Productivity is a mantra which is preached through all sectors of today’s enterprise. With so much emphasis on being productive, you are encouraged to live, breath and practice productivity. It is always encouraging to assess your performance in terms of the calls you attended, emails your responded and meetings you held in a day. It is indeed self-gratifying to observe you read 80 emails, responded to 30 urgent ones, had 2 meetings, updated your website, wrote a blog, briefed your sales team, read 4 important articles and so forth. Question is, Were you really being effective ? Will all this activity really produce results, after all productivity is about producing results. More so being a superhuman is rather addictive, it takes you into a self-afflicting, super-performance cycle where you want to better yourself and be more and more productive day after day.
i have been a victim of productivity hype, setup sales floors, sky high sales targets, encouraged sales teams to make hundreds of phone calls per day, sent thousands of promotional emails, ran aggressive selling campaigns but if i am asked the question whether a more planned and creative approach would reveal better results, my answer would be a big yes.
In this freak frenzy of trying to take on the world we forget that business is all about people, its about building relationships, building rapport, striking deals, its about connecting with people, understand their issues, identify with their situation and lowering your bar so you can speak to them at their level, its about listening, learning, processing and responding in way your clients realise that you have reached the crux of their problem, you understand exactly what they want. Its about convincing them you are the best man for the job, reflecting their ideas, thoughts and identifying with their problems.
All this can only happen if you have a certain mindset, if you are at a happy place, and you are willing to listen and learn. Aiming to be just productive keeps you in a zone, the high performance zone, and while in this zone, the listening and learning ability is asleep. You are chasing a target, the target is to do 50 tasks within a specific time.
if you do not have the power to influence you will not go very far with getting prospect customers on board, and you will only be able to influence unless you position yourself right.
I am known to take hours to write ONE email, yes just one email, infact sometimes that email is completed over a period of few days, because i am constantly looking for inspiration, creativity, i am always thinking what will my client think, react and how will he feel emotionally when he reads my email. For me each and every email is like hitting bulls eye. Making sure i cover all aspects so the reader does not get a chance to think of my competition. Its warm, effective, informative covers all aspects, but it generates the desired result, touchwood, we hardly lose a sale if we have a customer engaged with us, our success ratio is set to be between 80% to 90%. We do all the thinking for the customer, making it easy for him, its only when they dont like certain something about you product that they start considering other options.
My sales teams are encouraged to get 1 or 2 good relationships
. Its not necessarily following the commonly known phenomena “its a numbers game”.
i encourage my sales team to be sensitive to the customers needs and strike the right cord with the client, from heavy hitting targets to making ONE good business connection a day per person,
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