photo credit: notsogoodphotography

I don’t spend a lot of time writing about “the hows” of staying focused, but I do remind you now and then about the reasons that make focus so important.

For example, I closed the post A Thousand Dollars an Hour with “The goal? To do more of the right work. The work that advances your business in massive steps.”

I hope everyone can relate to that.

There’s nothing wrong with what I might call “leisure reading”, but I suggest setting aside time for it rather than doing it during time planned for work.

One thing that really helps me is to avoid “chasing rabbits”.

Have you ever seen a dog chase a rabbit? Rabbits are incredibly elusive because of their ability to quickly change direction when running at high speed. What makes them so elusive: A body designed to make radical direction changes without losing much speed.

The dog might end up running half a mile or more within a football field and might never catch the rabbit. An overhead view of the path of a rabbit eluding a predator looks like the crayon scribbles of a two-year old. It goes everywhere, randomly… just like your afternoon spent doing random browsing.

Chasing links

Your productivity suffers the same thing on the web.

It starts like this: Someone sends you a link via email, Twitter or Facebook. You follow it, it leads to another page, which leads to another and the next thing you know, the afternoon is gone and you can’t begin to remember what you did for the last three hours.

If you have the discipline to open the link in a browser tab and then not read it, you might end up with 20-30-40 browser tabs open. Not only does that slow your machine / browser down, but it’s a buffet of ready-to-serve distractions just waiting to suck you in.

Some folks might bookmark the links to get them out of their face (and out of mind so they can get back to work), but I’ve found that people rarely read the stuff they bookmarked.

Bookmarking misses the mark

Bookmarking works because you don’t have to worry about the tragic loss of that critical link that you know you need to read (a dash of sarcasm?).

For me, traditional bookmarking wasn’t effective, even via Delicious. Too much clutter? Too many clicks? Not in my face to remind me I had reading queued up? I don’t know.

What I do know is that Instapaper has, for the last few years, been the #1 “secret” tool that keeps me focused during the day.

Links come at you all day long. Click one, start reading and the next thing you know, the afternoon is gone.

Instapaper to the rescue

I don’t know why the subtle differences between Instapaper and simple bookmarks are enough to make this so much more productive for me, but they are.

Maybe it’s because I know those links will be in Instapaper when I’m in reading mode. Maybe it’s because I can archive with 2 clicks and instantly move to the next article. Maybe it’s because the queue of reading is kept in sync from my laptop to my desktop to my iPad and iPhone. Maybe the ease and speed of the Read Later bookmarklet does it.

I suspect the marriage of those things is what makes it work for me. I noticed a significant difference once I started using the free Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet. For me, it was the real key to quickly eliminating the tempting distractions without losing important reads.

If you have a Kindle, this page shows how to make Instapaper links automatically go to your Kindle.

I hope this helps you do more of the important, valuable work…all without missing out on XKCD.

PS: I’ve added a Read Later link to the bottom of posts, if you can’t use the bookmarklet for some reason.

photo credit: Majo´s Photos

One of my mentors describes a person or activity that wastes your time as a “time vampire”.

This might be someone who repeatedly interrupts you for information they could easily find on their own – in other words, they’re really making a social call.

It might be you checking CNN or Facebook.

Interruptions often happen because the interrupter hasn’t been trained to find what you’re giving them – that’d be your responsibility.

Sometimes these inquiries are valuable because of the resulting discussion, but the interruption is often costly because it pulls you out of the zone – a hyper-productive period of work.

That work thing

Even “Work” can be a time vampire.

How do you decide what to delegate, outsource or (gasp) what not to do at all?

We’ve talked at length about how to evaluate this with your staff, including automation and what to retain as a manual task – because it’s important enough that you’d never want to outsource or automate it (like most customer service tasks).

One thing we haven’t really talked in detail about is deciding what YOU do.

At the top of your list: things that no one else can do. Yes, I mean those things that no one literally has the ability to do except you.

Driving, Chipping and Putting

In a professional golfer’s work world, only the golfer can hit the ball. Almost everything else except for promotional talks and photos can be delegated. On the golf course (or the practice range/green), work gets done by the golfer that cannot be delegated. It might be 1000 dollar an hour work, maybe more, depending on the golfer.

While it’s obvious, that’s what I want you to consider: What work of yours is the equal of the pro golfer’s professional-grade driving, chipping and putting?

A Grand an Hour

If the golf thing doesn’t work for you: What work do you do that easily provides 1000 dollar an hour value to your business?

If the 1000 dollar an hour figure bothers you (I hope it doesn’t), try $500 or even $250. It’s possible that the work you do at this level is work that a client never sees, such as big picture planning (mission/vision/strategic stuff) work. Strategic planning and that sort of thing that drives your company for the next three to five years. Decision making at the highest level should be in this pile.

If you do this kind of work for clients (as I do), you probably know what it’s worth to them. Is this work that you can’t possibly delegate? Write that work down on your list.

