Write Better Email in Less Time

March 7, 2010 By Darrin Mourer

Every day there is a natural inclination for each of us to spend an inordinate time on email. We understand from experience that each client can read a lot into the emails they receive from you. Our tendency, then, is to make sure our communication is clear, accurate, and, well, pretty…

The trap is that it becomes easy to get locked in a sea of revisions instead of spending time on more productive activities. So in order to get better results in less time you have to focus on one underlying principal:

Eliminate redundancy.

A really easy (but rarely used) tool is email templates. When I first got turned on to this trick, I had it in my mind that email templates were for cold calls, marketing blasts and the like. But when I sat down and thought about all the emails I send, I realized there was far more redundancy than meets the eye.

Consider:

Meeting invites, follow up notes, action item assignments
Technical qualification emails sent to audience members before a presentation
Product or industry news/updates you may send to a group of your customers
Debrief emails to your extended sales team (even more beneficial if there are standard fields or data needed for your sales process/CRM)
Reminders of logistics for presentations, demos, etc.
Prep requests for on-site evaluations

If you’ve ever shown up on-site and wished you had a piece of information beforehand, simply think about what standard process you could use to make sure you captured it every time before you would need it.

Automate Process

For example, imagine there are 10 prerequisite pieces of data that you need to install your product in a lab. It’s easy to assume that the customer will have the needed data, but we know that is not always the case. Why not craft the ideal email you’d like to send to a prospect beforehand and save it for reuse (more on this in a minute).

Let’s take this a step further now and imagine that if you only ever had to craft this email once, how much time could you spend making sure it was absolutely perfect. A lot more than when you need to do it every time, certainly. Thus, templates are a dirt simple way to save time and is a great opportunity to perfect the style of your communications.

Creating Templates

Templates are available in every desktop email client I am aware of (even GMail too). Since 80% of us seem to be on Outlook I’ll start there.

Craft the ideal message including any/all fields that might be reusable (CC, Subject, etc). Keep in mind that because you’re doing this once you can afford to get a little fancier with tables, shading, and fonts. There are also a plethora of free, pre-built templates on Office Online and various productivity websites
Once you’ve filled out as much as you can for a generic email, go Save As > Outlook Template. You’ll likely have to scroll down to see the Template option
It will be saved as an .oft file. I recommend you create a folder for them off your desktop or start menu so you can get to them in a hurry. Name it something logical since you may end up with a dozen of these or more.

The Perfect PoC

Once you’ve got the idea down, step back through your last few proof of concepts. You can start with reviewing past emails, but you will likely find there are new possibilities to automate or improve some aspects of communication you didn’t consider before. Systematically apply the approach to all of your email interactions and refine your templates over time as you start to use them and figure out what’s missing.

The next time you run a PoC, it may not be perfect, but you’re email communication certainly will be…

[EDIT: By request, I uploaded a generic template I've gotten a lot of milage from. Get it here.]

Filed Under: Productivity, Soft Skills, Time Management Tagged With: Productivity, Time Management

Sales Engineer MBOs

December 2, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

I recently covered some of the different compensation split options available for Sales Engineers at a very high level. This prompted a few questions, mostly around the use of MBOs. As a follow-up, let me go into the various options available to SE management as well as some common pitfalls.

MBOs are targeted performance goals. As such they should always follow the SMART approach. Even though a standard quota plan is just an example of an MBO, most sales/SE managers use the term more to apply to goals other than sales targets. For this article, I will refer to it in its more general sense.

The Four Pillars

Others may group them differently, but to me there are 4 categories of MBOs for SEs:

Business/financial
Employee satisfaction/enablement
Customer satisfaction
Process (continuous) improvement

This ensures that the 3 main stakeholders in business are accounted for: shareholders/owners, employees, and customers.

Business/Financial

These are the goals that concentrate on the financial statements and address the needs of shareholders or owners. I suppose this is technically a euphemism for “shareholder satisfaction” These are also the most common compensation plan metrics—sometimes the only one (over 70% of SEs have a bonus plan tied to sales/revenue). This is even more so for AEs. Here are some options that may be available depending on your company’s revenue reporting capabilities:

Percent attainment of quota
Number of new customers
Number of tradeshows attended
Percent time spent in customer-facing activities
Percent growth in pipeline
Percent growth in average opportunity size
Percent decline in average opportunity age
Percent decline in assigned opportunities without SE involvement/tasks
Percent growth in deals won with SE involvement or specific activity (e.g. POC)
Percent growth in deals won vs. competition or specific competitors

