As a small to medium sized business, you likely already wear a number of different hats. As a social business there are days, most days, when I feel like I must be running a haberdashery. The challenge is maintaining our focus and this challenge starts, and maybe even ends, with that same obstacle. One minute you seem to have it under control and then, in the next moment, it’s gone.
Your ability to focus is under attack!
It’s difficult to maintain focus when, as a social business, you are being bombarded not only by your customers (and potential customers) along with your attempts to engage with them but, from those who are inside your own organization as well. Being social means that your initiatives are both customer and company facing.[Tweet “One of the biggest challenges for social business is focus!”]
It’s 24/7 and it’s lightning fast regardless of where you are – There is a huge compulsion to remain connected and to be responsive. In many ways, this is expected by both our colleagues and our customers. There is also a huge difference with “being responsive” and being “stupid responsive”. If we are truly realistic, anything can wait for a day. Being hyper-connected can, in fact, be counter-productive.
You are feeling overwhelmed – In fact, you are so overwhelmed that you either become paralyzed or you choose to ignore certain things out of pure necessity. The problem is, you may inadvertently ignore important opportunities.
Email is clogging your inbox – How do you address this issue? Do you ignore or delete emails while telling yourself … “If it’s important. they will email me again”? What makes you believe that you won’t repeat this cycle with that next important email from that same party? Now add social messaging and SMS to the list. While I don’t think that email will be going anywhere soon, many of my contacts actually prefer, and are more responsive to, messaging via text or via one or more of the social platforms. How are you addressing these multiple channels?
Watch out for shiny bauble syndrome – Are you always looking for the BBD (bigger, better deal)? Are you afraid that you might miss out on the next truly great thing? If I had a nickel for every app that I have looked at, and then quickly abandoned, over that past five or six years, right now I’d be living on a tropical island and sipping umbrella drinks.
What can we do about it?
While it might be more challenging for a social business to maintain focus, this goal is certainly attainable. You will need to learn to work a wee bit smarter in order to stay within your 24/7 limitations but, who wants to work 24/7 anyway?
Where and who are your clients? – Go where they go and develop buyer personas in order to help you to identify them. For example, my clients generally are not found on Facebook. Can you guess who else is not an active Facebook user? Me. The point is that you do not need to be active on every social network. You only need to be active (should be active) on those that provide you with some sort of a return. If your target market does not frequent network “x”, and you are devoting your energies to this network, what type of ROI are you expecting?
Don’t attempt to be everything to everybody – Trying to do too much and be everything to everybody not only dilutes your brand, it makes you nothing to nobody. Own your market. Simplify! Be a master at one, not a jack of all trades. People want to work with experts in their fields, not generalists. Lean and mean, smaller and focused, trumps trying to do it all.
Have a plan and work it – Keep a to-do list and review it daily. Some people, like me, prefer paper. Others might use tools like Evernote or Wunderlist to keep them organized and on-track. As added benefits, both of these applications allow for sharing and collaboration.
Mornings, evenings, and weekends are great times to review your plans for the day or the coming days. These are what many salespeople call non-selling hours (we can’t be in front of customers). Many more people will designate times to work on a specific project uninterrupted or will schedule two or three twenty minute slots per day to review and respond to messages and social network engagements. What your plan is is far less important than at least having one so … have one and work it.
Learn to prioritize – You need to be able to prioritize and identify that which is and is not important and then ditch those time and dollar suckers that are not. Why do we keep repeating that which clearly does not work? If you are me, you are “giving it more time”. Hey, good things generally take time and persistence is one of the keys to success but, at some point, enough is enough.
If you are not sure what is and is not working, look at the analytics. Most social networks will provide you with some level of these services as will marketing automation and standalone packages like Google Analytics for web page visits and activity. IBM’s Watson Analytics will do the same thing for your raw sales, support, marketing, and other data.
I did webinars and could not make them pay. Are these money makers for some people? Absolutely and probably for a lot of folks but, I’m not other people and your success has no effect on my bottom line so … they’re out of here. I’ll probably never play in the NHL either. What other things are proven winners? How about investing in you and in your company via education and improvements to your tools and infrastructure?
Make use of lists, groups, and tags – If you or your business are active on social media, the sheer volume of information and connections will rapidly wheel out of control. If you want to cut through the noise, filter out the chaff, and get down to the wheat … you can either cull the herd or get them into manageable segments. Every major social network will allow you to do this in one way or another (Twitter and Facebook Lists, Google+ Circles, LinkedIn Tags) and you will then be able to focus on those who are the most important to you.
Get yourself a good CRM – Particularly if you are in any sales or marketing related position, how you can even survive without a CRM is unfathomable to me. It’s not like the investment will break your bank. Micro and solo business applications start out at FREE and quality solutions for small to medium size businesses are available all day for under $50 per user per month.
Focus on organization and collaboration – Organization is massively important as is collaboration. Instead of emailing documents back and forth and waiting for response, use tools like Evernote and Google Drive to share and collaborate with your team members as well as important folks from outside your immediate company (vendors, customers, etc.). Skype and Google+ Hangouts will allow you to facilitate virtual meetings on a moment’s notice.
Turn the tables on email – You need to manage your email instead of it abusing you. I’ve read a number of articles that will be in total disagreement of my personal methods but, I handle emails as they arrive. My inbox is always clean, I never miss an important message, and my response rate to my clients is extremely high. If you would like to see how your email habits stack up, check out Conspire.
Email management is probably the holy grail of social apps with dozens of platforms and add-ons that are competing for your business. Inbox by Google and Verse by IBM are two of the latest players and two who are approaching this task from new, and different, angles. Use Unroll.me to unsubscribe to automated mailings and/or to take those that you select and to roll them up into one daily digest.
Make mobile productive, not a distraction – Mobile notifications are perhaps the largest distraction of them all. I’m honest enough with myself to recognize that a mobile notification for me is like a bell was to Pavlov’s dogs. You have to respond so … remove the triggers that initiate that reaction.
However, taking advantage of mobile technologies does have a huge upside. For me, mobile allows me to perform a lot of my mundane tasks during breaks in the action. If you are someone who does a lot of travel, think of the time spent in airports and hotel rooms. Having access to critical information and the ability to stay productive is a must when you are on the road.
If you are a multitasker, do so wisely – I personally do not find frantic multitasking to be productive (multitasking = lack of focus) but, please don’t tell me that you are doing this while you fiddle with your phone during our meetings. I don’t really care, you are demonstrating my lack of value to you and, as such, you will not be earning my business. Mind you, multitasking can be a valuable skill as long as you know how and when to deploy it which means that you will turn your phone off during any meeting. At least the ones that you have with me.
Decompress and assess – I generally take the last two weeks of each year to slow it down, reflect on the past year, and explore my options for improvement in the coming year. This year was no different. The clarity that you can attain is outstanding!
Lessons from the past
Starting my career as an outside salesperson, we didn’t have cell phones, we had pay phones. This meant that we had to drop a quarter two to three times per day to call the office and check on messages. Despite this overwhelming burden, somehow we still managed to conduct business.
We held meetings with clients while never having to worry that the phone might ring or that an important email might arrive. Nobody sent us a friend request on Facebook or posted an extremely funny YouTube video via Twitter. We were focused on the customer and on the task that was at hand.
We used shoebox tickler files to ensure that we got back with the customer when we needed to and on a regular basis. We didn’t have computers back then but, our paper-based systems worked and they worked well. Our whiteboards displayed sold and billed business by sales rep.
Things were simpler back then and, while we can’t, nor should we, return to the past … simple still works. What are you doing to simplify your business model and how is that going?
Craig M. Jamieson
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