Scheduling with Success

Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devices

Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:

• Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
• Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe

But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.

Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting.  Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art in that the back-and-forth of “scheduling Ping-Pong,”

So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down place and time?

It’s not “just” scheduling

Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.

They are right when the playing field is even and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. Then it really is simply a matter of finding the next open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.

Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.

Three tactics for getting it right

So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?

1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:

Many tech equipped, near autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later.  One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. True, you might as well do a task yourself if you will always have to micro mange and explain it to your helper with painful specificity. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:

• Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
• Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
• Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
• Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled

To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time savings and peace-of-mind.

2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads.

A good assistant may successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done on an email, even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.

A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy.

 

Here’s an email that works well:

Here is an e-mail that does NOT work well:

Develop a scheduling vernacular with your PA

Maintaining positive client relationships with a PA in the middle requires sensitivity. You can’t meet with everyone all the time. You have to prioritize and, while most everyone understands this need, you want to avoid inadvertently insulting even a lower priority contact.

Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf.

For example:

• To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
• To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie

Oh, and one more thing

See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.

 

 

Tags: calendar management, CRM, Personal Assistant, personal productivity, Productivity tools, Remote Personal Assistant, Sales Productivity, Time Management

Which Edition of Salesforce Should I Get?

A great post from our friends at StarrForce:

Which Edition of Salesforce Should I Get?

You’d like to get the edition that best meets your needs without buying more than you need.

You’re looking for the proper balance between price and requirements.

Want a simple explanation of which Salesforce Edition to get? Here you go:

Why purchase Salesforce Professional Edition rather than Salesforce Group Edition?

Salesforce Professional Edition does everything Group Edition does plus:
1. Can support more than 10 users
2. Offers mass email ability
3. Supports customizable dashboards
4. Has better support for AppExchange apps
5. Supports role hierarchy/sharing model (translation: in Group Edition there is no security among users, everyone sees all records)
6. Supports products, marketing campaigns, and offline edition
7. Supports the Mobile client

So if you don’t need one or more of these additional capabilities you’ll be fine with Group Edition.

If you haven’t already tried Salesforce you can get a free trial by clicking here.

Why purchase Salesforce Enterprise Edition rather than Salesforce Professional Edition?

Salesforce Enterprise Edition does everything Professional Edition plus has:
1. Profiles (the ability to support multiple departments)
2. API integration
3. Partner Portal support
4. Custom workflow, including assignment rules and auto escalation rules
5. Team selling
6. Record types
7. Customer portal support
8. APEX code

So if you don’t need one or more of these additional capabilities you’ll be fine with Professional Edition.

Note that its easy to upgrade your edition of Salesforce but not to downgrade:
1. Salesforce will allow you to upgrade your license type at any time.
2. But you can only downgrade a license type when your contract expires.

Want to know more about Salesforce Editions and licensing? Check out this post from the StarrForce blog Salesforce license types.

Need hep implementing Salesforce? Check out  Quick Start packages from StarrForce for more information.

Have a Salesforce question? Get free support: Twitter @starrforce

 

Tags: CRM, Salesforce

Be interested in others so they can be interested in you

The professional services challenge

If you are a management consultant, venture capitalist, lawyer, accountant, IT firm, executive coach or any other service professional, you face the same challenge: How do you balance execution and client acquisition?

And, if you’re good at what you do, you in all likelihood are a better practitioner than salesperson. It’s the love of your craft that got you into the business, not your love for sales.  How are you supposed to build a relationship business with cold-calling techniques?  There has to be a better way!

The initial dead end

We recently worked with an executive coach who was having challenges in scaling his practice. His clients love him, but direct referrals alone couldn’t grow his business quickly enough.

The coach – I’ll call him Jim – spoke with Prialto about having us call target lists he was generating from his professional networks, but we advised him that the approach he’d outlined would not work. Three months later Jim came back to us: “Eric,” he said, I have a very professional productivity assistant (“PA”). She’s great. But I’ve NOT gotten one meeting arranged by her in three months. This is not working for me, and I need to change something.”

The problem wasn’t that cold calls don’t work, but that the premise for the calls was wrong. Jim’s PA was essentially making “cold calls” to strangers, and asking them to meet and talk with Jim about his practice. While nicely worded, it was clear to these strangers that Jim would be coming to talk about himself and to pitch work.

