CoreConnex | Business Systems for IT Service Companies

1. Avoid getting caught up in work that is not a priority defined by your clients

The urge to ‘do things the right way’ often times interferes with ‘doing the right things’ for your clients. This subtle way of looking at prioritizing work with clients can save you from wasting time on work that may not be an actual priority for your clients.

Understanding your clients’ priorities often allows you to trade higher priorities for lower ones - contrary to what clients tell you, not all priorities are high. You can help your clients make a decision on which priorities they want you to address first. A general way for you to approach having your clients categorize their priorities is to have them give you basic priority scores for the various work items you both have identified as needing to get completed.

• Complete first - highest business priority
• Complete next - secondary priority
• Complete if time permits - not a critical priority, but needs doing at some point
• Could live without - a low priority, but let’s not forget about this

Managing priorities this way helps you and your client maintain a level of expectation about what is going to get done for them. It also gives you permission not to complete some work items right away which helps free up time you may have otherwise spent on lower priority items that could have waited until later.

This easy, but effective client management technique helps you set expectations and agreement with clients that some business priorities take precedence over others and is a powerful way to develop a relationship focused on client business priorities, but can also save you from wasting time (money) on items that could actually wait until later to be addressed.

2. Create a personal system to categorize your time by key functional areas of your responsibility

Email, texting and phone calls can suck up an entire day without ever resulting in accomplishment of necessary work. Resist the urge to respond to everyone as soon as communications come in. An easy way to help you remember what your priorities are is to break down your time into categories so you can prioritize your time on items that are absolutely essential to making or saving money.

Pre-scheduling important priorities allows you to reserve time for that particular work and measure whether you are spending enough time on items you have defined as priority for yourself. Some examples of categories you might give your time might be.

• Client account management
• Executive management
• Administrative
• Sales execution
• Sales management
• Personal
• Marketing execution

Then, break down these categories by the percentage of time you should be spending on each. This lets you check yourself to see if you are staying true to your time management discipline.

If you find yourself always rebalancing your schedule one of two things is happening. 1) The categories you have labeled as priorities are not really high enough priorities for you to make time for or 2) you are not setting clear expectations with yourself or others who work with you (including clients) about how important your time is.

Your time is valuable - make certain you are spending it on your highest priorities; otherwise it might not be worth doing.

3. Avoid getting sucked into work because you feel the urge to be productive

Projects that are interesting and help solve a problem, ‘fix’ something or give you more information may not be the project you need to be working on right now. Always know your goals for why you or your employees are completing projects and how they are helping you achieve a stated milestone.

For example, let’s say one of your major business milestones is to understand how your clients perceive your service offerings and level of service. To do this you have decided to measure your existing clients’ satisfaction level on the services you provide. This means you will need to send them a scorecard to rank their level of satisfaction on priorities and how well you have been delivering on those priorities.

If you find yourself creating a pivot table to see what type of work your engineers have performed over the last 3 months and how much time they have spent at each client, you may be focusing on a project that while great for understanding how much work has gone on at that client over the last three months; it is taking up time and not helping you get to your end goal of finding out what your clients are really thinking about your service offerings and level of service.

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CoreConnex specializes in professional services automation (PSA) software for VARs, MSPs, channel distribution partners, IT service providers and other professional service companies. We encourage you to share experiences and perspectives as players in this professional community. This blog is moderated. Comments that are unprofessional or derogatory will not be posted.