HERE’S WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT
IN THIS MONTH’S MEMBER WEBINAR:

You can download the Podcast
Make More Time

Take control of your time

1. It’s up to you. No one other than you has any motivation whatsoever to make YOU less busy.  Your boss, your team, and your peers only benefit from your endless output.

2. Pick the right FEW things to do, and do them really well.  Don’t get overwhelmed by the activity of your job. Choose your activities to be the ones that support the most critical business outcomes.

3. Delegating: You can’t get there without delegating.  Think about delegating not as just assigning work, but as freeing yourself up to add even more value.

Create More Time – Do More Smart Stuff

4. Just take some time back. Schedule time for yourself and HIDE to think and work on the most important things.  If you don’t hide the activity will know where to find you.

5. Shift some time from activity/working to thinking/planning time.  Work ON your business not just IN your business.  Thinking of improvements and efficiencies helps make even more time.

Clear the Deck – Do Less Stupid Stuff

6. Seek and Destroy Chaos: deal with bad meetings, bad communications, and bad working habits.  Make the container smaller and time-box low value activities.

7. Resist temptation to solve and resolve things that don’t matter.  Don’t use time on things that don’t achieve critical business outcomes, even if they are more fun to work on.

Optimize the Time You Have

8. Manage your energy: Deal with being overwhelmed, get over disappointment quickly, make things easier on yourself not harder.

9. Improve working habits: Get better at using “in between” times, and don’t spend “prime time” on low value activities.

10. Magic: If you can align your FEW Priorities with where you have natural strengths it’s magic. You can and get more done, have a big impact, and you’ll make time because you can go fast when you are doing things you are really good at.

Download the Podcast Make More Time to learn more.

Here is a useful checklist of the things that make the difference between careers that break through and careers that stall.

Feel Free to forward it to others!

DO Better

Are you working on the right things?

• Can you explain how your company makes money?
• Can you show specifically how your work is adding value to the business?
• What percentage of time do you work on key initiatives, vs. stay busy with tactical activity?  What should it be?
• Do you have the ability to stop doing things that have a lower payoff?

Are you working in the right way?

• Are you a work-horse? Does the work just keep getting piled on because you do it so well?
• How much time do you schedule for yourself to think?  How much should you?
• What things do you do things specifically to make more time and make room?
• What do you do to manage your energy?

Are your working at the right level?

• Do you delegate well?  Do you jump in and do work for your team?
• Do you ever “cover” for work your team does that is not good enough?
• What are the top 3 critical leadership tasks to be done at your level?
• How do you measure if you are creating value in the business or just delivering work?
• Do you find ways to reduce the cost of doing what you did last year?
• What are you learning about this year on top of your job description?
• What are the learning goals you have set for your team this year?
• Do you have the right team?  Do you need to upgrade your team?
• What do you do on purpose to build trust through your behaviors and communications?

LOOK Better

• How do you create positive visibility for the work you and your team do?
• Do you know who all of your stakeholders and influencers are?
• Who are the people who have a say in what happens to you (even if you don’t interact directly)?
• Do you know what you are known for?  Is it what you want?  Do you know why?
• Do you do things to build your credibility on purpose?
• How well do you know your boss’s boss? Your boss’s peers?
• How do you learn what is most relevant to your business stakeholders?
• Do you know how they would describe it?  What words would they use?
• Do you focus as much effort on how you sell your ideas as the ideas themselves?
• What is your process to regularly communicate with people outside your organization?

CONNECT Better

• Do you have mentors?
• What sort of mentors are most necessary to help you meet your goals?
• Are you a mentor?
• Do you regularly GIVE things to people in your network?
• Do you do networking naturally?
• How much time do you spend doing proactive networking? How much should it be?
• Do you have relationships with people who challenge and fuel your imagination?
• Do you regularly interact with people in other organizations an industries to get fresh perspectives?
• Do you tend seek out help when you need it?
• What is your strategy to grow your network?
• What kind of network is expected for the next job you want?
• How many people who don’t work for you, would do work for you if you asked?

Want some help with all this?

If you’d like to get some more insight and support for how you can attack this list to position yourself better, be more effective, and get a bigger payoff in your career, I offer a unique opportunity to a small group of people to spend a day with me.

We work on building your personal plan to grow your career, raise your game as a leader, create your Personal Brand, increase your influence, and grow your network.  It’s a small group, so it is personalized to you.

