Making a Daily Plan – Is It Worth It?

It’s easy to get distracted when working from home. Aside from calendared meetings that are difficult to change, requests from housemates, doorbells that demand answering, and the endless emails and texts that arrive all clamor for your attention, time, and a fraction of your working day. So how do you stay on course? Consider a daily work plan.

Many years ago, I had occasion to see a video by productivity legend Steven Covey.  In it he demonstrated conclusively why only by planning your work can you ensure that the most important or complex tasks and deliverables are completed on time.

I’ve always advised people to create their daily plan the day before, usually before shutting down for the day. Adding breaks, and plenty of time for what Covey calls, “the big rocks” (your top priorities for the day) helps to clear the decks and avoid missed deadlines. Alternatively, some people like to set aside 10 minutes first thing in the morning to plan – if they can ignore the phone long enough to get it done.

When planning, even when forced to work away from the office, it’s important to use a modality that is comfortable and consistent with your preferred working style. For example, some of us like to use traditional paper planners (like Franklin Planner) or simple lists, while others prefer electronic tools. It’s possible to use Outlook as a planning tool with readily available software overlays, or you could choose to use a more comprehensive planning tool that encompasses not only work activities, but the activities of daily life .

Whichever solution works best for you, be sure to be on the lookout for those “time wasters” that can wreck any plan. I have found the “start time delay” to be the biggest problem for me personally. There is always something to deal with before starting the workday, and frequently it leads to another task that just “must” get cleared. Excessive travel between appointments can also run out the clock, although with the growth of Zoom and Skype meetings, this time waster is less common.  

Finally, don’t overschedule. Allow for downtime during the day, a reasonable gap between meetings, and a heavy “think” session. Increase the number of scheduled tasks and meetings to your daily plan only after you’ve had success with a less aggressive schedule.

By following these simple steps, you will get increasingly adept at meeting daily objectives and higher lever goals. 

 

Emergency Health Care Advocate Service – a growing need filled by a newly launched service

I’ve always felt that service developers and deliverers can be the most creative marketing people in business. As a group, they are remarkably adept at recognizing market needs and creating and launching services to meet those needs.

Last year when my mother was taken to the ER by ambulance, the facility where she lived, which was about 40 miles away from me, did not notify me. The first I heard of it was when the ER called and said, “Your mother has been brought in for treatment, and she‘s upset and asking for you. Can you give us a little medical history?” As I left an appointment to drive to the hospital, I remember thinking, “I wish she had someone with her to calm her and make sure that she gets the attention and treatment she needs in that busy ER.” 

Fortunately for my mother, when I arrived an hour later, all was well. But what if she’d had no nearby family? 

In fact, today many elderly people live on their own and far from family members and cannot count on friends, who also tend to be elderly, for help in a crisis.  Since Janis Carney is an attorney specializing in elder care, she was well aware of this dilemma, which, with an aging population, will only grow greater. In 2013, she created a company, EASE Plan Inc., to provide 24/7 patient advocacy for elderly patients in the ER. Her plan, which for a monthly fee offers Emergency Advocacy Support and Education (EASE) to enrolled members, seems to strike a welcome chord in Santa Clara County (SF Bay Area), where she launched the service.

“As a doctor for 20 years, I know how complicated the medical systems has become,” says Dr. H. A. Satri Sukhdeo of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, in Palo Alto, CA. “Patients can easily get lost in the healthcare system, and [it] is especially dangerous for them when they end up in the ER. These patients need an advocate,” One of every five members of the Boomer generation and almost 1 in 3 of us over the age of 75 will visit a hospital emergency room at least once this year. Demand for EASE Plan services seems likely to grow with the shifting demographic.

Current clients are finding that Ease Plan offers significant benefits.  “I have two grown children, but neither of them could be here in less than 5 hrs. if I had a medical emergency. I felt bad when my own mother had a medical emergency and could not get medical attention quickly. I signed up for Ease Plan as soon as I heard of it,” Said Linda C., Ease Plan client.

The service not only supports its clients in the ER but also helps them organize their medical information, be clear on the services to which they are entitled, and, generally, be more effective consumers of healthcare even outside of the ER.

“My mother needs 24-hr. care and is in a skilled nursing facility. Unfortunately, I have found that without a professional care advocate, she does not receive all of the care she should be getting. Our [Ease Plan] Care advocate has been a tremendous help to mother and to me,” said Connie F., another Ease Plan member.

Professional service sales without testimonials: Fruit trees without bees!

I was working at my desk on a Sunday afternoon, when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize,

“Hello, I am ____ and I am calling about _____ who has used you as a reference for some home repair work. What can you tell me about him? Did he do good work for you?”

How many of us have provided a reference in the past or been on the other end and called and requested a reference for someone we were interviewing or considering for a job or project? Conducting such “due diligence” seems reasonable and prudent and is a well established part of the service sales process.

Testimonials--a special type of reference

As a provider of paid services, your ability to have former or current customers privately validate your value to their organizations is important. In fact, it may be the deciding factor in getting a purchase order or engagement. But getting your references to put their names to a few sentences that sing your praises and permission to publish their references on your website, review sites, and in social media is a special level of endorsement. It’s called a “testimonial,” and I believe that the most successful service businesses use them early and often to introduce themselves, help potential customers feel comfortable, and inspire trust. In other words, testimonials are invaluable at every stage of the service buying process. Surprisingly, many service businesses have no process in place to collect, compile, refresh, and publish their testimonials. 

