This is the time of year where everyone is focused on planning for the new year.
Early on in my time at Leverage, I learned an awesomely effective consulting question from Nick Sonnenberg.
It’s called:
“Can you share your screen and show me?”
If you’re struggling to understand something your client is explaining, ask them to share their screen so you can see what they are looking at.
It’s easy to talk about how efficient you are, how you’re at Inbox 0, how you’re more organized than Marie Kondo, how the team works together flawlessly, etc.
But it’s much better to show it.
Sharing screen also allows me to ask another highly effective consulting question:
“Show me how many clicks it takes you to…
… see a list of tasks you need to do today
… see a list of tasks you’ve assigned to others with their current status
… see a list of projects you are working on along with their current status and next steps
… see an active customer list
… see a subscriber list - preferably engaged (people actually opening and clicking on your emails)
… see a list of your goals along with your current actuals
… see an up-to-date list of your sales pipeline so you can plan and predict for incoming revenue
… see your product offerings - cost, what’s included, how to get started, the steps in your sales process, etc
… see your proposal creation process”
If it takes a lot of clicks or effort to generate these items, there’s something wrong with the team’s systems.
Usually, one of two things could be going wrong:
Either there isn’t one central source of truth - ie. tasks are held in multiple places including a paper notebook and various software.
Or, the one central source of truth hasn’t been organized properly - ie. the CRM is the central source of truth for customer data but everyone enters information into it differently so it’s a mess to pull out anything meaningful.
If you think about, having ‘too many clicks’ to get to things can occur in our personal lives as well.
Extra ‘clicks’ creates friction which causes us to waste valuable time in pursuing our goals.
A few examples:
Working Out
-How quickly can you start a workout? (ie. if you have to drive to the gym 20 minutes away to start a workout, there’s built in friction.)
-What workout will you do when you start to exercise? (ie. if you are doing your own programming, you might repeat the same things over and over again thus getting bored and lose motivation)
Healthy Eating
-Do you have healthy food readily available in your house?
-Or is it easier/faster to grab unhealthy snacks? Why are unhealthy snacks even in your home?
Money
-Are your bills automatically paid? Or, do you have to remember to pay them and then submit payment manually each month by cheque?
-Are you automatically saving a certain amount off the top each month? Or, do you have to remember to save money and aren’t sure where to put it?
Relationships
-Do you have ‘go to’ activities planned to avoid sitting around asking, ‘What should we do?’
-Do you have a family calendar so everyone is aware of what activities are when?
-Do you have a common connection time like family dinners or date nights so there is dedicated, focused relationship building time to discuss key issues?
The more ‘clicks’ it takes to do something, the harder it is to meet your professional and personal goals.
Strive to reduce the number of clicks it takes you to get to stuff by having better systems.