Employee Satisfaction/Enablement

There is a host of revenue generating activities that are not specific to one’s own accounts. Creating sales collateral and supporting other account teams are specific examples. This category also applies to activities that go to morale boosters which address the needs of the employee stakeholder. Examples include:

Number of supplemental sales/marketing/support/implementation collateral created (and shared!)
Number of opportunities assisting regional sales teams in your personal niche
Number of posts on company bulletin boards or other social networking contributions
Number of published trip/win/loss reports
Number of informal training sessions (e.g. lunch and learns) delivered

Customer Satisfaction

Goals in this category encourage positive and long-term relationships with customers, which is in everyone’s best interest. These can include:

Number of repeat customers (renewals)
Number of published case studies or customer references
Percent achievement on customer sat surveys
Number of customer requested product features submitted to product management

Process (continuous) Improvement

Each of the other categories addressed a specific business stakeholder. Process improvement is a very broad category that concentrates on the foundational goals that generate continuous improvement in each of the others. This is best illustrated by the concept of moving the fulcrum over, or sharpening the saw in Covey terminology. It covers everything from contributions to business process improvement to personal development. Examples include:

Number trainings attended
Acquisition of a new skill or certification
Percent of activities documented in CRM
Contribution to special projects
Time management goals

Flexibility

Each of these basic options can be tailored (and weighted too) in numerous ways limited only by your creativity and ability to get at the data. You can focus these goals on specific products, business segments, or even competitors so that they align to company strategy.

Pitfalls

With the ability to be flexible also comes the possibility of actually lowering productivity if you aren’t wise in how you approach them. Some of the most common pitfalls include:

Not keeping them SMART. The biggest culprit here always seems to be measurability. In many cases a desired result is qualitative. In these cases I employ “correlated result” approach where I seek out measureable events that typically lead to (or are correlated with) the desired result I am after. Example: It’s difficult to measure someone’s product knowledge, so the measureable result is attending a training, passing a specific test, etc.
Not publishing continuous results. We all need immediate feedback to make the biggest impact on results. If you’re only reviewing quarterly or (gulp) annually, you’ll find the process very ineffective and discouraging.
Reliance on manual compilation. If you need to manually jump through hoops to get the data you need it is that much harder to integrate them into daily practice. Automate the process whenever possible.
No scoreboard. Even if you just keep it in your team, your people need to benchmark. Friendly competition in my experience is good. The best will benchmark against themselves. Keep it updated frequently.
Tedious recordkeeping. If your SEs have to spend an inordinate amount of time entering data so that you can report on it, your program is destined for failure (or minimally noncompliance).
Unintended consequences. Over reliance on these metrics leads to pressure to game the system. Communicate the spirit of the goals and the behavior you are wanting to see.
Top down only. When each of us is involved in setting our own goals, we feel natural ownership. Involve your team in the creation process, even if by a committee that standardizes them for the entire organization. No taxation without representation!
Not communicating the why. If your SEs don’t know why something is important, you will have a difficult time getting ownership of the number.
Metric overload. Anything over 10-12 goals starts to become overwhelming. Keep is short and sweet.
Business only. We in Sales are naturally focused on business results. Over-weighting your goals in Business ignores other stakeholders and ultimately leads to lowered effectiveness.

Hopefully this gives you a head start on crafting your own MBO program. By no means is my list comprehensive and should be thought of as a starting point of discussion. Mastering Technical Sales also has a balanced scorecard that may be helpful that matches fairly well with this post. I’m also working on a template for me to use personally that I will include here in the future.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Compensation, Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales, Soft Skills, Terminology, Time Management, Training Tagged With: Career Growth, Compensation, Management, Roles & Responsibilities, Sales, Soft Skills, Terminology, Time Management, Training

Quick test – Are you being proactive?

November 20, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

I was going through and organizing my calendar the other day when I decided to check in with myself on my progress towards my goal of better organization. A while back I had gone through and color coded my calendar and also started documenting where I was spending my time. I knew I needed to get a better handle on where my time was going if I wanted to manage it.

If I look at where much of my time was going, most of the entries (not including the ones I went back and added) were generated by others. Since that time, most of my calendar entries are self generated. This isn’t to say I’m spending vastly more time in meetings, but that I am generating/accepting meetings from topics or agenda items that I initiated.

Seeing it from this perspective for the first time was very exciting!

From that I devised a quick test you can perform to gain the same insight.

Select a review period. A quarter works well but you can use a typical week too in a pinch.
Tally your time. This is easy with color codes but you can do it manually too. For each entry, log the length of the meeting and label it as proactive if you set the agenda (even if working with a rep/customer) . Label it reactive if someone else set the meeting and you had little or no say in the agenda. Also included in this category is any firefighting and non-scheduled activities. Yes, this includes the last minute RFP you had to drop everything for and spend 4 hours on.
Review the comparison. The more time you’re spending on the former, the more proactive you are being with your time.
Check back in.With this quick test, try performing next week, month, quarter, etc. and see if you can start moving the needle.

