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.

Love new tools but don’t have the time?

If you are like me, every time a friend suggests a new cool online tool (SaaS software, web application, or mobile app), you quickly write it down to research later.  But, inevitably, after taking a quick peek at the website, that interest quickly fades.

I used to kick myself for not adopting every new tool I heard about.  I constantly asked myself, “Bob found this tool useful and he appears more productive that I am, why can’t I adopt it?”

There is a scientific reason

The simple scientific fact is that, like social relationships, there are only so many SaaS applications you can effectively manage on a regular basis.  In 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, studied social networks and found that a human can maintain ~150 stable relationships.

Further studies have shown that Dunbar’s Number remains consistent, even with the advent of social networks.  As another data point, Pinch Media, which tracks iPhone app usage, has shown that 30-days after an app is purchased, less than 5 percent of buyers continue to use it.

Want the power of these applications without the effort?

Through our team’s 100,000+ hours supporting Prialto members, we have observed the practices of senior executives and sales teams.   We estimate that a busy executive can manage 6 to 8 applications on a consistent basis.   However, there is a second tier of apps that executives need functionality from but can’t spare the time to use (i.e. expense management, CRM, social media monitoring..)

If you are like us and enjoy learning about new applications but fear adding another one to your processes, please take a minute to share:

• The top apps you use regularly
• Apps you would like to get value out of without using/learning

Productivity Applications 1-Minute Survey

About Prialto

Helping executives manage web-based applications is at the core of Prialto’s mission to deliver a turnkey productivity solution.   Prialto has built a database of applications and best practices for executive productivity.  If you would like to learn how you and your team can leverage global assistants to increase productivity, contact us at www.prialto.com or 866.910.8440

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

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.

Prialto works closely with sales teams to offload valuable recurring tasks and allow them to better focus on their clients. Our focus on making executive more productive within their current systems has allowed us to see what works universally well across organizations.

When prialto starts working with a new client, we often find that a company’s CRM design itself is a barrier to adoption.   Just like Microsoft Word, CRM systems have incredible functionality, most of which goes unused.  We recommend making a system as simple as possible and putting thought into each field tracked.  Below are a few best practices we have observed through our team’s 100,000+ hours supporting prialto members.

1. Turn off unused tabs: There are a number of tabs your team likely isn’t using (chatter, files, getting started…) which can be turned off to reduce complexity.
2. Clean up page layouts: Most companies use standard page layouts with little customization.  Your team is likely not using many of these fields (i.e. fax #, address, home phone, birthday…) which should be removed.
3. Leverage structured data: Most standard CRM fields are text-based.  The value of data increases dramatically with structured fields using pick-lists (i.e. client status, industry…)
4. Add strategic custom fields: Here are a several custom fields we find quite useful:  Next contact date: Typically this is the most valuable field in our members CRMs.  Every follow-up is driven off of this field.  Referral source: Rather than just tracking lead source, we also suggest linking the record to the contact who provided the referral.   Value: Many of our members rank each company and contact in their CRM to allow for quick prioritization.
5. Focus on relevant data: A number of lists throughout your CRM system can be customized to allow your team to focus on key data to your business.
6. Optimize views: Each module can have customized views to allow your team to leverage your data and quickly prioritize accounts.
7. De-duplicate data: As companies grow, data duplication becomes a serious issue.  Setup your system early to flag and eliminate duplicates.
8. Copy all communication to your CRM: To improve communication across teams, most CRMs allow you to easily add emails to the system by BCC’ing a specific address.
9. Integrate a support team: Requiring your sales team to enter data themselves, diverts their attention from clients.  Prialto works with sales teams to offload tasks such as data entry and prospect research.   To optimize collaboration, we suggest adding additional fields to track status and priority.

If you are exploring how to optimize your CRM, we would be happy to provide referrals to CRM consultants we know and trust.  And, if you want to optimize your sales team itself, visit www.prialto.com to learn more or call us at 866.910.8440.

