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By Neal Gorenflo & David Nour
Many B2B sales organizations create separate roles for winning new accounts (hunting) and winning additional business from existing accounts (farming). This can lead to little to no coordination between sales people. This is a colossal blunder. Why?
I spend a couple of hours each day following hyperlinks from various posts on Twitter, and a dozen or so interesting blogs I keep up with. With the absolute information overload and 200+ emails / day that I receive, it really has become a “pruning” job – don’t keep up with it and whether in the inbox or on the Blackberry, it gets overwhelming quickly.
As such, a couple of years ago, I immersed myself into Macros and Rules in MSFT Outlook – this subject line, goes into that folder; emails from this address go into here; any of these words in the subject or body of the email, DELETE!
So, when I came across this article on Best Practices in Writing Email Subject Lines, I couldn’t help but to not only be intrigued, but wanted to share it as well.
Three tips for you on your Digital Etiquette:
What have you found to be effective in your email communication?
There is no question that many people are very good at staying heads-down and engaged on critical projects, strategic initiatives, and overall tasks at hand. But I can’t help but wonder, how many of this same group really know how to vacation.
Do you really know how to take a break from your company? When was the last time you got lost on purpose? I am not talking about moving your office outdoors, masked as a vacation where you spend most of the time working, but those getaways specially for Baby Boomers that really make you consider a permanent change in lifestyle.
Would you believe that you only need 30 minutes to plan for your most valuable relationships each week? How? Follow our simple RATE formula:
I have yet to find anyone who will argue with the value of relationships or teamwork. But as the traditional, often hierarchal command and control management models give way to more decentralized approaches, a new focus on socially networked and emotionally intelligent leadership is quickly emerging. Many leaders are finding themselves as members of a number of teams including those that are virtual, autonomous, cross-functional and sometimes even focused on pre-mortem; hence the need for a much more relationship-centric approach.
As the need to build highly liquid, dynamic, effective teams increases, the available bandwidth to build and nurture these teams diminishes. Rapidly changing market dynamics coupled with limited resources, demand re-engineering, streamlining, and an increased demand for service, all makes most leaders feel certain that they must continue to do more with less.
Have you noticed that some meetings go much longer than they ever should? Do you ever wonder that there is a perception that everyone must speak? I often wonder, do some of these people feel that if they say nothing, they are not contributing, and that somehow, sitting in active silence is a sin punishable by death?
Say the topic of discussion is a marketing campaign. An employee can think of no legitimate criticism or valuable suggestion for improvement, so instead of saying nothing at all, he digs up an objection based on a single incident that occurred years ago at another job in a different company and sometimes, you think, on a different planet.
Another painful example to watch is the “all inclusive” types – those who deem it their fiduciary responsibility to add diversity, change management, process optimization, globalization, or in more recent trendy times, a green initiative, to every discussion.
Worse yet are those who feel compelled to ask vague questions. How do we take this to the next level? What are our best options? Think about it. Every one of these interactions adds 5-10 minutes and continued drag on endless points beyond the necessary duration. Meeting facilitators in our overly sensitive PC world have been brainwashed to say – even if they are not thinking it – that there are no stupid questions. And way too many are way too considerate to cut off the offensive parties. With each up-tick of the noise, the pressure on those who haven’t said anything increases. I know in democratic societies – not to mention our dreaded educational system, where teachers make participation 20% of the grade – “speak up and be counted” is often considered to be noble.
If you don’t become a faithful advocate of quality participation counting for more than quantity noise, you are contributing to gross negligence in the lack of candor in corporate America. Be a proponent of insightfulness, not more useless banter.
Publish agendas in advance and allow participants to prepare. End meetings early. Offer your open office door to anyone who didn’t have a chance to speak at the meeting. Never single out quiet employees with the jovial yet sarcastic, “Susan – we haven’t heard much from you today.” Don’t allow introduction of non-agenda items. And for a chance, try attending a meeting where you have nothing to add and, here is a novel idea, you add nothing! Because when the team sees that it is Ok to not add noise but instead aim to add value, they will follow suit.