You can categorize this work however you like (“Class A work”, “CEO work”, “Meat and potatoes”, etc). The idea is to remind yourself that this very high-value work that you can’t delegate is more important to your business than any other work. If it *can* be delegated, then it don’t put it on this list. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, it just isn’t the MOST important.

One floor down

Once you’ve put everything you can think of on this super-important, cannot-be-delegated list, consider the work that is a level below that.

If this vision helps, consider the work that  gets done on the floor one flight of stairs below your CEO suite (which might just be your corner of the basement, bear with me).

This work is still very important, but the gap in value per hour provided to your company (no, not to your clients) vs. that on the level we just discussed might be substantial. That doesn’t make it unimportant, just less important than the earlier list.

Perhaps you do weekly group webinars online or some other form of group sales or lead generation (that’s marketing-speak for “doing the things that attract and find new prospects”). Creating the conceptual design of a new product or service. Creating new strategic partnerships with other vendors might also be on this list. Training your staff to do important tasks that you do now is probably on this list since it gives you more time to do “CEO level” work.

It’s possible to delegate this work, but it’s still valuable enough to the company that you feel it is worth your time to do it.

The goal? To do more of the right work. The work that advances your business in massive steps.

photo credit: db Photography | Demi-Brooke

All of us have heard “Perfect is the enemy of good.”

This post defines it pretty well.

To me, “Done is the engine of more” is pretty clarifying.

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

Lots of people have todo lists that keep them on track throughout the day.

Without them, a lot of things would never get done – including by me.

Think about all the stuff you do. Make a list.

Start with daily tasks, then weekly, then monthly – but do 1 at a time.

Oh yeah, there’s another list of stuff that needs to get done.

Just not by you.

Stop

Of those things on the list(s) you just made, what can you stop doing?

What can be delegated?

What can be automated?

What really doesn’t need to be done at all?

What doesn’t move you forward toward your business goals?

Think hard

What things – if no longer done – would free up the time to do all the high-priority things you should be doing, but aren’t?

What could you get done if you weren’t doing the things on the “Stop Doing” list?

photo credit: koalazymonkey

Multitasking: We all do it and we all pretty much know how good we are at it.

You may have seen the graphical representations of the difference between multitasking and not doing so.

They go something like this: Lets say you need to complete 3 tasks that will take 3 days each.

If you single task, the first task is done in 3 days, the second one in 6 days and the third in 9 days, so it looks like this:

111222333

If you evenly alternate between them, doing a day of work on each one and then moving to the others, it looks something like this:

123123123

That means that you don’t complete a task until the end of the 7th day.

Yes, you’re doing (roughly) the same amount of work, but your focus is completely different and MOST of your work is delivered later than it ordinarily would be.

But it gets worse…

If you have 9 tasks to do and they each take 3 days, the illustration changes your view even more:

123456789123456789123456789

Task 1 isn’t finished until the nineteenth day, sixteen days later than if you weren’t multitasking.

Working in the Zone

If you do the kind of work that gets you into “the zone” (IT and other technical work is famous for this), give not-so-multitasking a try. This is why folks who do technical jobs are often sequestered away from doing customer support – the unscheduled interruptions can decimate their productivity.

Think about it: If it takes 20 minutes of reading/thought/analysis to get that programming (code/scenario) or differential equation into your head and have you thinking as if your brain were processing the program or equation, then an interruption to do customer support every 15 minutes (only 4 times an hour) will prevent someone from ever getting to that point.

And you wonder why they never reach optimal performance.

Here are some thoughts from Harvard Business Review that dig deeper into why you should stop multitasking and how to do so.

photo credit: eschipul

Today’s guest post is from the guys over at Lateral Action and is all about seeming busy while not being productive.

Or more accurately, it’s about being more productive and efficient but at the wrong things.

Are you productive where it counts – at the right things?

Make quick work of the post at the above link and see if you’re reading about yourself. If you are, put some tools in place to help you focus on the right stuff.

A paper notebook / checklist is fine – as long as you USE it.

Paper doesn’t work for me. It creates clutter and makes things worse.

I need an automated solution that nags me a little – and I use the GTD system by David Allen to make stuff happen. Fortunately, there’s software that supports GTD. If you use Windows, the GettingThingsDone add-in for Microsoft Outlook is a strong tool. On the Mac side of things, OmniFocus uses Getting Things Done principles to help you stay on track. I’ve used both of these tools and find them incredibly helpful.

photo credit: rick

One of the things I’ve always counseled you to use in your marketing is testimonials: carefully chosen things your customers have said about their experiences using your products and services.

On Dec 1 2009, that changes a bit.

In some ways, it’s a good thing. It’ll make almost all those lame infomercials edit their fake testimonials.

In others, it’s a bad thing because it will punish (or frighten) good businesses by making them think they can no longer use testimonials or that the ones they can use have to be gutted.

Neither is true.

A great testimonial addresses…

…a common sales objection.