Unless you are one of the few companies with an inherent viral model, building a sales team takes a lot of work.  We have seen founders and CEOs make two consistent mistakes (in previous careers we were guilty of these ourselves):

• Trying to hire a sales team before you prove your model yourself
• Creating a commission plan before a sales model

As you build your sales team, here are a few simple tips to maximize your chance of success:

• Do-it-yourself: “Good sales people don’t go to companies with un-proven sales models”.  We all think our product / service is the best and should sell itself.  But until you know the pitch, objections, pricing strategy… you shouldn’t turn this over to a salesperson who lacks the authority necessary to fix issues uncovered in the sales process.  Even if you could attract a sales rock-star at this stage, they likely would fail.  So roll-up your sleeves and start selling.
• Hire a Closer First: Once you have begun to figure out the sales model, don’t immediately turn it over to someone else.  Start building your sales team by bringing in people to close the leads you generate.
• Pay Bonuses, Not Commissions: Resist the urge to pay people on a commission basis until the sales model is refined.  You need to know your team can hit targets consistently before tying them into a commission model.  If you adopt a commission model too soon, you are apt to spend your time managing compensation expectations rather than improving the sales model.  Instead, focus on discretionary bonuses for the time being.
• Build Your Marketing Funnel: Before your sales model is finished, you need to develop a clear lead generation model.  This doesn’t require cold-calling and there are a number of great guides out there (i.e. a recent book by our friend Aaron Ross)
• Create a Simple Commission Plan: Now, finally you are ready for a commission plan.  But, make it simple – you should be able to track it on the back of a napkin, not a whiteboard.

We wish you success as you grow your company.  Getting to the first million dollars in sales is the first challenge and we encourage you to focus on sales rather than sales compensation.  As you scale, sales productivity will become a challenge and opportunity.  For more information on how prialto helps sales teams become more productive, visit www.prialto.com.

Over the past ten years, I have rolled out CRM systems at four different companies and have personally witnessed the power of CRM to:

• Improve management of customer and prospect relationships
• Provide better sales visibility
• Improve communication across a sales team

However, I also know full-well the statistics on CRM.  Gartner estimates that over 60% of CRM implementations fail after the go-live date.    I recently spent an evening talking about sales productivity with a leading sales rep for a Bain Capital portfolio company.  What I heard shouldn’t surprise anybody but hopefully it is a wakeup call.

• Hunters aren’t built to enter data: We all know successful salespeople are wired differently.  But, in a quest to fulfill the promise of new systems, we try to turn our team into desk-jockeys.  This sales rep shared with me that his entire team feels like “… well paid clerks.” and that he “… didn’t get into sales to do admin.”
• Sales teams don’t see the promise of CRM: Star sales people see sales as an art and CRM as ‘big brother’.  Like the sales rep I talked to they believe, “I hit my numbers and don’t see the reason to document in Salesforce just so they can monitor me.”
• Sales training isn’t working: Despite the investment in systems, stars prefer to be lone wolfs.  With few established processes, sales teams end up with a few rock stars and a ton of new sales reps struggling to figure out the ropes.   This sales rep shared with me, “Our company is a total mess.  There is a huge learning curve for new reps and we lose many of them quickly”

No wonder that according to Forrester the average VP of sales lasts 18 months.  With a sales team that sees no value in the systems, the worst thing you can do is add more process.  So how can we stop this cycle and improve our sales productivity?  Here are two, not-so-revolutionary, ideas:

• Stop having your sales people enter data they don’t see as valuable
• Free your salespeople up to focus on what they do best

While these ideas sound simple, they take some effort to implement.  Here are a few basic steps you can take to get started:

• Review your sales administration processes: Analyze each process to understand a) the level of specialized knowledge and b) the priority for your business
• Focus first on those processes easy to standardize: Processes such as CRM data entry, appointment setting, prospect research, lead and contact management, travel, expenses, and reporting are great places to start.
• Create a true sales support function: Inside sales and lead gen are not focused on increasing the productivity of your sales team.  They are measured by their own metrics.  To solve your sales challenges, you need to provide your sales reps with a support system.  We find the best way to achieve this is to integrate assistants into your sales team’s processes and track the impact on your reps productivity.
• Commit your organization to success: The benefits of freeing up your sales team to focus on sales can be powerful.  A study by McKinsey of a global manufacturer showed an average gain of 15% more time for selling and decreased cycle time for internal sales processes of 20%.    But, to realize the potential, an on-going commitment, technology platform, and training are required.

Prialto (www.prialto.com) works with growing companies to focus their sales reps on key client interactions.  By integrating assistants with sales teams, Prialto helps improve sales productivity while, at the same time, providing better visibility into sales pipelines.  To discuss how we can help you re-engineer your sales team, contact us at 866.910.8440

One simple cell phone etiquette rule will save us all many hours.

You will recognize the context:

Say you are driving north down Highway 101 from Palo Alto to San Francisco at about 3:00 PM on Friday afternoon. You dial your friend in New York and reach him as he is heading home to rest before going out to dinner. He’s on the E Train.

