The Core

No kidding, this is absolutely, without-a-doubt, the best piece of people management advice I was ever given.  It has saved me untold amounts of time and agony. Best of all, you come out being the good guy.

I've named the tactic "The Lynsky" after P. Lynsky who was my regional manager for Burroughs back when I sold computer mainframes door-to-door.

I was doing great in sales (200% quota YTD) and Lynsky started mentoring me directly, rather than working through the local zone manager.  He  knew that I was getting bogged down in installations. Hell, things would be so much faster if I could just drop off the computer and wave goodbye. Lynsky, of course, just wanted me back out selling.  But salesmen were responsible for the installation and training, even some of the coding. The problem wasn't so much the basic hardware and programs, mostly it was in all the custom reports that the client wanted/needed once we got it past the initial install and they could see what else the package needed.  I was coding a crapload of extra reports to make the customer happy and it was sucking up my time.

So Lynsky calls me into his office: "Just give them something to do FIRST, just a little something,  anything. It doesn't have to be hard to do or beyond their capabilities. Then have them call you to do the next step once they've finished their task."

Since reports were what was killing me, I started asking for the client to just lay out the column headers.  Nothing fancy, just take a scrap piece of greenbar and rule off some columns and pencil in a header.  All of a sudden, the need for these reports which the client HAD-TO-HAVE RIGHT AWAY or he'd go out of business tomorrow dried up.

I'll reply yes or no. If yes, we'll proceed through escrow.com

Did you read my last email?

You will make me an offer. I will accept or reject. The only communication you need to send me is a number. Any other communication will be ignored