Getting a testimonial – particularly a strong, believable, honest one that directly addresses a common sales objection – can be difficult. Not so much because they are hard to get, but because people don’t always like to talk about their use of a product/service. A lot of that depends on what it is.

Not everyone understands what kind of testimonials are truly valuable. When people tell you they love the product or that they love working with you and your service is wonderful, those are nice and heartwarming comments, but they aren’t strong testimonials.

One type of strong testimonial states specific results, such as “We’re up 70% in same month, prior year sales after working with Mark to improve our marketing over the last 3 months”. That’s a good testimonial, and it’s (naturally) the exact type of thing the FTC doesn’t like.

Why? Because it states specific results that might be 100% factual for one person (or 100, if you have that many), but it still doesn’t mean that every single Joe Blow can achieve the same results by simply falling out of bed in the morning.

If everyone who buys your product can’t typically achieve a documented, 100% factual result stated in a testimonial when THEY use your product / service, you will have a problem using that testimonial EVEN IF 99% OF YOUR CUSTOMERS NEVER USE IT.

Isn’t that grand? “Lowest common denominator” comes to mind.

As you likely assume, these regulations came about mostly because of the bad apples out there. So be it. Let’s get to the details.

Bad apples beware

The new FTC regulations that take effect on December 1 2009 that will require you to be far more careful about the testimonials you use.

Quoting the hard-to-believe results of one highly-motivated person and then saying “these results are not typical” is no longer sufficient. You have to state typical results that your customers get when using your product or service. If those turn out to be difficult or impossible to achieve, expect the FTC to come calling – and not for dinner.

If you haven’t already done so, you need to check your marketing materials TODAY for any claims that – no matter how real and accurate – are not typical.

You can see the FTC-issued guidance on this at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

This applies to bloggers, advertisers of products/services and many others, so I strongly suggest you give it a look. It’s not a game. Regardless of what party is running Washington, these folks seem to revel in making examples out of business people to ‘send a message’ to everyone else.

Sometimes, these things come down very unfairly. Don’t let it happen to you.

More details from the FTC are available here.

Be gone with you, Debbie Downer

Now that we have the “Debbie Downer” stuff out of the way, there is some good news in this because it does punish the slime in your market along with the good guys.

Several things come out of this, but one thing is clear – it makes measurement all that much more critical to your success.

If your product or service can somehow anonymously document what it does – easy for some products and services, almost impossible for others – you will be ahead of the game.

A lot of this applies to software businesses and those with automation in their products / services – but if testimonials are important to your business, measurement might become essential across your entire product line.

Implement results measurement into your products and services. Not only will it help your product / service, but it will help you sell them to those who REALLY need them AND it’ll be the evidence you need to prove the results of typical use.

NO, I’m not a lawyer. If testimonials are central to everything you do, I strongly urge you to consult your attorney about these regulations.

Meanwhile, you should be measuring results. Imagine what will happen if your products / services can prove to your customers what they are doing for them (and what they are not).

That’s why we’ve had this measurement conversation for years prior to the FTC forcing it upon you.

photo credit: orangeacid

Yes, I know that is going to rile some folks up, but you probably need to be riled up anyhow.

What exactly do I mean by “give them the fish”? Let me back up a little.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

I used to agree. It used to seem that teaching someone to fish was sufficient, but human nature is a powerful teacher.

Not anymore.

First, a couple of examples from the Rotary world:

• Do you think that Rotary should just airdrop polio vaccine (and instructions) over Africa and let those folks take care of vaccinating themselves?
• What about the hand-operated wells that Rotarians regularly donate and install in third world communities? I’m talking about the wells that eliminate a mother’s 6 mile daily walk for water. Before you think “So what?”, think about how long it takes a mother to walk 6 miles, then walk 6 miles back carrying 5 gallons of probably not-so-clean water. If you’re taking care of a couple of infants, consider how that impacts your child-rearing and your ability to make a living. Now suddenly you’re taking clean water out of a well right in your village. Impactful.

But…I didn’t start this conversation to talk about Rotary. Their polio and water efforts just make the point easy to illustrate.

Personal Inertia

All of this is really building up to some comments about personal inertia.

Inertia is a big obstacle for an 80,000 lb 18 wheel truck or a jumbo jet, but a person’s personal inertia makes their inertia pale in comparison.

Powered by daily routines and daily “crises”, as I referred to yesterday when quoting Mr. Rohn, it’s bigger than most people realize.

While everybody can do what so and so does to be successful, reach a goal, get out of a mess, change some aspect of their lives, or market their product; but not everybody will.

Why Personal Inertia happens

A lot of the reason for this is that people just aren’t used to taking NEW actions. Sure, they get up for work in the morning (even if they work for themselves) and they go about their business, but they struggle to make new things happen.

Rather than making things happen, they often watch things happen (or worse, wonder what happened).

That’s why you have to give them the fish. Change is tough. Sometimes scary. Sometimes, just different enough that your routine just doesn’t seem to allow for them.