I can’t do many of these workshops any more, due to the rest of my business commitments, so I do only two public sessions per year now.   

I have only 6 seats left in my next session on October 22 in San Mateo.

If you come I guarantee you will get at least one life-changing idea, and dozens of practical things you can start doing tomorrow to get more of what you want out of your work.

I share, from my personal experience, and everything I learned from smart people along the way, what things will have the biggest impact on your success, and which things are a waste of time and will get you stuck.

It’s been wonderful to hear the stories about the big promotions, and the career and life changing events that people have been able to create for themselves as a result of this workshop.

If you are interested, don’t wait.  Sign up Now.

There are only 6 seats left and the next session will not be until April or May of next year.

If you can’t make it to San Mateo, you can also get this workshop on DVD.

Thanks,

I have worked with many different sized companies and one of the universal truths I have seen is that sales people basically hate leads that are generated by marketing.

Unless of course, the “lead” is ready to buy.

Sales people only like HOT leads

I don’t say this to take a shot at sales people.  Effective sales people do a heroic job of cultivating their own business, and getting their own leads based on personal outreach, account development and referrals.

So, warm or cool leads generated by marketing are just not helpful.

They become “action items”, which get in the way of developing the business they are working on.

So why bother generating leads for sales at all?

If you are in the marketing role, generating leads is built into the DNA of your job description.  It’s also makes for a clear measurement:  How many leads did you generate and how much did it cost?

The standard goal is to spend the right amount of money and generate high quality leads that sales people use and turn into business.

Joint Marketing & Sales Approach

The real goal should be a joint sales and marketing goal where the leads are of high enough quality (and Hotness) that the sales force actually is motivated to work them.

I have seen two very basic practices make a huge difference.

For Sales: Actually use your CRM system

In so many companies, the CRM system becomes a “write-only” database for leads.  The information in it gets stale and out of date because it is not used as a day to day tool for developing business.

One time as a CMO, I investigated the leads that were in stage one of my company’s CRM system with people from sales, field marketing and corporate marketing.  “Stage one” is where leads that have been fully qualified were supposed to live.

In an unusual a fit of honesty from all involved, I got some real answers.

* A small percentage of the stage one leads were actually stage one leads.  They were being worked by sales people who had qualified them and moved them to stage one.  This was the minority.

* Some leads were there because the sales people were getting measured on qualifying leads, so they just moved them to stage one to meet that objective then just ignored them.

* This point was also good for marketing which also being measured on stage one, “qualified leads”, so it mutually re-inforced useless behavior and inflated success measures all around.

* Some leads were there because even though the deal had moved forward into later stages, no one updated the leads in the system.

* Some leads were there because the sales rep left the company and they were never reassigned.

* Some leads were there because the sales rep thought THEY had generated the lead, not marketing, so they entered a duplicate that they would get credit for directly.

* Some leads were there were actually worked and found to be not qualified, but no one bothered to close them out.

…You get the picture.

The way around this is to actually use your CRM system.

Have Lead Review Meetings

Sales teams have weekly order or revenue review meetings.  The most effective sales teams also have lead review meetings.

Imagine each week, if every sales team was looking at their assigned leads in the CRM system and every sales rep had to report on progress on each and every lead that was assigned to them.

This is not just about forcing sales to use the system, so everyone can have a nice neat system.

This is about developing business and making sales.  This is how the sales teams turn leads into business. This works.  I’ve seen this produce dramatic results from every sales team that does it.

The more focus sales teams have on the development of leads the more business they get.  It’s pretty black and white.

For Marketing: Don’t throw away warm leads

This qualifies as some of the oldest “news” on earth.  I bring it up again only because it is one of the most well studied AND most ignored marketing practices.

Companies spend money to generate leads and have a process to qualify them.  The HOT leads get worked on and the rest get thrown away.  Then you do another marketing program to get a whole new crop of leads, work the new HOT ones, and throw the rest away….

This is very expensive and also, it is well proven that the few hot leads have far less value long term than the warm & cool, but qualified ones.  (the ones you are throwing away.)

For starters, the warm and qualified cool list is a much larger list.  And people who expressed interest once are much more likely to buy eventually, then a brand new crop of unqualified leads from your next marketing program.