You are in the midst of an important discussion. And, then, just before he heads into Brooklyn Heights, he says “If I lose you going under the water, I’ll . . .” You hear silence, and, then, silence. . Gone! Lost connection, and who knows exactly what the last words were your friend heard?

You wait for about how long you know it takes for the E Train to resurface on the other side of the East River. Here, then, is the sequence of events that follow:

1. You redial
2. You hear a busy signal, and hang up
3. You see a message waiting on your cell phone screen
4. You are near certain it is from the friend you were just speaking with saying “tag, I’m trying to call you back,” so you redial again
5. You think you are about to connect, but you hear the call waiting signal. You check your screen for the incoming number. Sure enough, it’s your friend calling you back again. You try to click over, but he’s already gone back to voice mail.
6. You hit the red button several times to terminate any call left connected
7. You wait for your friend to dial again, but nothing happens because now your friend is also waiting
8. You are both probably frustrated by now. You hit the green button again to dial, but now all the cells on Highway 101 are clogged with people planning their Friday evenings. Your call takes several minutes to get through and now you can hear that your friend is on the line with someone else.
9. “Forget it,” you think, “I’ll catch him tomorrow.”

Who should call back and who should hold off?

Here’s the etiquette:

Don’t spend time guessing or presuming whose phone or location was responsible for the lost connection. That’s impossible for either party to know.

Whoever initiates the call should dial back, regardless. It’s simple and straightforward. You’ll both always know who that is and you will avoid a lot of confusion and wasted dialing and waiting.

]]> http://blog.prialto.com/2011/11/22/one-phone-rule-will-save-us-all-time/feed/ 0 http://blog.prialto.com/2011/11/16/taking-emotion-out-of-corporate-email/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=taking-emotion-out-of-corporate-email http://blog.prialto.com/2011/11/16/taking-emotion-out-of-corporate-email/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:28:46 +0000 Eric Taussig http://blog.prialto.com/?p=487 Tweet

How about a corporate policy mandating against emotional communication in email? Michael Keck recently informed me that this is the rule for internal communications over at Algentis.

Michael and team want to stay focused on serving their clients. They DO NOT want to waste time parsing email sentences to decipher any hidden meaning behind the written words.

The no subtext rule

Their solution is a no-subtext rule: Don’t write with emotion and don’t waste time looking for it. If a manager wants to know when he will receive an overdue deliverable, he will write, “when will you send that deliverable?” He will not spend time crafting a more tactful, but easily over analyzed, sentence like, “I just wanted to check in on when you’ll be able to get that deliverable to me, as I was under the impression you would send it to me yesterday.”

The policy probably won’t work with customers, and, even internally, it requires colleagues to adhere to the same principles that make a marriage work well: Assumption of goodwill, complete forgiveness for past disputes, etc.

Don’t read between the lines

If a manager writes to a colleague “when will you be arriving today?” the receiver of the message must avoid reading any innuendo into the simple question. The point is for the reader not to waste time thinking “I wonder if he thinks I’m late a lot.” The Algentis policy says such nuanced discussion will be left out of email and transmitted only in verbal communication, a form far less prone to misunderstanding.

Higher personal productivity is the benefit

I’m not sure if the tip is a good one for all teams. Operating among diverse groups may require a commitment to extra communication. But adherence to the no-subtext rule is probably helpful to any individual reaching for higher personal productivity. Imagine unilaterally telling coworkers that you’ll no longer spend time deciphering emails with emotion: The information only, please!

You may miss a bit of the meaning and connection. But spending less time reading between the lines may save enough mental energy to make it worth the tradeoff.

For two years I had a Verizon PC card to give me web access for my HP laptop. The card was free, but the service cost me about $60 per month—a big monthly cost. The connection was fast and the ability to connect from client locations was an important benefit. But the $60 per month ($720 per year) really irked me, so I ended up dropping the service.

Now I finally found a way to get the mobile web connection I want on my laptop without the high monthly fee. I recently download the Tether app for BlackBerry. For a one-time fee of $49.99 I can connect my BlackBerry to my HP laptop via a USB cable and get the web and email from almost anywhere. There is no additional fee beyond the BlackBerry data plan I already have from Verizon.

Not only do I save a bundle, but also I score a victory for competition with the big carriers.

What: Tether app for BlackBerry
Where: http://tether.com/
Price: Free trial available, full version is $49.95 one-time fee