And that’s where the fish comes in.

Sometimes you have to give them the fish to prime the pump. To make the impression necessary to show that the learning is worthwhile.

What IS The Fish?

The fish is what you do for others. Maybe a service, maybe something you teach or something you create for them if they can’t or won’t do it themselves.

I know you can teach them to fish (whatever your fish is), but they have to WANT to learn to fish or your time will be wasted.

Yep, WASTED.

More than likely, whatever you do is the fish your client needs (or is related to it).

Again, giving them the fish primes the pump and helps make that action part of their routine.

Until it’s routine, it’s unlikely to happen.

Before you give them the fish, before they “get it”, they might not have the vision you have.

The fish might be necessary to make the impression (produce the results?) necessary to show that learning to fish is worthwhile in the first place.

Give, then teach

Once the lesson, the results, the vision/buy in are there, learning to fish seems like a good idea.

Their idea. Your gift made it so.

When eyes light up, budgets appear and/or time opens up, it’s time to teach.

photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

One of the first things you notice when you get materials from Dan Kennedy is that they aren’t glossy. They aren’t printed on luxurious paper, with fine bookboards and perfectly sewn bindings.

Usually its a comb binding or a 3-ring notebook, if it’s bound at all. And there might be typos and some hand-drawn diagrams.

Dan insists that perfect is the enemy of good. It isn’t at all unusual to hear him say “good enough is good enough”, largely because he is all about taking action. He might write a book in a weekend because he is capable of covering the topic in that time, so why spend 3 years writing it?

This is one of the reasons that Dan can produce the volume of info that he produces. The binding might not be worthy of a collector, but the information isn’t any less valuable as a result.

Good enough

Along those lines, a guest post from Wired on the topic of good is good enough.

I know what you’re thinking.

“Aren’t you the one who is always talking about differentiating yourself with higher quality, high-touch service, etc?”

Yes indeed and continue to I stand by that.

You should remember that I’ve also suggested that you have multiple tiers of products and services to reach more people with that wonderful (whatever) that you do/create.

It isn’t just about quality. Your lower end product might still be high quality – it just won’t be a Bentley. And that’s OK, because not everyone wants/needs that.

As a result, you need to “show them the ladder”: Show them how to do business with you. Here’s the entry level product/service and here’s where you go next.

If you need a visual: Sell them a Chevy. Next time, sell them a Buick. Then an Oldsmobile. Then a Cadillac. Skip a rung or 2 if they wish.

There’s always room for improvement of those products. You’ll likely never create a perfect product the first time out. Well, you might – but it might take you 10 years to perfect it.

By that time, someone will have sold your market a Buick.

photo credit: * Honest *

Not world peace mind you (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but peace between your ears.

Do you find yourself somehow mindlessly wasting an hour, 2 hours or more a day? Maybe not even every day?

You arent alone. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t hear it from someone.

In today’s guest post, Peter Bregman has a solution you might find useful. It only takes 18 minutes a day.

photo credit: eyeSPIVE

Ever messed up a bid?

Even after 25 years in the IT business (much less other stuff), I find that one of the hardest things to do accurately is bid a sizable time and materials-based project.

If you’re in IT, you know all the reasons.

Stuff changes. Requirements aren’t necessarily what they really are. Features get added, removed, changed and re-added.

It can be troubling if you live by (or try to live by) a schedule.

As long as the communication channels are open, it works out. It works out because over the years, you’re zig zagging across the good bid/ouch line with smaller and smaller zigs and zags each time (mostly).

But I deal in atoms not pixels!

Yeah, that’s another reference to Free. I’ll stop with that eventually.

I wonder how big construction, architecture or engineering firms can afford to do that zig/zag thing.

Pixels are cheap. Atoms are not, especially when you’re talking about a project like a mall, a bridge or 23.3 miles of Interstate highway. Which brings us to yesterday’s measurement discussion.

I was talking to a guy in the construction biz a while ago and asked him about this. Based on all the bidding processes for huge municipal (etc) construction projects, are any of them right? It seems like they all go over budget and over time.

Can you imagine what the expense of being wrong is if you’re the construction, engineering or architecture firm?

Parts is parts

And then I was thinking… buildings, roads and bridges break down into finite tasks just like programs do.

In the programming world – or at least in the academic one – there’s something called function point analysis.

The theory is that you can assess the time/complexity/cost of a project simply by counting the function points it contains. Rumor has it that it works if used properly. Guess how many businesses I’ve encountered using it over the last 25 years.

Doughnut. Zippo. None.

Why? Because it’s hard work. For small clients, it may not be worth the effort. Add to that, it means you have to properly plan and spec the work in pretty good detail. Not a lot of people want to put that effort in before handing a job to a programming staff to complete it.

On the other hand, not even Electronic Data Systems used it when I was there back in the Ross Perot days and we checked, rechecked and re-tested *everything*. Twice. Three times after 5pm.