It’s pretty easy to think (or even assert) that you are managing your own time; it’s another to have a datapoint that can confirm your story.

If you want to get more exact and/or automate the process, you can export your calendar and use color codes to sort your time and perform calculations. Save the template you create and every quarter you can create a visual depiction of your time slices.

Filed Under: Career Growth, Time Management Tagged With: Career Growth, Time Management

Reducing Email – For SEs

April 19, 2008 By Darrin Mourer

Entering reduce email into Google results in over 15,000,000—yes, 15 Million—matches. If there is that much information available on the subject, why is it still such a ubiquitous problem, especially among sales engineers?

In my experience, most senior reps and SEs have been through at least one time management course—though most rarely spend much time on the email problem. There is a huge Getting Things Done (GTD) movement which does talk a lot about email management, but most people fail to implement recommendations it preaches.

Considering these facts, I don’t have high hopes for getting you (yes, YOU) to change your bad email habits, but I will at least share my personal tricks in case it helps even one SE.

I. Stem the tide of incoming email – You know that cute quote of the day thingie you subscribed to, get rid of it. Email alerts from PC Magazine or other subscriptions, get rid of them. You can also change the address to reflect a personal email address, but I recommend getting rid of them completely. Do not try to manage them with inbox rules. It doesn’t remove the temptation.

II. Get mandatory discussion lists out of your inbox. Use rules to help. Only review them in batches. Email digests are best. You can also use rules to send routine department announcements to a separate folder. I won’t tell you which one some of mine go to

III. Never wait for the due date. I have yet to find a system that allowed me to delay responding to an email action item that didn’t involve me screwing up from time to time. If it’s a quick task, I do it right then. If it will take longer than 5 minutes I leave it in my inbox until I get to a good stopping point from my other work. If you can’t find time to get the day’s items finished, do them first thing next morning before beginning new work. Once completed, delete or file them.

IV. At the end of each day, file or delete all email out of your inbox except for tomorrow’s action items. You want as much of a clean slate as possible every single day.

V. As for filing, this is becoming less important as search technologies get better. Google Desktop, Microsoft Desktop, and Lookout are all pretty good. Because none I’ve found to be 100% reliable, I do still file some things such as trip itineraries, frequently referenced information, and project related data. Don’t have too many folders that it makes it time consuming to organize. Simple is better than more accurate in this case for me. Do make sure you get everything out of the inbox though.

VI. Dealing with sheer volume seems to be a bigger issue for managers on up. At some level this is inevitable, but whenever I hear of folks complain (read: brag) about getting over 500 emails a day they need to respond to, my only comment is: You’re doing it (email) wrong. But that’s a different post.

Many people have success with other techniques like self imposed time limits or scheduled intervals. I would recommend leaving that as a last resort. Email, like it or not, right or wrong, is a de facto communication channel for many people. Imposing too much rigidity outside of industry norms will aggravate people.

I also have a bit of an issue with those that avoid email using the defense of “If it’s important, you should call me.” I’ll be the first to admit I am guilty of sometimes using email (or instant messaging, again, another post) when a phone call is more appropriate. The thing about phone calls is that (while more personal) are infinitely more time consuming. There is voice mail, playing phone tag, the mandatory 5 minute “how’s the weather” introduction. I have also found that most people (including myself) need a few minutes of thought to accurately respond to certain questions. Ask me a something complicated over the phone and I may have to drone on for a few minutes before I clarify my thoughts. Email allows the person to dedicate the appropriate time to answering the question and forces a tendency towards brevity and clarity.

So in summary, my recommendations are:

- Implement the basic principles (or your own adaptation) above
- Don’t impose too many rules on your colleagues. Be responsive.
- Accept that it is a de facto means of communication for many and treat it with about the same level of care as a phone call and dedicate time to the activity accordingly.

Similar to the feeling you get once you purchase a new car only to notice that seemingly every other car on the road is the same as the one you just purchased: I noticed two other posts on addressing email come across my desk.

One is from Mastering Technical Sales and the other is from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker guest posting on Unclutterer. I recommend reading both of these alongside this post. The primary reason is that there just happens to be a lot of disagreement between all 3 of us authors.

That just goes to show you that there is no one size fits all rule. Each one of us is different and thus will benefit from more from certain systems which certainly depends on your job and company culture.

Filed Under: Time Management