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Slightly off center from your question, but: 1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's,
by howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
Slightly off center from your question, but:
1. Every Wednesday I Google Meet with my salespeople. We review the prior week's priority prospects, this week's, and then I ask them about clients not on the list that our BI system has identified as promising. An integration of internal systems, Slack & Zapier alerts me each day to anomalies (good and bad) with clients, inventory and systems. MixMax (shout out to Brad!) is a big help in tracking email activity. RingCentral reporting is a big help in validating Salesperson activity.
2. Every Friday I review Github repository activity for my development teams. A very soft-touch and collaborative conversation follows for developers and engineers whose pace of work or direction seems off. This is almost always a result of improper scoping, unrealistic milestones, or miscommunication.
3. Every Monday and Tuesday I'm hands-on with my marketing team preparing for the Wednesday release of our marketing communications, and reviewing ongoing advertising campaign results.
4. Every weekday I'm in our Xero accounting software looking at cash flow projections, inventory, A/P and A/R. Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations that make is easier to use for real-time reporting.
5. I visit our satellite facility every other week for in-person chats with that team.
6. I've invested a lot in automation to track our market, predict conditions and generate alerts.
Notwithstanding 1-6 above, there's no substitute for good market conditions and good employees. I have the latter, but not the former. I mention this just in-case you're thinking you can systematize your way out of a demand vacuum.
- edpichler 6y agoHow big is your company?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoIn the seven figures in sales. Assuming we survive the current volatility.
- pryelluw 6y agoI wonder how much you pay your sales people based on the last paragraph.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoWe're on par with our market and offer benefits our competitors do not.
- sandGorgon 6y agoWhat kind of anomalies do you track on clients and inventories ?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoClient interaction with proposals. Client interaction with website. Client follow-through on 'promises' --> sales methodology we employ.
- sandGorgon 6y agoVery interesting. That is predicated on sales people updating some "status" right ? You could have a very deep sales methodology. Just curious if that's how you do it
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoPartially on status update and partially on indicators of interest (behavior) that we track. Yes, for a company our size we're ridiculously sophisticated.
- elwell 6y ago> I review Github repository activity for my development teams Would be interested to hear more details about your thoughts on this. Do you look at # of commits, lines added/subtracted?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y ago1. Conversation around issues. I look for engagement with other devs, suggestions, solutions. 2. Commits over 2-4 weeks. I expect commit gaps that can last up to 2 weeks given some of the problems and constraints unique to us.
- sails 6y ago> Xero is hot garbage IMHO, but I've built some integrations Curious to understand more about these? I've been doing a bit of exploring in the analytics space here, and would love to know where you found the available apps falling short.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoIn short, cash flow is everything. There's no reason a user should have to even login to Xero to see their cash positions.
- darcys22 6y agoThe financial cloud apps control your financial database and therefore your ability to perform analytics on them. Open source allows you to actually plug in and make dashboards. It took me 20 mins to build a monthly revenue dashboard in metabase that updates live and you cant do that natively with Xero. https://youtu.be/PeQR7GseFQI https://youtu.be/PeQR7GseFQI
- technics256 6y agoHow does your BI system identify them as promising? Is this via company metrics already inserted into your CRM or maybe something organically gathered?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoCustomer behavior. The customer's conduct determines everything. "Wishful thinking" is the enemy of results.
- jerp 6y agoHi this is really interesting. Can you go into any detail on how you achieve 6 please? LinkedIn Scrapers and such?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoWe ingest data from various sources, some scraped and some from available feeds. Over time, some of that data we observe to be predictive. It informs cash flow decisions for next two weeks, and it isn't perfect. But, its reliable enough that it determines officer salaries and some investment decisions.
- forgotthepasswd 6y agoOT: Hello howmayiannoyyou, can I by any chance interview you for 10 min for feedback on a product I'm building? It looks to me that it fits part of the workflow you mentioned, and it would be useful to hear your perspective. My email is on my profile. Thanks!
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoPossibly. Email in my profile.
- forgotthepasswd 6y agoThanks! I couldn't find it on your profile. Here's mine: forgot.hn@outlook.com Some anonymous email exchanges would do, if you'd prefer that way.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agodirector@industrialintel.co
- forgotthepasswd 6y agoThanks again! Sent you a message, feel free to remove your email address from here.
- statictype 6y agoAre you the owner of the company? I'm curious about how you effectively context-switch between sales and code reviews and marketing. Do all of them report to you?
- howmayiannoyyou 6y agoYes. All report to me. Rapid context switching is taxing and something I try to avoid. Some folks are better at switching than others and I guess I am one of those people. I do try to separate contexts by day or portion of day. I also have many years of experience with all this, so decision-making carries a low cognitive load for most problems.