I beam with joy

Let’s get back to the architects and such.

As I noted, buildings, bridges etc break down into components like beams, walls, pillars, etc. (Now you see why I just had to talk about function points, sorta.)

Like programmers (perhaps more so), these folks deal with complex bids with lots of variables.

They bid a bridge job because they have the best bridge designer in the state. Or condo. Or stadium. Whatever.

3 days before the bids are opened and awarded, she gets hit by a bus. Or gets a 3x salary offer from some Middle East engineering firm. Or disappears to find herself by walking the Great Wall.

Regardless of the reason, she’s gone.

It isn’t unusual, but it sure will throw your design time estimate a wicked curve ball and any technically-oriented business might see this.

What if?

What if your design software had the ability to measure how long it took to design an I-beam that will hold a dynamic load (ie: a load that changes/moves). Or how long it takes to design a retention pond at a factory.

So what, right?

OK…Imagine that your design software has the ability to do that for each staffer, broken down for each possible component of a building, screened-in patio, bridge, truss, lake, or other feature.

Like function points in software, the design software might keep track of all this based on complexity – such as by the number of load points and force vectors, or maybe square footage and materials have an impact.

Maybe experience and type of training comes into play. Maybe you learn that the designer’s college choice impacts these numbers.

Speed, Quality, Complexity

Now, imagine that this software can aggregate all this data by employee, by component.

With a little extra effort, you eventually figure out which designers are the best at designing each type of component.

A combination of speed, quality and work complexity ends up telling you exactly who to allocate to a particular piece of design and most likely that comes along with a very accurate estimate of the time needed to do the job.

If you break down the design of the most complex project you ever had, you know how many I-beams, trusses, concrete walls, pillars and so forth there are, as well as what kind of loads they have.

And now – because you have measurements of what the real work takes – you can make a bid that is far more accurate than the guesses those other folks are making.

Now imagine that you make the software that allows for this kind of measurement.

Your customers are the ones who bid more accurately. They win more bids. They become more successful. Your software becomes their secret weapon. You know what that means.

Imagine soft puffy clouds

Now… consider this discussion in the context of the service you provide, from programming to sports writing to graphic arts to small engine repair to architecture to plumbing or whatever.

You may already do some of this assessment by the seat of your pants / gut feel. Is it accurate? Be honest with yourself, it doesn’t matter what you tell me.

But would it be as accurate as an ongoing set of measurement data that is based on your current staff mix? I doubt it.

Would it help? Let’s see.

• Imagine how much easier it would be to manage a project if you knew exactly what each component required time-wise.
• Imagine how much easier it would be to manage a project if you knew exactly how to allocate your people to different details of the project.
• Imagine what your sales staff would face out in the field when they realize they can confidently bid a job and know it’ll come in on time and on budget and they can whip out performance reports to prove it.
• Imagine how your testimonials would change and the impact that would have on prospects.
• Imagine how your customer retention numbers would improve.
• Imagine what something like this could do for your staff’s morale. Never a late project, ever again. Well, maybe almost never.

Measurement. Might be a good idea, ya think?

photo credit: BruceTurner

Despite Chris’ assertion that information wants to be free, some of it just isn’t. Sorry.

In fact, some information is worth far more than the paper it is printed on (or the pixels it lights up).

For example, imagine that your company publishes technical articles. Short, sweet, fine-tuned to a specific purpose for a very specific audience.

The trick is making money from them, so maybe you’ve found that the best way to do that for your company (vs all other models) is to charge for access to your publication.

The Wall Street Journal does this. So does Investor’s Business Daily, as do a number of publications (online or print) in technical fields like auto mechanics, programming and FOREX trading.

Prove it

One of the biggest challenges these firms have is proving their publication’s worth at renewal time.

When renewal time comes up, or the charge appears on the credit card bill, the customer thought process goes something like this:

Come on, why should I pay $300 a year for a technical investing article resource when I can find everything Google has indexed for free?

The answer these businesses might commonly respond with include some of these:

• Because it’s well-indexed so you can quickly find the exact trading info you need.
• Because it has a search engine that understands investing terminology so you can quickly find exactly what you need
• Because our publication is fine-tuned to the audience’s investing style (or whatever). It’s as if it was written solely for day traders with between $4200 and $6500 to trade per day.
• Because it includes proven step-by-step guides for trading without losing my shorts (pun intended).

All of that is warm, fuzzy but not so exciting.

#3 and #4 aren’t bad but #1 and #2 are Google’s domain. They get better at it every day and paying you for it is going to get less and less likely unless you are much, much better at it in your specialty area.

I got your proof right here

Bottom line, almost all of that is pretty subjective. Bean counters (and spouses?) want hard numbers: “Why do you need this?”

Why not let them tell you?

If your article instructs them and provides them with a skill or offers a way to discover a new technique, make sure your feedback mechanisms (on the site or whatever) allow a way to say “Dude, this article saved me 2 or 3 days of struggling with this task”.

