My Humble Madness: 2011

Monday, October 3, 2011

i-PART - your daily productivity tool

24 hours is all we have to get something out of a day, and how much do we actually spend on planning for it. For most of us, the number is a big zero. We just get through the day, almost like a machine, responding to situations and managing incidents randomly strewn in a largely unpredictable day. But, is that how we are supposed to function? Not really, we are social animals but with intelligence. Efficiency in planning and execution is what differentiates success from failure.

Following are the critical components of a simple productivity management tool - i-PART
identify-Prioritize-Act-Review-Track

1) Identify - List down everything that is there on your list of To-Do items. Prepare a Master List and Draw out related action items. For a Sales Manager, a typical Master List would look like this:

Master List : a) Align team's goals with individual goals for the week, b) Interact with primary customers - distributors and set the right expectations, c) Feedback, coach and mentor team members, d) Share progress with seniors e) Document, Knowledge, Insights

2) Prioritize - Mark the items as "Immediate" (T0), "If time permits today" (T1), "Few days" (T3), "If time permits this week" (T7)

3) Act - Act on T0 and T1 items and close as many of them as possible.

4) Review/Re-prioritize - Check and confirm if the priorities were set in a correct manner.

5) Track - Remove the items that are done and put a target date on the items that need to be done.

i-PART is best done early in the morning right after you get ready for work.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Sales Management is FOCUS management

For all the sales professionals out there - "FOCUS" framework

F - Field Metrics : How is your territory different? What works? What doesn't work? Who are the decision makers? Who are the influencers? Who are the competitor reps? What are they doing differently?

O - Optimize : Don't try to do everything. Focus on the most contributing products out of the portfolio and plan to maximize sales from your best-products.

C - Customer : Never take your customer for granted. They don't just choose your product. They choose you as well, particularly for B2B. So, groom yourself well. Present yourself and your products both. Your relationship with your customer is the icing on the cake that is your product. That icing becomes the ultimate deal-maker in many cases. So, work on yourself and your confidence as much as you work on your product knowledge. Make yourself useful to them by providing helpful insights, arranging local meets, providing opportunities for their professional growth.

U - Under-promise and Over-deliver : This is the cardinal rule you should never break. The day you do the opposite, you will lose the customer and his/her faith forever.

S - Stakeholder Management : This one is the most intricate yet the most crucial jigsaw piece of the whole puzzle. No matter how much pain you have to go through, always and always make sure that all your stakeholders (your boss, your super-boss) are informed about what you have done in the past, what you are doing today and what you plan to do in the immediate future. Everything that you do is finally meant to take YOU up in your professional growth. So, keep the bosses informed about your progress, your plans and your achievements. Do NOT let the conversation with your bosses revolve around your sob-stories. Your boss wants to know if he has the right person on the job. If you can't deal with your issues, you can't win his trust for better and bigger responsibilities. If you have a genuine issue, do a thorough research on its significance before bringing it up. If you can't define and detail a problem, you would only end up narrating a ghost-story.

Rate yourself on all these parameters (on a scale of 0% to 100%) and multiply all the % scores to see for yourself what your FOCUS score is.

Compared to the traditional Aware-Inform-Negotiate-Close kind of frameworks which are more about handling a sales cycle, this one is simply about managing yourself as a sales-professional.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Are you "A.L.I.V.E"?

I often wonder what would be the best way to prove to yourself that you are actually "alive". Here is a simple test:

A: Actually breathing?? (duhh!)

L: Listening to your heart??

I: Interested in following it??

V: Valiant in sticking to it??

E: Excel in what you choose and Explore other interests??

This might be an over-simplification, but it does capture the essence of the whole concept of being truly alive.

If you find yourself interested in arts and crafts, but you find yourself far away from it, you might be killing a part of yourself. While we do a lot of things just for survival, there has to be some time reserved for yourself. Your "me-time". So, ask yourself, how much of "me-time" did you have yesterday, last week or last month. In fact, don't stop there. Also ask, if you actually spent it wisely listening to yourself.

Was there an ice-cream sundae, you really wanted to enjoy, but just gave up on, for xyz reasons? Was there a guitar or a violin lesson that you imagined you could take, but didn't believe you could manage? So, decide now, which one of these are you actually 'interested' in following. There might be a lot of crazy ideas too that your heart might suggest, but you dont have to listen to everything that it throws at you. Pick only those ones for which you would be ready to fight till you make it to the end.

Once you excel in something, you will be a capable contributor in that sphere of activity and the world will recognize you. With real recognition, comes the ultimate feeling of being alive in this dense crowd around you.

Simple? Silly? Crazy? Whatever! I warned you with the title of this blog!