Maximizing your Return on Time

Came across this video in one of my LinkedIn groups and it brought to mind a number of concepts I’ve been thinking about lately about the nature of time and business.

Your time as capital

There are businesses that have plenty of funding and businesses that are bootstrapping their efforts, but there is a common denominator to all of them. They all have 24 hours in a day to get their job done.

The increasing rate of technological progress has made jobs across all departments much easier, but the nature of sales as a person to person communication makes the time required indivisible when it comes to person to person interaction. Yet still, there are firms out there that still have legions to cold callers phoning 40 hours a week on shaky leads. A serious waste of man-hours in 2011.

Your customer’s time as capital

Your customers have a finite amount of time today as well, and nowhere is this more true than in the current B2B climate. Wasting time bombarding customers with information they already have or have no need for is a loss for them, a loss in the salesman’s time, and a loss of customer good will.

Optimizing inbound leads with analytics

In order to maximize the time you pay your sales force for, and the time out of your customers busy schedules, you need to figure out what message you need to convey to them BEFORE you start calling. How is this possible? You’re a savvy business blog reader. Your business is online and you have an inbound lead system. But how are you using it?

Analytics are critical in order to personalize your sales message for a customer. The more you know about what content they have viewed, the less time is wasted reiterating information they already have. You can focus on cutting to the chase on parts of your value proposition they are unaware about. But it’s impossible to do this without a proper, objective method for analyzing their interaction with content.

Through video, you can tell exactly how much of the message was viewed, and since all users process video at the same rate, it’s a precise measure of what part of your message got across. We made this a priority when designing the flimp platform, and many of our clients have used it to great success.

How have you increased the return on time for your sales force? Let us know in the comments.