And yeah, it’s a lot like a Digg or a reTweet, but it’s more accurate than that.

The mechanism that works for you might need to be a number they can type in, or it might be a radio button with selections like “Waste of my time”, “Saved me maybe an hour”, “HUGE, DUDE. This got me back on track after a week”.

Whatever it is, it provides them with a way to tell you how much time, money, etc your information, your service, your product, your help saved them.

Think about where you could go with that info, even if it is largely anecdotal and not scientifically defensible.

If you have 100 clients and they (on average) provide feedback via a mechanism like this that says you save them 112 hours per year, seems to me that your prospects might want to know that information.

It also seems like it would be a great way to totally defuse the “your price is too high” argument (and maybe a number of others).

It might tell you how outrageous you can make your money-back guarantee. If it’s 30 days but it should be a year or 5 years, these numbers will give you some insight into it.

Who knows, you might even find out that your pricing and your value proposition are in vastly different places.

Download audio file (BoatAnchorBadSharingGood.mp3)

photo credit: Robb North

Over the last month or so, I’ve been playing phone tag with someone at the local bank’s office.

I use this national bank primarily because they offer some electronic banking services that local banks don’t bother to offer (such as a real-time, seamless interface with QuickBooks), despite my repeated “encouragement” to do so.

Some have noted that the cost to provide this QuickBooks interface is substantial – yet I get interesting wrinkled brow looks when I remind them that I pay $15 a month to use this nifty QB service because it saves us hours per month. Until the fee got to the point where the time was more valuable, I’d pay it. But I digress…

Anyhow, we’ve been talking with someone there about a refi and a combination of my schedule / travel and her schedule /travel have made it difficult to get into the same room at the same time. Not their fault, just one of those things about a busy summer.

This last time I called, the person I’m working with was out of town for several days. I asked the person on the phone if they could put me on their appointment calendar for the week after they return.

My calendar! Mine, mine, mine!

Astoundingly, the answer was no.

Yes, the folks at this large national bank, the same ones who are advanced enough to have their accounts seamlessly talk to my QuickBooks, do not allow or cannot manage to let their employees see their appointment book or schedule an appointment for someone else.

Insane.

I have a feeling it might be related to worries that someone might raid someone else’s appointment calendar for plum prospects, but there are ways of showing only open dates. Even so, that shouldn’t be necessary.

If you can’t trust a *bank* employee to access a co-worker’s appointment calendar, tell me why you trust them to work at the bank in the first place – cuz I don’t see it. But that trust thing is a topic for another day.

Unseen Value

Now we get to the point where you see where this affects you and your business: Are there resources (like an appointment calendar) that your staff should be able to share so they can help each other serve your clientele?

Back in the photography software days, it was a huge deal for new users of our product to finally get off that paper calendar at the front desk. It allowed anyone to see which photographers / camera rooms / salespeople / presentation spaces were booked and make an appointment no matter where an employee was when they answered the phone.

Sounds completely obvious, but many businesses simply couldn’t do it because they were still tied to that boat anchor – the paper appointment book.

Big, heavy and “somewhere in the warehouse”

Another market I worked with manufactured expensive custom items that were big and heavy. They stored them in the warehouse once they were finished.

The information about the build status and storage location of these custom-ordered items was kept on a set of clipboards on a line of nails in the manufacturing area.

Sometimes the info on those clipboards was out of date or missing because someone forgot to write the build status or location down. An order might get lost / forgotten until a customer called for it – and then you might find out that it hadn’t been built yet.

Now imagine that you are a receptionist in the front office and you’re all alone over lunch hour or during a big sales meeting. When that big customer calls to ask about their 27 piece, $57000 order, you have to put them on hold (or tell them you’ll call back), run back to the clipboards, flip through the orders manually, find the order and run back to the phone.

If the clipboard is missing because someone has it at a manufacturing station, or it is on the manager’s desk (or car seat), you know nothing.

If the data on the clipboard wasn’t filled out, you get to run back to the warehouse and look on dozens of shelves from floor to ceiling for an item that has a little paper tag on it showing the customer name.

That’s a boat anchor.

The alternative? A system that integrates customer information, orders, build status and delivery information together. When the phone rings, you can look up all of a customer’s orders, find the status of any of them and tell them right then. The items are barcoded as part of the manufacturing process so most status and location info is automatically updated. Depending on your situation, “most” could be “all”.

What’s your boat anchor? What can you share to get rid of it, enabling your staff to be more helpful and more productive?

photo credit: ckaroli

Finally, the last installment of my friend’s Apple customer service story (start at Part One here), the in-store experience that finally resolves everything.

Here we go…

Wednesday arrives, I walk in, and head to the back … what’s called the Genius Bar. The guy says, “I’m sorry. Can’t check you in, no more available appointments.” So I explained what the girl on the phone told me and I get the, “Corporate doesn’t have a clue. We’ll put you on the wait list. Might take a few hours. Might not get to you today.”

