Apr 26, 2011 11:42 AM
A colleague called me the other day for some advice on productivity. He was going to be doing some training for a client who wanted a short segment on time management.
I asked him to tell me about their problem.
He told me his client has a team of sales professionals who are frustrated with having to do a lot of paper work, but it has to get done. They want to know how they can be better or more productive at the paper work.
I asked him how much money they make while filling out the paper work. He said, "Nothing. But it's part of the process and has to be done."
"Can or will the company hire a person to fill out the paper work for them?"
"No."
"I'm imagining that the sales professionals are on commission and earn their money when they're sitting in front of prospects, toe-to-toe, giving presentations. Am I correct?"
"Yes."
"Then the best use of their time that would make the company and themselves the most amount of money in the least amount of time would be to spend as much of their time giving presentations (or making appointments to give presentations) and have someone else fill out paper work. Is this correct?"
"Yes."
"Then, even if the company won't hire someone to help with the necessary 'non-income generating' administrative work, and because the sales professionals make money on a commission (percentage of sales), why not have 2 or 3 sales people hire and train one full-time employee on their own to help with their paper work?"
There was a short pause and then I heard the "ah ha" moment over the phone. He said that would be very entrepreneurial of the sales people, like a sub-venture within the company. And once the company sees the benefit of doing this, they may incorporate the strategy and pay for the employee(s) throughout the company so that everybody wins.
Another idea occurred to me. Whether or not the company uses a data base to enter the data collected on the paper work, why not create and use a secure online data base application solution? This will drastically reduce redundancy.
Make sure all sales people have wireless internet access for their laptop or iPad. Then, during the sales process, the sales person could input the data collected from the prospect or customer directly into the main data base via the secure online application solution.
Then, all the sales people would have to do is print the forms and have the customer sign them (if necessary).
If you're doing a presentation in a restaurant or coffee shop, you could get a portable printer and keep it in your car.
If you're in the customer's office, you could 1) go to your car and print them out, or 2) save/print the forms you want to print to a PDF file, save the PDF file to a thumb or stick drive, put the thumb or stick drive in the customer's computer, open the PDF file on the customer's computer and print the PDF using the customer's printer.
When the sales person gets back to the office, the paper work is already filled out and stored in the main data base and he has the necessary signed paper work in hand.
If the company doesn't have an online solution or isn't willing to create one for you, you still have options. You could do it yourself.
You don't have to know anything about creating online applications. There is no shortage of affordable, qualified programmers out there. Just post the online application/solution you want created on elance.com or odesk.com and you'll get plenty programmers bidding on it.
Once you've created the application and it is fully functioning and relatively bug-free, you could show your company the benefits of using it and then lease the solution to them or sell it to them outright for a profit.
Just because a company or someone says it/they won't or can't help you, don't buy into their limitations. Think different. Know your outcome/intention and keep asking, "How CAN this work so everyone can win?"
By David Humes, is the founder of 'Black Belt' Productivity Training