In a study conducted by a Dutch consulting firm, potential customers were willing to pay more for a specific service when it was presented with effective testimonials.  Campaigns built around testimonials are highly effective. Used as part of a professional sales person’s toolkit, they increase success.

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

In my opinion, there are three things that you, as a key player in a service business, need to keep in mind about testimonials:

1. They have a shelf life, especially if you use them often
2. Real people are behind them, so you should stay connected with them
3. Don’t keep them a secret

 OK—so testimonials aren’t chewing gum, but they DO lose their flavor

Asking customers how they liked their service or simply sending them a note and asking them to comment on their service experience does your customers a disservice. A hands-off approach may be a fine technique for quality assurance for internal use only. But many of your customers may be busy and generally not able to devote the time desirable for crafting an effective 2-3 sentence testimonial. Asking them to write something or trying to guilt them into responding and then posting their testimonials all over the internet with their name attached may embarrass them if there are inadvertent errors in grammar or spelling. And let’s not forget content!  You want your testimonials to deliver the specific messages that will resonate with your customers. I think it is better to work with the people you’ve asked to provide testimonials and take the time to assure those testimonials will serve you well. A high-touch approach to crafting testimonials reflects well on the long-term customer relationships.

You can lose your spot on their Shelf of Mind through inattention

Since you want customers with whom you have a long-term positive relationship to let you use their names and thoughts to promote your services, you need to stay connected with these customers. Encourage them to “like” your business Facebook page, subscribe to your YouTube Channel, and follow you on Twitter. Not into Internet stuff? Well, how about a quarterly seasonally appropriate greeting card--maybe with a free latte card enclosed—and a “thank you” for their ongoing help in growing your business. By the way, keeping in “loose touch” with these valuable contacts helps to assure your business a spot on their shelf of mind—and your name on their lips when someone asks about a good provider of your service. 

Like bees around fruit trees, testimonials spread the good word

In days gone by, testimonials were used by sales reps to bolster presentations and facilitate sales. They could be put in context and additional details could be added verbally to facilitate their relevance to a specific sales situation. Today, regardless of where they are first posted (website, Yelp, Google Reviews), testimonials are replicated throughout the social web, where they remain searchable for years. Once on the internet in a few select places, other hands can spread the word and make testimonials about your service accessible to all. Consequently, these testimonials must be effective. Your potential customer sees only what is on the page, so a testimonial must  be well-crafted and unambiguous.

It is a short leap from “unambiguous” to “contrived,” and it’s no surprise that a premium is placed on testimonials that can be verified as coming from real customers and not as planted by paid “friends” of a business. Review sites like YELP have developed sophisticated software techniques for identifying genuine testimonials from faked ones.

Use an Impartial 3^rd party to collect your testimonials?

Since testimonials are widely viewed as critical—heard of Angie’s List?--many businesses have begun to turn to  third parties to collect and verify testimonials, both for logistic and practical reasons and because customers tend to trust testimonials that they can confirm are truthful. 

Amazon Verified Purchase

Several years ago, Amazon started adding the tag line “Amazon Verified purchase” to reviews to confirm that the reviewer had actually bought the product from Amazon about which the reviewer contributed a testimonial. Since that time, several firms have developed third party solutions that use the power of the internet to collect, vet, and publish testimonials, with generally good results for their customers.

“Our experience indicates that our testimonials were 30% more effective in generating business when we used a verification firm to collect and verify”. This individual providing this testimonial used a firm called Testimonial Shield.    

According to Terry Doland, of Express Printing of Sunnyvale, CA  and a local reseller of a third party solution called, Mpact Magic , “…by allowing our customer’s customer to control all aspects of  testimonial creation and posting, we increase the value and the utility of the reference.”

Whether you do it yourself or hire someone else to do it, ask your customers to help you market your service business by sharing their experience of buying and using your service. Afterwards, stay in touch with these customers who provide testimonials and share with them the good news about your business with prospects, on networks, and in your channels.

Window Shopping -- for Legal Services

New Retail location in Palo Alto, CA of Book Flip

Luda and I were out for dinner the other night, and elected to take a stroll down University Avenue in Palo Alto. Imagine our surprise when we noticed a new store in town -- where we could shop for "Advice on Pitching to Investors" or the latest book on business building on one, well-decorated location.

This shop, called "Book Flip,  is backed by Legal Force, one of the largest online databases for trademark and intellectual property AND a publisher of business books, is located at Ground Zero for start-ups, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Our local paper (Palo Alto Weekly)  ran a great article about it shortly after it opened in February of this year, and had a great interview with Legal Force's CEO:


Raj Abhyanker wants to change the Public's perception of lawyers, streamline part of the legal process and resurrect the "Mainstreet bookstore" business model — all by opening a retail store in downtown Palo Alto that sells legal advice, books and tablets.

Abhyanker is the CEO of LegalForce, a company that aims to improve the access between lawyers and the public by using technology. He hopes his store, the LegalForce BookFlip, will transform the way the public looks at lawyers.

"We want people to realize that lawyers, like doctors, can provide help throughout various stages of life," said Abhyanker, who has a law degree, an MBA and a master's degree in electrical engineering. "Few people know where to turn for legal help. We solve this by letting the public walk into a major retail location for help."   Click here to read the rest of the Palo Alto Weekly's Article.







Is this a new, emerging model for selling legal services? Appointments will be low cost, access will be 7 days a week, and follow up appointments can be scheduled with LF's legal specialists for a negotiated price.