Unsurprisingly, they had no interest.  To cap it off, Jim himself didn’t enjoy direct selling.

From a chore to a passionate calling

We advised Jim to find something that he enjoyed in his work and focus his meetings and outreach around this instead. Jim had a passion for the problems that executives face and the more he learned about them the more valuable he became to his larger customer base.

Jim started a simple blog about these issues. His first postings were based on his, current clients. With their permission, he took a few thorny subjects he had helped clients on, scrubbed the personal information, and wrote about them in a clean direct format.

His PA then began calling the same list that had been ignoring Jim’s meeting requests and asking if Jim could interview them for his blog. Jim, the PA explained, wanted to hear about one key challenge and what they’d done to overcome them.

A constant flow of meetings

Literally within days of this tactical change, Jim was getting receptive meetings with people in his target market. Most importantly, the meetings were enjoyable for both parties. Jim got to learn about a subject he found intrinsically interesting, up –close executive issues. The people he met with got to talk about almost everyone’s favorite subject: Themselves.

These first couple of meetings, turned into a constant and predictable flow of appointments. Over several months, several of the executives that Jim interviewed asked more about what he did when he was not interviewing for and writing his blog. And a few of these curious executives became clients.

What’s critical is that this was no ruse. Jim was not pretending to want to interview these folks. Jim truly enjoyed the subject. He was passionate about it and this came through.

By being genuinely interested in these executives, they became interested in working with him.

 

Three tactics for scheduling with success

Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devises.

Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:

• Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
• Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe

But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.

Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting.  Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art of back-and-forth “scheduling Ping-Pong,”

So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down time and place?

It’s not “Just” scheduling

Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.

They are right when the playing field is level and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. In that rare situation the task is just finding the next mutually open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.

Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.

Three tactics for getting it right

So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?

1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:

Many tech-equipped, near-autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later.  One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:

• Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
• Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
• Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
• Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled

To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time-savings and peace-of-mind.

2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads:

A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy. While it is true that a good assistant can successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.

 

Here’s an email that works well:

 

Here is an email that does NOT work well:

 

3) Develop a scheduling vernacular with your assistant

Picture this scene:  You need to reply to a contact’s email request for a meeting, but the meeting is low priority. How do you convey to your assistant that information while not offending the contact?

One way is to beforehand agree to a tactful language with your assistant so he or she knows your intention while also keeping your contact happy.

Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf. For example:

• To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”

• To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie”

Oh, and one more thing

See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.

 

Why Call Centers Will ALWAYS be horrible to deal with

April 17, 2010

A CNN.COM headline recently caught my hopeful attention: “Coming soon: Call centers that don’t suck.”

Wow, I thought to myself, what new innovation might spare me from ever again having the horrific experience I’m now having with Comcast?

My Internet has been intermittently down for more than three weeks due to an unusual wiring issue in my Foster City, California neighborhood, and my out-of-the-ordinary problem will not compute on Comcast’s customer service apparatus. I’ve been shuffled between agents in Guadalajara, Livermore, Sacramento, Walnut Creek, Philadelphia, and Denver. The account notes on my problem now are many pages long . . . and I’ve yelled some of the meanest words I’ve ever uttered at even Comcast’s most earnest helpers.

My frustration does not stem simply from a product or service breakdown. Most consumers, including me, understand that products sometimes break down. Nor is my issue with the ineffectual Comcast CRM software that fails to correctly communicate my issues between the different people (technical and customer service staff members) that are needed to solve my problem.

I expect such failures. If my problem is within the mean, I’ll probably find resolution in the notes on a web site. It is when my problem is unusual that I need to speak with an able generalist empowered to think beyond the script. If the notes don’t address my problem, CRM software in the hands of a narrowly focused person almost certainly is not going to be any more helpful.

My problem is a people issue.

Comcast has not been able to put me in touch with a person who can take ownership of my problem and resolve it. Call centers cannot produce such people. I am now nearly irreconcilable. I am exhausted from having to retell my story over and over, and I’m increasingly impatient with the scripted responses. Every call is more frustrating than the previous one. I now hate the agents before my conversation with them starts . . . and they hate me.