And so, it’s Christmas morning again, and there’s the present I didn’t want instead of the present I dreamed of and wrote the letter to Santa Claus in great detail about.

I explain that Corporate isn’t the failure. The failure was in the training of the very first young lady I spoke to Sunday. Her bad information put me on the wrong path.

I notice a young lady listening carefully with a different colored t-shirt from the fellow I was speaking with. When I finish making him feel all of my pain, he says, “I’ll let the manager know and you’ll be in the queue. It might be a little while but we’ll try.”

So I wait a while and notice the wait list popping up … without my name on it. I look over the shoulder of the guy checking appointments in and, sure enough, I’m like #4 on the list. So I must be in a different list.

After a few minutes, the lady in the different colored t-shirt comes by and says, “I’m going to speak to the manager as well. It won’t be long.”

And she returns and says, “You’re next”. I’ve been standing around for 30+ minutes but I’m cool with that.

All this pain and suffering, just to get in front of a service person at what is supposed to be a very customer-oriented company.

Is that how you view your company, as a customer-oriented company?

Is there a black hole that customers can fall into and swim around in for hours or days before they pop up in the right place? It’s better that you find it than your customers do.

So now, we’re finally in front of a service person. Let’s see if the expectation of Apple’s care for the customer holds…

A young man walks up and says, “Joe? Let’s see what you have.” I hand him the iPod and say, “I bought a pair of these for Christmas. One works with both sets of headphones. This one works with neither.” He nods.

We walk to his workstation. He turns the device over, types in the serial number, and says, “I’ll get you a brand new one. It won’t have any of your current data on it. You’ll have to resynch on iTunes on your home computer.”

I’m cool with that.

He doesn’t test the unit I handed him. He didn’t even look at it except to read the serial number off of it. I’m out of there in 3 or 4 minutes after he’s started. (Emphasis mine – Mark)

I get home late that night and plug the iPod into my wife’s laptop. It takes a little while but iTunes jumps up. It says it’s a new device and wants to verify what iTunes account this is associated with. I tell it and it immediately offers to download Joe Jr’s settings into it … that’s the one I swapped … and away it goes for 30 minutes if not more.

Finally, it’s finished. I update a few apps that had updates since the last sync. It doesn’t remember my wireless network’s password but it remembers the network name. I put in the password and away it goes.

Then, it doesn’t know the email account’s password though it knows the account name. I put that in.

Everything is as it was before except the headphone jack now works.

So, if you get entered into the queue correctly, they seem to have pretty darn good service.

One little snag caused all that happened over the last 3 parts of this story – and as you see, it could have been resolved in 3 or 4 minutes.

One snag that could lose an influential client for Apple. Fortunately for them, it didn’t.

Are your biggest or most influential clients this patient?

Study your customer service logs. Talk to your most angry customers. Find the cases that dragged on “forever”.

Figure out where your customer service blackhole is.

photo credit: James Jordan

In part 3 of our series (start at Part One here), my friend’s story about his customer service experience continues on the phone with Apple Store continues on the phone…

So I begin to explain, yes, of course, there are ways to make appointments without my needing to sit at a computer. So, she transfers me to corporate help on the national level.

There, after a host of menus, I’m not getting far. So I answer in my best Cajun accent knowing that they’ll send me to someone who is bilingual. Sure enough, a young lady comes on the line.

She explains that she, too, can’t take an appointment. I explain to her that she has a computer, she has the URL, of course she can take an appointment. She can fill in the blanks and I’ll tell her what goes in them. She says, yes, of course she can do that.

Then she says, “There are no available appointments for a few days.”

So I said, … let’s be clear. I’m in your local store. I tell the lady I’m coming through on Wednesday afternoon and what time. She says I have to dial a phone number to set up the appointment and I can’t do it until a day or two before Wednesday. I do that. Then I find out that a day or two isn’t far enough ahead. And that the phone number doesn’t allow me to set up an appointment either. And then I remember that toy I really wanted for my 4th birthday and I channel all of that pain into the phone call.

She says, “Just drop in, find the manager, explain what happened on Sunday and today and she’ll take care of you.”

Cool. I give her the “human engineering talk” about the touch tone system as well.

So at this point, if you are the call center person, how do you relay to your corporate IT/communications group that there is an obvious problem in the phone menus? Many small companies lack a trouble ticket reporting system for people at this level. It might get written on a Post It note and referred to someone later, or it might be forgotten.

Just a thought…

If the next customer to deal with this problem buys iPhones for a Fortune 500 company, what’s the potential cost to Apple and AT&T?

If the next person to fall into your trap does so because you don’t have a solid mechanism for reporting, tracking, fixing and getting user feedback from your own people – what could that cost you?

How big is your biggest customer? That’s how much a simple customer service problem could cost you.

photo credit: MShades

Last time, we talked about the start of an unfortunate experience with Apple customer service.

Let’s continue the story with the joy of a voice mail phone tree. Click here to read part one of this story.

