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Preparing Your Emergency Sales Plan: What If You Couldn’t Work for 30 Days?

Posted: 08 Feb 2020 10:22 AM PST

What if you weren’t able to work for 30 days? Do you have an emergency sales plan? Thankfully, I did. My husband tore his Achilles tendon. What was first diagnosed as an injury that could be fixed with physical therapy turned into one requiring surgery and one month of not being able to put any weight on his ankle.

Think about all you do with both feet. Now think about how dificult your mobility would be if you only had the use of one foot. Falling, for one, would be a real issue. So, in my husband’s situation, I had the choice of either hiring a nurse or becoming one—I chose the latter. Because I couldn't work for 30 days, I had to implement my emergency sales plan. Luckily, I was prepared beforehand.

Here are three important things to consider when developing your own plan:

1. Familiarize yourself with technology tools

After your ability to work stops is not the time to starting embracing technology solutions. You had better be ready to implement technology tools when your time and abilities are limited.

I had meetings scheduled before my work situation changed, so I changed those my meetings to Webex meetings. When I myself had a hand injury and was unable to type on my laptop, I learned how to use voice recognition software. Android and iOS have excellent voice recognition software built in. Learn how to use these kinds of tools now, before you need them. You don’t want to be learning the technology on a day you’re feeling overwhelmed giving care or in a brain fog. Learn the technology now.

No matter where you are stuck working, remember that your phone is an excellent sales tool. You can easily pick up the phone to call customers and prospects instead of arranging face-to-face sales meetings. When you call your customer, explain the situation you're in, and you may even end up learning more about your prospects and customers on the phone than you would during a typical sales call.

Let's be clear here: it's not your job to sacrifice your personal recovery for your customers. But if you are able to continue working during this period and explain your situation to customers, the empathy they feel for you could strengthen your business relationship (and might even translate into more sales). The fact that you took the time while caregiving or during recovery time to call your customers demonstrates your personal concern for them.

2. Prioritize what’s most important

You've heard the expression "First things first." However, when your time and your abilities are limited, your new expression should be "First things only." Other less critical tasks can wait until your schedule is back to normal; now is the time to go over your to-do list and determine what is and isn’t essential.

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Do you have any reports with firm deadlines? Are there tasks that others are depending on you to get done for them? The way to determine whether a task is critical or not is to think about what would happen if you didn't do anything for a few weeks. Would anything serious happen? If not, you can forget about that task for the time being—it's simply not that critical.

When you’re out of the office during this time period, your only job is to make sure that the most essential and critical selling tasks are taken care of. You will be better able to evaluate which tasks are critical if you can think clearly and have the time to make thoughtful decisions.

3. Learn how to better delegate your work

You must learn how to delegate critical tasks. Think now about which people you could delegate certain tasks to. You may even want to discuss these kinds of back-up plans with those people now.

Be specific when you ask for help. You are more likely to receive it when the person you’re asking for assistance clearly understands what is expected of them. But you might get pushback, which is why now is the time to find out if they would be willing to help you should you need it later.

Having an emergency sales plan gives peace of mind

Being kept away from your normal sales routine can be a big disappointment for many high-energy sales professionals. Disappointment, however, will not serve you well as a caregiver or as a recovering patient, so banish the “woe is me” attitude. You will have peace of mind if you have an emergency sales plan ready to go.

You may also end up finding out your that your business flourishes with the help of others. And it would be wonderful to learn that people value you just as much as they value your products or services.

RELATED: 10 Ways to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly While You're on Vacation

The post Preparing Your Emergency Sales Plan: What If You Couldn't Work for 30 Days? appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Maura Schreier-Fleming. Copyright 2020 by AllBusiness.com. All rights reserved. The content and images contained in this RSS feed may only be used through an RSS reader and may not be reproduced on another website without the express written permission of the owner of AllBusiness.com.

How Busy Are You, Really? Here Are 5 Ways to Find Out

Posted: 08 Feb 2020 09:21 AM PST

Are you busy, or just busy bragging?

You might feel personally attacked by this question, but it's a legitimate one—and one that's been on minds of most bosses in all industries, especially in the past couple of decades. According to one study of 10,000 adults across 28 different countries, 42% of adults admit to habitually overstating how busy they are, with 60% believing their peers overstate their levels of busyness. Given that this is a self-reported survey, we can probably assume those numbers are even higher.

Why might you exaggerate how busy you are? There's a chance you could get out of doing work if your boss already thinks your schedule is full, but in most cases, it's due to competitive pressures. Being busy is something of a status symbol; claiming you're busy makes you seem more diligent than your peers, and makes you seem more indispensable.

So, what can you do to find out how busy you really are?

1. Use a time-tracking tool

First, try to get a relative gauge of how busy you are by using a time-tracking tool. There's a chance you've succumbed to the temptation of busy bragging, and you might have convinced yourself you have more responsibilities than you actually do. Start by using a time-tracking app such as Toggl or RescueTime to track your activity throughout the day. You can also ask your peers about things like how many hours they spend working each week, how many projects they're handling, and what their expectations are.

2. Compare your past and present responsibilities

Pretend like you're writing a job description. Take inventory of all the current responsibilities you handle, and approximately how much of your time those responsibilities eat up. Get yourself fully familiar with how your role has evolved, as well as the sum total of all the tasks and responsibilities you handle on a regular basis. To get a perspective on how your responsibilities have changed over time, compare this list of responsibilities to the job description for the position you originally filled, the job description of one of your peers, or the responsibilities you had when you first started your business.

3. Measure your email activity

Email is a strong indicator of how busy you are, and for several reasons. First, email takes time out of your day, so the more emails you're sending and receiving, the busier you are (in general). Second, for many modern jobs, almost everything you do is tied to email in some way, whether you're sending and receiving emails about a new project or reaching out to a team member for an update. Perhaps most important, email is unalterable; you can't claim to have sent 200 emails in a day unless you have the records to back it up. Check out this list of Gmail extensions that will help you measure and improve your productivity.

4. Track your time in meetings and scheduled events

You probably keep a detailed record of your work schedule, including formal events and meetings, which take up hours of your time—and meetings probably take up more of your time than you or your boss realize. According to a ReadyTalk infographic, employees spend about a third of their total time in meetings. This can help you drive home just how many hours you're spending in the office—and where those hours are being spent.

5. Measure your achievements

Finally, consider estimating your busyness in terms of the results you're able to achieve, since actual achievements are the real bottom line. This is going to vary based on your industry and position, but may include things like sales, leads generated, traffic increased, bugs fixed, or articles written. Even if you can't prove that you're spending more time than the average worker, you can prove that you're worth more than the average worker. You can measure your results using one of the productivity-tracking tools on the market.

Having the evidence to support how busy you are is important, but so is the way you present that evidence to your boss. Use these tips to determine key takeaways and goals beforehand, and frame your conversation in the context of action items and suggestions.

For example, you might show how much of your time is consumed by meetings, and suggest that these meetings be shortened (or, in some cases, canceled altogether). Or, if you're proud of how busy you are, you could position this as an opportunity to delegate more responsibilities, ask for a raise, or ask for a new title to reflect the significance of your new workload. This is your chance to make something meaningful happen, so take it.

The post How Busy Are You, Really? Here Are 5 Ways to Find Out appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Jayson DeMers. Copyright 2020 by AllBusiness.com. All rights reserved. The content and images contained in this RSS feed may only be used through an RSS reader and may not be reproduced on another website without the express written permission of the owner of AllBusiness.com.
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