Well, Duh!

Sometimes we fail to do the obvious things that would improve our chances of success. I'm certainly guilty of that. How about you? Maybe we haven't had the "Aha!" moment when it suddenly becomes clear what we should have been doing all along. Other times the better way is staring us in the face and we still don't act on it for whatever reason.

I was reminded of this yesterday as I delivered a couple of sessions at the Virginia Engineers Conference. One dealt with time management, the other was on persuasive communication. As I often do, I occasionally asked for a show of hands to see how many people or firms were doing the things I recommended. These included:

• Planning one's activities for the week. Only about a third of my audience indicated that they took a little time at the start of the week to identify priorities and schedule activities. No wonder so many find themselves in the throes of "fighting fires" day in and day out. Stephen Covey's research found that the average corporation spends about 75-90% percent of its time on urgent activities, most of which are not considered important.

• Managing non-billable time. Less than a fourth of attendees indicated that their companies "manage" the non-billable hours spent on activities such as business development or corporate initiatives. By manage, I mean determining the level of effort required, assigning people specific tasks, budgeting their time, and tracking how much time is actually spent. Billable hours, of course, receive this kind of attention. Why not the "investment time" critical to a firm's success?

• Making documents skimmable. While everyone seemed to agree that their proposals and reports were probably skimmed rather than read by their target audiences, no one indicated that their firm designed documents to make them more skimmable! This is an obvious opportunity to set our proposals apart.

• Using second person in proposals. Once again, no one raised their hand when I asked how many used the word "you" in their proposals (this was an audience of about 75 people!). This despite the fact that several studies over the last 30 years have reached the same conclusion: You is the most persuasive word in the English language. Why then is it banished from our most important persuasive documents?

• Including an executive summary in proposals. Very few indicated they did this, something that I've routinely done for many years. I recognize that RFPs rarely ask for one, so the obviousness of this strategy may not seem apparent. But one large study found that executives read 100% of summaries in reports and similar documents (that's why they're called "executive summaries"), while only 10% read the body of the documents. Does this apply to proposals? I can't prove it, but will point to my 75% win rate as evidence that it at least seems to work.

• Regularly soliciting feedback from clients. Everyone claims to provide great service to their clients, but only about a fourth of firms routinely ask clients how well they're doing, based on my informal survey. A major study by Accenture of service leaders across different industries found that they consistently do two things: (1) relentlessly manage the service delivery process (something rarely done in our industry!) and (2) routinely solicit feedback from customers.
  

There are undoubtedly many other obvious things we should be doing; these are just a few that came up in my presentations yesterday. It might be fun to compile a "Well, duh!" list of strategies that are inexplicably ignored in our business. Any you'd like to contribute?