So what is the amazing innovation that inspired the bold CNN headline? It seems that IBM now is offering a “better” software solution to address the perennial call center problem of matching a customer with the right agent. It is called Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), and it is expected to improve upon the channeling of customers who hit the right prompts to an agent who knows a customer’s product. The new software will channel the customer to an agent who “knows” both the product and the customer. An international business person who uses an iPhone, for example, will be channeled differently than the graduate student who uses the same model iPhone. Presumably these two people will get a better experience by connecting with agents who specialize in their very different issues or at least connecting to agents who read from more specialized scripts.

It is, of course, a ridiculous notion that such software will address the systemic issues with the call center experience. Call centers aren’t horrible because customers are channeled to the wrong agents or scripts. They are awful to deal with because the relationship between the caller and the agent is inherently perverse: It is brutally transactional in every sense.

This is true whether the parties are interacting across nearby counties, across different states, or across different continents. It is true whether they share an accent and the same cultural identity or if they find each other’s accents very foreign.

The issue is quite simply that there is no intrinsic satisfaction in helping each other, because there is no lasting relationship. At a really great company, the agent might care about the product and service, but the agent can’t care about the caller. That’s why the call must be recorded. The call might start out polite so long as the caller experiences timely resolution. But, except for a desire for quick resolution on an immediate problem, there is no social incentive to treat the agent well.

No software will solve this problem.

Call centers are not going away, of course. They will always play a role in handling large volumes of similar issues. But the model will always focus on software and increased specialization, the very things that make them frustrating when the problem does not match the algorithm.

At that point, you will always want to hit the eject button. You don’t want to speak with a specialist. You want to speak with a generalist, the kind of person who works at a professional services organization. A high percentage of the individuals who comprise the call center workforce – the same agents who in their current environment may seem like automatons – can thrive in a learning organization where they are allowed to take ownership of customer problems.

An increasing number of firms like Prialto are finding they can tap into the same workforce that call centers recruit from, but for far more meaningful work. The best of these firms deploy a managed service solution. Unlike Online marketplaces like Elance or oDesk that treat global talent as a commodity to be traded, these managed services firms are working to develop that same talent so that individual knowledge workers from around the world may take broad ownership over client issues.

There is great demand for these services among small businesses that need an affordable and flexible workforce to whom they can delegate duties that are critical but not core to their business. The most talented employees within the call centers – those who want to help you, but are not afforded the tools to do so – are leaving the high volume, low margin call center environment for the authentic relationships offered by these new professional service firms.

Deprived of such talent, the call centers will rely ever more on increasingly clever scripts and software to drive customers to solutions, and that’s exactly why they will continue to be an unsatisfying experience for both agent and caller.

My Comcast Internet is still ridiculously unreliable and it has become clear that none of the company’s call center agents will be able to coordinate a resolution.

I’ve finally taken extraordinary measures to get my issue in front of a person who has a social incentive to help. I’ve tracked down and gotten in touch with Comcast’s general counsel and several of the corporation’s senior vice presidents, as I’ve learned that they are fellow alums from my university. These folks will make the same amount of money this year irrespective of whether my broken internet is fixed. My calls to them are not recorded and our email exchanges probably are not monitored.

However, they do have a social motivation to resolve my issue. They presumably care about their reputations among their academic cohorts.

I’ve also chased down Comcast trucks in my neighborhood and gotten to know the repair guys who live in my area. Again, the ongoing relationship – the fact that we might run into each other at the grocery store – is a healthy incentive for us to work together in a reasonable way.

Many believe that the call center experience is bad because of either poor technology or the geographic distance between caller and agent. Neither assumption is correct. Technology can greatly enhance a service, but it will always remain underutilized or ineffective without people thoughtfully driving it. People — regardless of their locale and relative physical distance — can work well with each other so long as they have ongoing relationships and appropriate social contexts and motivations.

I’m not holding my breath for the day outlier issues like my current wiring problem will be better handled by Comcast’s call centers. They never will, even when buttressed by the newest and fanciest RAMP-like software. Issues requiring dynamic follow through are best handled by inspired knowledge workers in a learning organization who have the ability to form a lasting, cooperative relationship with the people they are charged with helping.

There are tremendous numbers of talented individuals around the world ready to join such organizations. And since they are increasingly loathe to work in high-volume call centers, I’m holding on to my Comcast corporate contacts and focusing more on politely forming relationships with the repair men I meet in my neighborhood