Think about this.  Only deliver HOT leads to the sales force.  Keep the rest in marketing and keep marketing to them until they are HOT.

Keep building your warm list and keep marketing to them.  You will get more HOT leads coming out of that group over time than from your new campaigns alone.  And they will be even HOTTER because they will have a longer term familiarity with you as you’ve been consistently marketing to them

Building your career without mentors is like climbing Mt. Everest without a guide and a Sherpa.  Sure, you can attempt it but why would you?

Mentors can have a bigger impact on your success than virtually anything outside your own efforts. 

If you rely on your personal talents and energy alone, you are at an extreme disadvantage to those that get help.

You need mentors that help with:

1. Imagination
2. Reality
3. Connections
4. Air Cover
5. Learning
  

1. Imagination

Where do you get your ideas? Who challenges your thinking in a positive way? Big imagination is required to do your job in a stand-out way. What fuels your imagination?

Most of my biggest successes have started from other people’s ideas, challenges or inspiration. Whether it’s how you solve problems, or create new opportunities, you can’t do it if you never think of it!

Mentors can help a lot, because they typically have a very different perspective.

To fuel your imagination, look for mentors who: 

Are 2-3 phases ahead of you in the maturity of how your job function is done.  This can be in a bigger company or a more established business or product line. It’s critical to realize what is possible.

Work at an order of magnitude bigger scope or geography – learn processes and techniques they use that help them do a bigger job, so you can apply those as your business grows.  Learning things from a much smaller company can also be really useful.

Do your job in different industries – a Ford employee got the idea for the assembly line by visiting a butchery.  Seeing how other industries solve the same problems can help you see completely different ways of doing things which are huge innovations when applied in your world.

2. Reality

It’s easy to get so tied up in what you are doing, that you can lose sight of the reality of changing attidudes, business conditions, or market landscape.
 
So look for mentors who are:

10-15 years older and way ahead of you career-wise – they can help you see the things you are not seeing, navigate the land mines, work through unspoken rules, and point out opportunities to change the game that you might not see on your own.

In their 20′s and are a master at the web and social networking – you need keep up with how the world is communicating.  Don’t get left in the dark ages of email.  Know how to share information and engage your customers. 

Talented business people in other functions – you get ideas not only for general leadership techniques, but “man on the street” insights about how  people in other areas view what makes your function successful.

3. Connections

 Look for mentors who are In the job you aspire to.  It is important to really learn about the job you want before you go for it.  Having a mentor in that role can expose you to the real requirements, so you can practice thinking about it, or maybe even take on some projects to get real experience. 

They also give you acccess to jobs like theirs when they come up, because being in that role, they get asked who to consider – and they think of you!

Also,

You are most vulnerable when you are not connected. You have less ability to execute if you do not have a strong network. Sure, you need to be building your personal network directly, but mentors can expand your personal and professional network exponentially; not just in terms of size but of usefulness.

4. Air Cover

If you are at a big company and you want to grow your career there, you need a mentor in your company who is at your boss’s level or higher.  You need someone on your team in the room when you are not there to defend your honor. 
 
A mentor, by definition cares about you and your success, and having someone higher up in the organization who can advocate on your behalf when you are not in the room is critical.

They can also help you learn what it means to socialize and “fit in” at that level, which is important if you are trying to get there eventually.

5. Learning

Finally, you can’t have too many smart people in your life. Spending time with people you learn from is a big part of creating success. What are your personal learning goals? What learning agendas do you have for your organization? What do you want to be better at next year than you are now? How do you plan to get there?
 
Whenever you find someone you can learn from, create a reason to spend time with them.  Learn what they think. Bring them into your staff meetings as special guest stars.

Getting Mentors

Don’t get hung up on the term “mentor”.  Just buying a coffee for someone you can learn from, and getting the benefit of their time is the important part.

However, if you can formalize it to the extent that you both acknowledge that they care about your success over time, the benefits multiply. So, when you come across a relationship with a potential mentor that sparks, close the deal!
 
Check list: Do you have your 5 mentors?
 
1.   Someone in the job you aspire to
2.   Someone doing your job at larger scope or maturity, or in a different industry
3.   A twenty-something, web 2.0 guru
4.   A master networker
5.   A career guide 15 years your senior

Useful Goals:

You should have a goal of adding at least one real mentor to your life every year, and learning stuff from one really smart person once a month.