Chapter 2: Action Items

“Once you know where you are headed….how you assign your time – before, during, and after the sale is vital to your success” is the beginning of chapter 2.

Debbie suggests tracking the next 168 hours of your life. Everyone in the book club felt significant levels of overwhelm at that idea – everyone also believed they could easily track the next 24 hours. So we decided to do just that and meet the next day.

Discussion: Stephen Covey’s Time Matrix talks about where we spend our time and how to evaluate it. The matrix is drawn with top to bottom view of important/unimportant &  non-urgent/urgent = left to right. The number one area where people felt their time was being spent on “kind of important” activity is transferring customer conversation notes from paper into a CRM (customer relationship management system).

• Why “kind of important?” Well it is a non-pay activity that is critical to future pay activities.
• How is it “a little urgent?” If we wait to long our own notes don’t make any sense.

Here are Lynn’s Tick Tock Saving Tips

In Your Notebook:

• Contact & company name at the top of the page ALWAYS, there is nothing worse than great notes that you can’t remember who they are for!
• Draw a check box  next to any action items you need to take, that way you don’t forget something you need to do for the prospect/customer.
• Highlighter – if it is important, highlight it while you’re talking
• Circles & arrows – because your notes are added as the conversation goes on; link things together that feel like the SAME conversation points while you’re talking. Don’t believe you will remember it later, the phone will probably ring before you have time to put those thoughts together.
• Before you get off the phone, recap with the customer everything that is highlighted and/or has a check box – THEN ask if you missed anything!

When typing them into your CRM system:

• Bullet point the highlights
• Feel comfortable putting notes on different “subjects” in as separate entries vs. everything in one (timeframe, competition info, personal stuff – all can be their own entry with a meaningful subject to look for later)
• Don’t write the great American Novel – just enough that you will know what you were talking about on the next call OR someone taking your calls can follow through with.
• If you have different dates you need to get back to the customer on for different topics – create separate activities for yourself.
• If someone is buying something from someone – add an opportunity.
• Even if you don’t think it is something you can’t sell add it to your product information data base.

What do you do to make keeping track of customer information that is critical to your success easier?