selling

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