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my Response to Some Frequently asked business questions.
Here you can quickly find some of my short pithy responses to commonly asked business questions. Most of these answers are generalities and could certainly change based on the industry, situation, and team specific challenges.
How can leaders better optimize task delegation to meet deadlines?
When assigning tasks to your team, it’s important to ensure everyone is on the same page from the start. Don’t overcomplicate it. If you’re not able to easily explain the task in a few sentences, then you need to go back to the drawing board before bringing it to your team. Alternatively, be open to listening to their feedback when you deliver those tasks and expectations. This is one of the most important parts to ensure they are truly onboard, but also to ensure the expectations don’t need to be tweaked.
How can you effectively time block and schedule in a relationship building role?
After years of managing my Calendar to be the most productive the first thing I do is prioritize availability and time for customer calls and meetings. I want to ensure I have as much open availability as possible for customers to book calls with me. Block schedules are important and I still use them daily, but I simply make sure I mark most blocks as available instead of busy when building up my schedule so customers can still book a meeting with me during those times. When you think about it most of the activities that I have blocked off to generate more customer calls, so you don’t ever want to hinder that.
How do you balance managing accounts and generating leads?
Managing accounts and generating leads are typically two different motions in most professional roles and companies. In an account manager role, I would highly recommend keeping trust and relationship building as your first priority. You can really damage customer relationships fast if you come off with an aggressive sales motion, and are perceived as a salesman instead of a partner. If you want to generate more leads as an account manager, I would recommend a slower and more gentle relationship approach. Try being more helpful and be sure to add value. Things like seminars, sharing helpful tips and insights, and other similar resources will help attract some of those referrals from your existing contacts. Add value first!!
You want to improve your sales team’s performance. What data should you use?
I agree that sales activities are important because it does give a place to start. However, sales activities can also often be overused when measuring the performance of a sales team when the real measurement should be revenue if we are being honest. The end goal of any sales team should be to close deals and bring in revenue, not just make the CRM look “pretty” with pointless calls that don’t actually move the needle at all. When I interview seasoned sales professionals, I find that they all have one thing in common: They all know the specific activities and engagement they need to move the needle on any given deal. The extra quotas given by leaders typically get in the way, so proceed with caution when only measuring sales activities
What do you do if your team lacks creativity due to a fear of taking risks?
If your team has a fear of taking risks, I think it’s time to take an honest evaluation of your company culture to see if you can find out why that might be the case. The fear of taking risks is typically created by micromanagers or authoritarian leaders who are quick to point out each time an employee does something wrong and has created a culture of fear. I’m not saying that’s always the case, but in my experience, it is most of the time.
In other situations, you might have an employee who has a fear of taking risks that brought this fear with them from a previous job or role due to a poor work environment. In this instance, you must build them up to let them know it’s safe and even celebrated to take risks.
You’re building a team for a critical project. What can you do to ensure success?
It’s important to assemble a team where members are able to contribute candid feedback from their perspectives. When you’re talking about a crucial project, you’re going to need different perspectives present at the table, even ones you don’t always agree with. With that said, you don’t want members who will sabotage the project and are not willing to hear other people out.
If you don’t have a clear project manager in charge who makes the final decision, make sure you have an odd number of members so you don’t end up in a stalemate or a tie when voting on how to move forward. The last thing you want is for the discussion to stop and come to a halt, you have to keep moving forward, so find people that will help you do that.
How can you manage your sales pipeline from home?
First, I want to comment on the question itself. “How can you manage your sales pipeline from home?” In all my years in sales and sales management, when it comes to managing your pipeline, it really shouldn’t matter whether you’re in the office, at home, or in a car. I remember years and years ago when I carried a physical planner around with me and everything was written down manually. I’m grateful to have since graduated several times to digital-based solutions like CRMs, spreadsheets, etc… My advice is more focused on developing the habit of managing the pipeline however it is you want to go about doing it. However, today, I heavily support CRM systems with data calculations and task managers built-in.
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