Best Practices for Your Team
The following list of Best Practices is a guideline to get your employees organized and in the right direction. We invite you to use these ideas with your staff, elaborate on them, and expand them as needed.
- Pay attention to details. Always return phone calls, spell properly in client communications, pass on messages, clear all problems to the client’s satisfaction, keep your paperwork and computer files orderly, discuss timely opportunities/concerns with others, keep updated to-do lists and manage specified responsibilities. If a client or prospect requires information then make sure the fax or email that you sent to them has a clean, professional cover letter on it. Ensure the cover letter has the correct spelling of the client’s name and his regular phone number, so you can follow up on his needs and verify the successful receipt of the communication.
- Offices should be clean and orderly, and you should encourage random and scheduled client visits. Everything should have a prescribed home: paperwork, disks, cables, shared hard drive files. Every teammate requires easy access to whatever resources they need.
- Be patient and polite to all clients and prospects but move to quality conclusions quickly. Ideas must become realities quickly. No entrenched ideas or positions should hold you back—be open to new and better ways of operating.
- Be entirely customer-focused; be committed to providing the best solutions for your clients’ needs without sacrificing the bottom line. Constantly communicate with existing and prospective clients regarding many services and issues. Staff from multiple departments should make calls to clients to “check-in” on their satisfaction and offer additional service. Talk and meet with clients more often and study their needs.
- 85% of your time should be spent doing projects, sales, and customer service. The remaining 15% should be improving customer service to enable more sales while offering your present clients with better value.
- Employees should have the feeling that their organization is superior to competitors, so they can happily express that to others. In any area where a person doesn’t believe this to be the case, he should take action to change it and discuss it with others at departmental meetings.
- Read and share relevant articles and books on your specialty; study the official, technical specifications guiding the details of your industry; learn from other employees; try new products; apply and achieve mastery of the freshest technologies; and make learning a treasured component of each position.
- Push your sales and marketing program hard so you can
i. remain at the top of your business peer group,
ii. defy remaining naysayers,
iii. gain market share,
iv. do more stuff as a group: like parties, dinners, and trade shows,
v. buy new stuff,
vi. get raises and bonuses,
vii. take more training courses.
