Business | Cloud Productivity

7 Tips To Cut Your Meeting Times In Half

How many meetings do you have in a week, or even in a day? If you’re like most people, you are probably involved in two or three meetings per day. Each one taking around one to two hours of your time. How much time in each of these meetings do you think is spent on the details, on what the meeting was called for in the first place? Not much, maybe twenty to thirty minutes! So what happens to the rest of the time? Firstly, a meeting rarely starts on time, so there’s about 10 minutes lost. There’s the introductions and laid back chit-chat at the beginning that might last for 10 to 15 minutes. Sidetracks and tangents happen about 5 or 6 times per meeting and can last a few minutes each (or take over the meeting if you’re not careful). Banter and jokes to make sure people are still paying attention takes up more time. And finally, there’s the thank-you’s and good bye’s at the end that might take another 5 to 10 minutes. In the time that’s left, you have to power through as much content and questions as you had originally planned for the full time the meeting was scheduled for. Oh, and let’s not forget how long your travel time to and from the meeting takes. That’s a huge consideration. If you have to go out for a meeting that’s scheduled for say two hours, you should probably block out at least four hours in your calendar right away – your travel time will be about an hour either side to be safe! It all seems like so much wasted time! Here are seven tips to help you cut your meeting times in half and be more productive!

Coffee. The Backbone of Business and Personal Productivity

Business, Productivity3 Comments

There are thousands of articles out there on the internet that tell you that if you want to be more productive in your workplace you should stop drinking coffee and drink more water. I’m here to tell you that is wrong. Incorrect. Rubbish.

Coffee, whether you like it or not, keeps economies, businesses and individuals going. It is the fuel for our minds, our creativity and ingenuity. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It helps you get more done, in less time. Fact.

Here’s how…

The Wunderkit Release Strategy

Business, Technology6 Comments

6Wunderkinder is the software development company behind the incredibly popular Wunderlist. 6Wunderkinder started to make themselves known at the end of 2010 by launching Wunderlist.

Wunderlist is a task management application that works on almost every device! There’s a web version, iPad/iPhone and Mac version, Android version, Windows version and even a linux version. There are two devices that are missing from this list – Blackberry and Windows Phone. Wunderlist was initially released on Windows, Mac and iPhone and it’s popularity grew phenomenally quickly. This was largely because:

It’s free
It looks amazing
It keeps things simple

It also helped that no matter what device you were using, your tasks were always in sync. Wunderlist sync’s tasks up to the cloud and then keeps your other devices up to date seamlessly.

Google Docs Makes Collaboration Easy with the Cloud

Business, Productivity, TechnologyLeave a comment

Recently, a group of my colleagues was given the task of compiling a document. The problem was that there was only ten hours to do it in.

The document was an RFP so there were a number of questions that needed responses. Normally, for this task to get done, the team would need to first assess which questions each person would answer. Then, each would head off on their own and try their best to complete each of them. Later, one lucky person would have the added task of copying and pasting all the responses into a single master document, ensuring that each answer wasn’t replicated somewhere else in a slightly different way.

That just wasn’t going to cut it. There are far too many problem with this traditional approach. Not only is there too much time and energy spent assessing and dividing the questions at the beginning, but the logistics of it meant that it really wouldn’t take long at all for the documents to become out of sync – especially if one person sent through a couple of revisions for a question. It also means that the response are less of a collaboration, instead being a set of distinct blocks of text that don’t have any flow.

CRM is Business Strategy, Not Technology

Business, Technology4 Comments

In my years working for the SugarCRM Partner, InsightfulCRM, I continually got the impression that customers and prospects were in the market for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system because they’d heard the term CRM thrown around and believed a CRM system would help their business. Also, people believed that CRM was a piece of software that was managed by IT and was a burden to use. This is not the case.

What is CRM?

CRM is best understood by looking at the full expanded version of the term. Customer Relationship Management. As a business, we care about customers, prospects and partners, so let’s remove the term ‘Customer’. CRM now becomes simply Relationship Management. Nowhere do we mention “software”, “system” or even “technology”. Relationship Management is about effectively engaging, and tracking the relationships you have with you customers, prospects and partners. What does this mean? In it’s most basic form, you do not need technology to perform effective Relationship Management. Sure, there is technology around that helps make it a bit easier to keep track of and manage these people, but such technology is not essential.

Do ERM, not CRM

Effective Relationship Management (hmm… ERM…. that’s got a nice ring to it) is the way in which an individual tracks and manages their relationships. This can easily translate beyond the realm of business and into our personal lives. And it already has! Your email, address book, social media such as facebook and LinkedIn, are all different methods of ERM. While these systems are indeed technology, I want to stress three points:

None of them are labelled as a “CRM system”
They each serve a separate and unique purpose, but we all use more than one
We would be able to perform ERM without them!

Why Going to Tender is a Waste of Time

Business1 Comment

Tenders are a waste of time, effort, and money. There, I’ve said it. Every business I’ve been involved with when selling a product turns tenders away (unless there has been involvement prior to the tender being released). Why?

What is a Tender?
A “tender” is a a process by which a company that is going to market in order to find a solution to a business challenge or to assist in growing the business, asks a number of vendors to submit multiple pieces of documentation in order to compare, contrast and eventually select and implement a solution presented by one vendor.

The process starts with the company performing internal requirements analysis. Typically, the tender process is championed by one internal stakeholder who then asks each department that will be involved in using the end solution to submit a list of desired functionality. This internal stakeholder then compiles these responses into one document and often a spreadsheet, the latter being kept internal for the process of later comparison. The document itself is normally a set of questions in the nature of “Can your system perform X? What is the process to perform Y?” etc. These questions are aimed at covering off each of the desired pieces of functionality that the departments involved have requested. The resulting document is then either issued on a website and available for any vendor to respond to, or the champion handpicks a few vendors to participate in the tender.

Each vendor must then compile a response document answering each of the questions (there could be dozens and dozens) in as much detail as possible, including use cases, screenshots, and anything else they feel would help win the business. The vendors then submit these responses back to prospective client. The client reviews (this is a problem in itself), updates their internal comparison spreadsheet and more often than not, a few shortlisted vendors make the next step of meeting with the prospect to discuss moving forward.