Watch for the one failure point – the one place that takes the customer off the customer service highway and pushes them into the maze.

The young lady handed me a card, said call that number a day or so before I was dropping in, and everything would be cool.

Off I went.

Wednesday night, I was planning on returning to the city. So, Tuesday, while driving around, I call the number on the card. “For this problem, press 1. For this problem, press 2. For this problem, press 3. For an appointment …” so I pressed 4. And the menu started again.

Must not have stuck.

“For an appointment …” I hit the 4 again. The menu starts. I press 4, Bye bye. It hangs up.

Well, I remember my old Windows phones would sometimes not give the button tone on a call and calling back worked. So, I do it again. 4 … menu starts again. I press 0 … hangs up.

So, this time I _really_ listen.

“For an appointment, go to this website blah blah. For anything else, press 5.”

Duh.

4 doesn’t work. The 4th option is the only option that you can’t press a sequential number for. Somebody in human engineering dropped the ball.

I press 5.

A person in the Apple store answers and I explain I want to make an appointment. “Yes sir, here’s the URL” … uh, I don’t have a computer. I’m in my truck. I just need to make an appointment. “I’m sorry. You can’t make an appointment that way.”

If someone was standing in front of you, would you tell them to go home and get online to make an appointment? Of course not.

You have the customer on the phone and tells them to hang up and do something else to make an appointment? They are right in front of you, just as if they are standing in your store. What in the world would make you think the ideal thing to do is send them on their way?

I hope I don’t have to elaborate on the inane nature of a request like this. Clearly a failure in design of the service appointment process. Employees need to be empowered with systems that allow them to deal with this situation.

Next time, we’ll see where this mess continues and learn another lesson from Apple.

photo credit: psd

A friend of mine tells me this story about a recent experience while trying to get service at the local Apple store.

As the tale winds on, we’ll stop and go over a few lessons and suggestions along the way. It’s a long and winding story, but it’s critical to include the whole thing so that you understand the entire scenario this customer experienced and how it impacts your business.

So here goes…

So, Sunday, my iPhone could receive calls but nothing would display on the screen. I tried holding down the power button for some time but that didn’t help. I held the power button and the front button down and nothing happened there either.

I was on my way to the city when this happened. I pulled into a quick stop and asked a young man to borrow his phone so I could call my wife and put her on the project of locating the Apple store nearby.

I stopped in there, a big open space store with lots of folks, and a young lady met me at the door. I explained the problem and she called a young man over. He held both buttons down for a while and it rebooted. I thought I did that but, obviously, I didn’t hold them for enough seconds. My old Windows phone would clear everything out of it when I did that so I was too jumpy to wait long enough.

I remembered as I was leaving that one of the 2 iPod Touch units we bought for the kids was having headphone jack issues. They said just make an appointment and we’ll look at it, either fixing it or replacing it.

An appointment.

You have the customer in front of you. You have already stopped whatever you were doing to help them and you have solved one problem.

The next solution will take 2 minutes to fix or you’ll replace the unit and return the broken one to the factory (definition: the repair department of the 21st century).

Yet – you send the customer away instead of helping them right then.

Everything in this story that happens from here is a waste of company time, a waste of store time, a source of potential frustration to the customer and a way to waste a pile of the customer’s time.

Alternative: Spend perhaps 2 more minutes of working with them as they stand in front of you. Avoid delays, possible appointment snafus and take care of the customer at the first opportunity – or at least figure out if you can help them quickly.

Mistakes happen to everyone and every company. You can’t necessarily prevent a bad human interaction. You can prevent a bad design (yeah, that’s ironic, given that our example is an experience with Apple).

When these problems are designed into a system, people get caught in a riptide of customer service.

Instead of getting to shore, they get pulled farther and farther from their goal and yours: solving the problem and getting back to living their lives or back to work. You should be looking to find and eliminate the traps engineered into your business processes.

Everyone has a name for them: Whirlpool. Riptide. Twilight Zone. Black Hole. Maze.

Is there one of these places designed into your business processes? Your customer service system’s worst nightmare cases might tell you exactly where it is.

Your customers who encounter it certainly can tell you – but you might need to ask.

In the next part of this series, we’ll learn more about this Apple experience.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

I was over at ZenHabits.com earlier in the week and stumbled across a link to this ZH-inspired poster at GoddessGuidebook.com.

It’s a little quirky for the serious business type, but the message is all business.

Check it out, it’s today’s guest post.

photo credit: scragz

Today’s guest post comes from Adrian Savage, who was guest posting over at LifeHack.org when he wrote “There’s no time”.

If you struggle with having to much todo list at the end of your day/week/whatever, you might find the discussion of what amounts to a “ToDont list” helpful.

photo credit: WTL photos

Today’s guest post comes from Entrepreneur.com, specifically from author and Entrepreneur writer James Stephenson.

You’ve heard many of these things from me, but it never hurts to hear them from someone else.

Start here and dig in!