So I have, hopefully, finished my foray into sales-team management and have returned to full-time training. I’ve been asked to lead a series of classes on better time-management and resource utilization at work (and no, I did not name the series). I have a few dozen ideas, but I thought I’d see what the Teeming Millions had to contribute.
Briefly, here’s the parameters:
I work for a multi-national service company, which, for the sake of argument, sells and services palantir, lesser rings of power, and mithril armor & weaponry. The people taking the class will be inside sales representatives; they manage accounts for business who have a continuing relationship with our company. This means they have to retain old business and drum up new business – the latter coming into play if, say, a client is having us maintain their arsenals but is using a competitor for palantiri and rings. The salespeople do most of their client contact by phone and email, and frequently have to create sales proposals using MS Office, set up discount programs, coordinate technical support teams, and so forth.
My overall plan is to get people AWAY from the idea of multi-tasking. For instance, when I was doing their job, I only checked email and voicemail thrice a day: when arriving in the morning, just after lunch, and just before going home. Otherwise I found I was forever getting into endless correspondence loops that leeched time away from productive tasks.
Personally, I have a disagreement with your overall plan. I find it irritating in the extreme when I can’t get a simple answer from a vendor right away. If my vendors were only checking their correspondence 3 times a day, I’d find another vendor. Similarly, one of my employer’s main selling points is that our customers will get prompt service, phone answered before the 3rd ring.
Someone calling for a basic customer service issue is going to be calling the customer service department, not the sales department. The people taking the class are in the latter. They do OUTGOING calls, and though they do give out their contact information, the voice number most of them gives goes straight to voice mail.
When I had their job, my voice mail announcement was something like this:
“Hi. Thanks for calling Skald the Rhymer, account manager for the Northern Erebor territory of Durin’s Ironwrights. If you have a customer service issue such as a need for additional supplies, please call our customer service department at 314-149-2658. If you have a routine billing issue, please call our billing department at 271-828-1828. Otherwise, please leave your message at the tone. If you are calling before 4 p.m., I will call you back before the end of business today; if you are calling after 4 p.m., I will call you back before the end of business tomorrow. Thank you and good day.”
You see, most of their job (and my job then) was to INITIATE contact, and to act on information gleaned during said contacts. I found that by checking my correspondence as I did, I was able to plan my day and organize my workload far better than by doing it piecemeal. Let’s say when I check my morning email, I find that three customers have called in with billing issues that are not routine and will require my intervention, and two people have tech support problems, and one person needs to have a long conversation about moving his palantiri business over from our competitors at Elrond’s. This knowledge allowed me to plan my morning so I could handle like things in sequence, which reduces the time I waste. Nobody ever complained about waiting overlong for callbakcs.